It's hard to say how today we use Shakespeare's work. We go to the movies for light entertainment and (rarely) to the theater for heavier fare. If we view a Shakespeare production it in anticipation of doing a good deed for perpetuating the culture and a feeling of having done something commendable.
That's not why Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.
In his day, words could kill, and often did. They could also save; at least that was the hope.
The problem was that just as the Protestant Reformation resulted in a century of ferocious religious-dynastic war on the Continent, the wave that broke in England following Henry VIII's break with Rome was an equally ferocious Protestant-Catholic religious-civil war in which both religions fought for the future soul of England as either Protestant or Catholic. The Protestants emerged victorious, persecuting Catholics and driving them underground. When Catholics, such as Henry's daughter Mary temporarily got the upper hand, Protestants were hounded and accused of treason. Intrigue, spying, treachery, persecution, torture, and the most gruesome of executions: hanging, drawing, and quartering, were the result.
Shakespeare wrote during this time.
During our McCarthy Red Scare of the early 1950s, our greatest playwright of the era, Arthur Miller, took up his pen and used the Salem Witchcraft Persecution as an allegory to dramatize the parallel between 1692 and 1954.
"The Crucible" was a way of speaking truth to power, a coded message that not all was right. Miller was getting out a message to the faithful, the public, those who kept the faith that there was a better way than the persecution of people for their beliefs. At the time Miller's was a subversive message that in fact resulted in his being hauled before our own Star Chamber proceeding, a brain-wringing by interrogators of the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington.
Claire J. Asquith, the Catholic wife of a British Diplomat in Moscow during the Cold War noted the secret method used to beat Soviet mind controllers. She writes:
During my years in Moscow as the wife of a British diplomat, I was introduced to the double-speak of subversive drama, an ingenious method designed to circumvent the Communist censor.
Minute alterations to plays by classical authors enabled dissidents to communicate with their audience about contemporary politics. The result gave initiates an enjoyable sense of complicity, but was innocent enough to hoodwink the authorities.
I began to wonder whether the many incongruities in the apparently apolitical works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries indicated that they were playing the same dangerous game.
Asquith then deconstructs Shakespeare, showing that the Bard, one of the sharpest minds ever to compose a thought in English, larded his plays with all sorts of seeming irrelevancies. Asquith shows how they weren't so irrelevant after all. They were the hot-links to new understanding that alert audience members would understand led to a subservisive message or a coded message to the Queen (Elizabeth I, who was apparently believed by some to be a secret supporter of Catholics) pleading for mercy in a way that wouldn't cause the loss of Shakespeare's head. Asquith likens Shakespeare's digressions to "pull-tabs" opening up a new view, but in today's Internet world, we use hotlinks to signal a quick trip into a new world of meaning, as here.
Asquith's message on decoding Shakespeare, a closet Catholic in a Protestant empire presided over by a series of Darth Vaders on the throne, is below. See also Greenblatt's "Will in the World," 2004. The state religion flipped many times during Shakespeare's lifetime and when you were on the outs, you risked being charged with treason if you opened your mouth, and even if you didn't.
The lessons of that age account for our own Constitutional guarantees separating church and state, and the non-Establishment of religion. Today we insist that church leaders obey the law.
Sunday in San Francisco Archbishop Levada was served with a deposition subpena as he was robing for his farewell mass at St. Mary's Cathedral. He's on his way to Rome to serve in the office that polices the doctrine, formerlyknown as the Inquisition. The last occupant of the office, Cardinal Ratzinger, is now the new pope, Benedict 16. Levada is on the springboard to popedom himself if he plays his cards right among the cardinals and is awarded a cardinal-ship himself. According to a news report, Levada objected to being subpenaed. The process server told him to accept the subpena now or he serve him on the altar during mass. The archbishop accepted the subpena. That's what I call a process server. Church bowed to state legal process, literally. It wasn't always like that. In the old days, if you wanted to exercise civil legal power, you went into the priesthood. Today's priests are lawyers. Hence the fight over Roberts.
Levada's testimony is sought in connection with the Portland Archdiocese, which he headed, being driven into bankruptcy over legal claims made by parishioners molested by priests and alleged complicity by higher-ups in protecting perpetrators by putting them on a sort of clerical merry-go-round that perpetuated the problem.
The history of Shakespearean England teaches the lesson against allowing sectarian theologians to have sway over government.
Our solution is to put the law over the theologians and priests a 180-degree turn from the previous practice.
For another reference on this site to the influence of religion on American attitude and law, referring to the Reformation, the English experience that we reacted against, Jonathan Edwards, who was the last great Puritan and popularizer of the fire-and-brimstone sermon, and the recent Greenblatt biography of Shakespeare, come here.