Peter Milward, Shakespeare the Papist. Pp. xv + 308. Naples, Florida: Sapientia Press, 2005. Paperbound $27.95 (ISBN 1 932589 21 X).

Abstract

IN choosing the title, Shakespeare the Papist, Peter Milward, SJ, has forthrightly declared his interest as a present-day member of the most feared band of ‘papists’ in Shakespeare's England. He has trawled thirty-seven Shakespeare plays for evidence that Shakespeare was not only born a Catholic, on the basis of an increasing consensus; not only died as one, on the basis of one inescapable piece of external evidence, but actually was one during his creative lifetime, on the basis of internal textual evidence in conjunction with the historical record. No Shakespeare scholar can claim such familiarity with the religious controversies of Shakespeare's time (The Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age and The Religious Controversies of the Jacobean Age) and such knowledge of the mind-set of one the major parties therein involved as Milward. No advocate of any present-day literary theory can claim to be as acquainted with the Weltanschauung of Elizabethan and Jacobean theology within the framework of its historical context. If John Speed was correct in associating Robert Persons, SJ, and Shakespeare as ‘the papist and his poet’ in 1611, then there is a parallel between Milward and Shakespeare.