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ResSource Ltd in association with Second Spring presents Shakespeare’s Secret A Summer School at St Benet’s Hall, Oxford Thursday 27 July to Thursday 3 August 2006 and David Skinner, Joseph Milne, John Freeh, Robert AschPeter Milward of the Renaissance Centre in Tokyo, himself one of the most world-renowned authorities on the interpretation of Shakespeare and author most recently of Shakespeare the Papist (Sapientia Press, 2005), writes as follows: “The name of Clare Asquith is gradually taking a leading place in a new wave of Shakespearian criticism that has come to characterize the academic world over the past twenty years, a wave that may be traced back to E.A.J. Honigmann’s study of Shakespeare, the ‘Lost Years’.” The distinguished Thomas More scholar John Guy adds that “Even if only half of Clare Asquith’s argument turns out to be correct, she’s written the most visceral, challenging, compelling book on Shakespeare’s place in history we’ve had for over twenty years.” G.K. Chesterton says in his book on Chaucer, “That Shakespeare was a Catholic is a thing that every Catholic feels by every sort of convergent common sense to be true.” That Shakespeare was at least a Catholic sympathizer is by now well established. How consistently or openly he wrote on the subject is becoming clearer in the light of Lady Asquith’s book. SHAKESPEARE’S SECRET 27 July to 3 August 2006 REVISED SCHEDULE Mass will be celebrated in St Benet’s each day, probably at 7.30 in the morning, just before breakfast, which is available from 8 am. THURSDAY 27th July
1.00 pm: Lunch FRIDAY 28th July
10.00: Clare Asquith on the Hidden Code SATURDAY 29th July
10.30: Seminar on As You Like It SUNDAY 30th July
Morning: Mass and worship options MONDAY 31st July
9.30: Peter Milward on Shakespeare’s World of Learning TUESDAY 1st August
9.30: Seminar on The Tempest WEDNESDAY 2nd August
9.30: Feedback session on The Tempest THURSDAY 3rd August
9.30: Final wrap-up session If you wish to do preparatory reading, do please take a look at A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as well as the other plays to be studied, and of course Clare’s and Fr Peter’s books. It would be helpful to bring your own copies of the plays used on the course, though we can loan some plays for the duration of the course. If you want to buy good secondhand books on Shakespeare, the English Reformation, and Recusancy, we recommend you pay a visit during your stay to St Philip’s Books at 82 St Aldate’s in Oxford, opposite Christ Church Memorial Gardens. NB main sessions will be held in the refectory, which is also used for meals. Therefore the morning sessions will end by 12.15 and the afternoon sessions will end by 5.45, in each case to give the staff the chance to prepare the table for the meal. OUR TUTORS AND LECTURERS Clare Asquith has lectured on Shakespeare in England and Canada. An article on The Phoenix and the Turtle was published in 2001 by the Times Literary Supplement and an essay on Love’s Labour’s Lost appeared recently in Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England. She lives in Somerset with her husband and five children. Peter Milward published his first book, An Introduction to Shakespeare’s Plays in 1964, followed by Christian Themes in English Literature, 1967. After further research at the Shakespeare Institute, Birmingham, 1965-66, he published Shakespeare’s Religious Background, 1973; and went on to publish two volumes of Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age and the Jacobean Age in 1977 and 1978. He is the editor of Renaissance Monographs and first director of the Renaissance Centre in Sophia University. His most recent books include Shakespeare the Papist, A Life with Hopkins, and A Poetic Approach to Ecology. David Skinner is the Lecturer in Music and coordinator of musical activities at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he directs the mixed-voice chapel choir, Magdala. Previously he was Postdoctoral Fellow of the British Academy at Christ Church. He is also a co-director (with Andrew Carwood) of the award-winning early music ensemble The Cardinall’s Musick, and frequently gives masterclasses on music history and on singing from early music notation in both the UK and abroad. Dr Skinner is a Committee member of the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society and of Early English Church Music, and he is currently co-authoring a book for OUP on music and the English Reformation. Joseph Milne is honorary lecturer at the University of Kent at Canterbury, Fellow of the Temenos Academy, Trustee of the Eckhart Society and Research Associate at the International Institute of India Studies, Canada. He has led Shakespeare seminars at the Temenos Academy for over twelve years. His special interests include philosophical hermeneutics, theological and philosophical anthropology and in particular Eriugena, Teilhard de Chardin and Paul Ricoeur; Advaita Vedanta, Christian mysticism, religious music and literature; Shakespeare and Christian Platonism. Robert Asch teaches history at the Chavagnes International College. He is the co-editor of the St Austen Review. John Freeh is Assistant Professor of English at Hillsdale College, MI. BACKGROUND READING
Prior reading is not a requirement of the course, but will make the whole experience more rewarding for you if you can manage it. In 16th-century England many loyal subjects to the crown were asked to make a terrible choice: to follow their monarch or their God. The era was one of unprecedented authoritarianism: England, it seemed, had become a police state, fearful of threats from abroad and plotters at home. The age of terror was also the era of the greatest creative genius the world has ever known: William Shakespeare. How, then, could such a remarkable man born into such violently volatile times apparently make no comment about the state of England in his work? He did. But it was hidden. Revealing Shakespeare’s sophisticated version of a forgotten code developed by 16th-century dissidents, Clare Asquith shows how he was both a genius for all time and utterly a creature of his own era: a writer who was supported by dissident Catholic aristocrats, who agonized about the fate of England’s spiritual and political life and who used the stage to attack and expose a regime which he believed had seized illegal control of the country he loved. “It is rare when a work of such painstaking scholarship is so dramatic, important and exciting to read. Lucidly and persuasively, Clare Asquith takes us through the complexities of religious politics in Elizabethan England, and reveals the anguished debates hidden in Shakespeare’s plays. Shadowplay solves many of the puzzles that have perplexed scholars over the years, dramatically enhances our understanding of the dramas of our greatest playwright and, in my view, will lead to a seismic shift in our understanding of our past.” (Piers Paul Read) OTHER READING You may also like to read Shakespeare the Papist, by Pater Milward SJ (Sapientia Press, 2005). This has been described as a “climactic achievement in Shakespeare studies,” the definitive work by the great Jesuit pioneer of the Catholic interpretation of Shakespeare. Plus Online reading on Elizabethan England: Historical notes England’s Christian identity – an identity by now greatly eroded – is bound up with that of Europe as a whole, but has distinctive traits of its own. Subject to successive waves of invasion, conversion and re-conversion, England’s ethnic identity is very diverse, and its relationship to the mainland (as an island kingdom frequently at war) ambiguous at best. Its Catholic roots, and the allegiance of its people to the Holy See of Rome, go deep, and through the court of Charlemagne its Catholic culture influenced the rest of Christendom at a crucial moment in the history of the Continent. The traumas of the English Reformation were also profound, and their effects far-reaching. But even during the two centuries following the Protestant Reformation, English Catholics, despite their small numbers and the persecution inflicted on them by the state, made disproportionately important contributions to the culture of their native land. Professor Eamon Duffy’s book THE STRIPPING OF THE ALTARS (Yale, 1992) succeeded in convincing most historians that the English Reformation was not, by and large, supported at the grass roots of society, but was largely imposed on the English people for political reasons, and vigorously resisted by them wherever possible. The rich texture of popular devotion, which shaped and conditioned English society at every level through liturgy, guild and pilgrimage, is vividly portrayed in the book. So is the wave of iconoclastic fury that the Reformation unleashed in England after the break with Rome. The English Reformation has a great deal to do with shaping the modern world. The Industrial Revolution was made possible in part by Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries and the consequent enrichment of the landowning classes. By his daughter Elizabeth’s time the Reformation had become bound up with the Age of Exploration and the Scientific Revolution. This was the age of Shakespeare, a “brave new world” in which the newly emergent nation, discovering its identity in distinction from Christendom, was ruled by a totalitarian regime that yet had little inkling of the future power of Parliament. The Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 made church attendance at the new Anglican services compulsory and required all churches to use the Book of Common Prayer. (The alternative was a substantial fine or excommunication and loss of civil rights.) As a sop to Catholics, the wording of the communion service was left vague, interior furnishings (such as screens) were ordered to be left intact, and some vestments were retained. Anyone assisting at a Catholic Mass, however, was liable to six months imprisonment for the first offence, a year for the second, and life for the third. Catholic priests were hunted down, tortured, and killed. They took refuge where possible with Catholic “recusant” households, where they were often concealed within walls and under floors. The persecution, alternating with periods of relative leniency, was to continue until Catholic Emancipation in the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, over the years that followed the Settlement, the Church of England came to include a wide range of styles of worship, from Puritan to Anglo-Catholic.
Elizabeth was the last of the Tudors. In 1603 James I (VI of Scotland), son of Mary Queen of Scots, inherited the throne. The King James Bible was his one of his main achievements. The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 fuelled suspicion of Roman Catholics, and religious tensions contributed to a series of Civil Wars in 1642-1651. King Charles I was beheaded and for nearly a decade the English monarchy was replaced by Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth or Protectorate. Under the Protectorate, Ireland was savagely conquered, and in England a range of radical groups emerged: Levellers, Diggers, Shakers and Quakers, many of which later sought refuge in America from religious persecution. John Bunyan (d. 1688) was a Puritan who joined the Baptists and was imprisoned for non-conformity under Charles II. It was in prison that he wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress. After Cromwell’s death the Puritans accepted the Restoration and an Episcopal structure for the Church; thus the “middle way” of Anglicanism was now much more firmly established. READ David Jepson’s article, “Shakespeare and the ‘Dissociation of Sensibility’” in Second Spring, our international journal of Faith & Culture. Issue 7 is out now. Details at www.secondspring.co.uk
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