A Place in the Story: Servants and Service in Shakespeare's Plays (review)
Elizabethan Catholic resistance as a corrective to the domination of the academic WASP patriarchy, given that the Vatican is such a repressive tyranny, with its medieval doctrines on women, contraception and divorce,” to which “litany of hate” Professor Wilson himself adds “the Church’s murderous bigotry on gay rights” (4). Shakespeare, we learn in the course of the book, was not that kind of Catholic. A pair of examples of Professor Wilson’s remarkable ingenuity in finding specifically Catholic allusions in Shakespeare’s work will have to suffice. Although Belmonte is the home of the widow whom Giannetto finally wins in Il Pecorone, the principal source for The Merchant of Venice, Professor Wilson maintains that “Belmont” actually refers to the Hampshire seat of the Catholic Montagues, “famous as a Mass centre” (255). It thus follows that Lorenzo’s condemnation of “the man that hath no music in himself,” who “is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils” (5.1.83, 85), is intended to distinguish the “loyalism” of the Montagues from “the politics of traitors” (256). Since Jesuits were caricatured by Protestant polemicists as “massing crows,” “the picture of the Jesuit ‘black-robe’ as a carrion crow was one which Shakespeare would himself use to dissociate from papist terrorism, when he wrote of the evil hour when ‘the crow / Makes wing to th’ rooky wood’ (Macbeth 3.3.51–52) in denunciation of the Masses hosted by the conspirator Ambrose Rookwood at Clopton House, near Stratford, in the darkening days before the Gunpowder Plot” (12). Shakespeare may well have had such notions cross his mind as he was writing, but even if we could prove that it were so, it is difficult to see how such knowledge enhances the public meaning of the plays or adds to the depth of their meaning or the power of their appeal. Homer may have been thinking of Ionian political events of the eighth century BCE or sleeping with his own “Dark Lady,” but our ignorance of such incidents in the poet’s life hardly diminishes the Iliad or the Odyssey. It is doubtful that ferreting out Shakespeare’s precise political and religious predilections (and so making them compatible with our own) will serve to advance our understanding of his literary and dramatic legacy. R. V. YOUNG North Carolina State University