The Bard and Barack

It’s summer time and the livin’, as Ira Gershwin wrote, is easy. The world has no fewer problems but the tendency is to put the serious stuff on the back burner until after the World Series. But people can go too far.

I have in mind Edward Achorn in Tuesday’s August 5 Providence Journal: “Was the Bard a secret Catholic?” is the question asked, and it will come as no surprise that the answer is a definitive “could be.” Achorn relies on Joseph Pearce’s The Quest for Shakespeare: The Bard of Avon and the Church of Rome. You may remember Pearce. He was a member of the British National Front, a neo-fascist society dedicated to race purity. Twice he served time for militant racism, but then he found the Catholic Church and reformed. Currently he is a professor of literature at the right-wing Catholic Ave Maria University.

The evidence Achorn selects from Pearce’s tome is interesting, but it’s the kind that people present when they want to make the case that Columbus was Jewish—as circumstantial as it is irrelevant. Achorn concludes his article with a graphic you-really-don’t-want-to-have-to-read-this-stuff-while-sipping-your-morning-coffee description of being drawn and quartered, a punishment meted out to Catholics in Elizabeth’s persecutions of them. This is followed by, “His works remain universal. But that Shakespeare might have been a hidden Catholic lends undeniable piquancy to the themes of power, honor and strained loyalty running so strongly through his work.”

If Catholics want to claim Shakespeare, it’s fine with me. But what is objectionable is that while Achorn uses as his source a (pseudo) academic and quotes a legitimate one—Anthony Esolen who contends that Pearce’s case is “meticulous, reasonable and convincing” he without cause or justification maligns academics in general. Hey! What’d I do?

“All this of course, [that Shakespeare was devout crypto-Catholic] must seem anathema to academics who wish to embrace Shakespeare as the spokesman of secular modernity. The popular creed of our day is that godless Man is all, and that elites, using Machiavellian means to advance themselves, should have as much power as possible to work their superior will over less enlightened human beings. In the view of some, Shakespeare had nothing specific to say about morality or religion, other than to question the legitimacy of both.”

Let’s parse this. To begin with there is no such thing as “academics”. We are, if anything, anarchists. No one of us speaks for another, and often enough, not even for ourselves. We are ready to admit that we favored something until we opposed it. We are a punching bag for conservatives who see our malign presence in the classroom as undermining everything they believe in, but the punching bag is never the aggressor; it’s the innocent bystander.

Is there really a stampede of academics embracing Shakespeare as the spokesman of secular modernity? Is secular modernity so immoral as Achorn assumes? I know conservatives who are atheists, liberals who believe in God and neither camp advocates immorality.

Now we get to the core. We secular modernist academics are elitists! And we don’t trust the common man to make decisions for themselves! And we are inappropriately co-opting Shakespeare, that moral Roman Catholic. I know you know, this, dear reader, but when conservatives use the word “elite” they are not talking about Noble Prize winners, nor even of Congressional Medal of Honor recipients. They are talking about liberals, especially liberal Democrats, and, now-a-days more particularly Barack Obama. It’s the cry of the right-wing haves who want to wrest the poor and the lower middle class away from the Democrats who have been their champions at least since the days of FDR.

Oh, and lest it goes unsaid. Poor Shakespeare was a crypto-Catholic because he feared torture and death at the hands of rabid Protestants? This is why he “revered justice, detested bullies, and fully understood the sinfulness and frailty of his fellow men and women”? Elizabeth’s predecessor, her half-sister Mary, burned Protestants at the stake and Guy Fawkes, a Catholic, tried to blow up Parliament. In Spain the Inquisition’s auto de fes were consuming Protestants, Moors and, need I remind you, Jews. Galileo was threatened with the same punishment for the same crime as Giordano Bruno who had been burned at the stake for teaching the Copernican theory. Let’s face it, Catholics at that time held no monopoly on being persecuted. Belief in God does not equate with moral behavior; secularists can be just as moral—or immoral—as religious folk.