William Shakespeare, whose birth is commemorated today, for many people personifies Englishness. But the richness of his imagery owes much to the very faith which the England of his day rejected

?FOLLOW your spirit; and upon this charge,/ Cry, ?God for Harry, England and Saint George!? ?

Laurence Olivier?s glorious film version of Shakespeare?s Henry V, in which we see the king and a few valiant Englishmen straining like greyhounds in the slips and putting paid to the proud French hordes at Agincourt, evoked a very English kind of patriotism when it was made during the Second World War.

Indeed Shakespeare, whose date of birth is 23 April, the feast day of England?s patron, St George, is to many people synonymous with England. And to the chroniclers of Shakespeare?s age, his account of Agincourt was an example of providential care of England ? a forerunner of God?s deliverance of the country from the Armada, which marked divine approval of the Reformation.

But the Bard?s work ? and that includes Henry V ? indicates far more complex theological and ecclesiological strands woven within it. For in the past 50 years, Shakespeare scholars have uncovered intriguing evidence of Shakespeare?s Catholicism, or at least his Catholic roots.

Take for a moment Henry V. This is a memorial play. Each performance is both a pilgrimage towards the shrine of Agincourt and a hagiography of the king, whose human failings are nevertheless clearly shown. On the eve of the battle, Henry undergoes a Gethsemane-like agony as he contemplates suffering for his people. The following morning, he inspires his troops with a psalmody worthy of King David. He predicts that the feast of Sts Crispin and Crispian ? the day of Agincourt ? ?shall ne?er go by?/But we in it shall be remembered?. Facing the audience and flanked by his hierarchy of officers, Henry is the great high priest celebrating a liturgy. (?Do this in memory of me?.) He sanctifies himself and his generals in a litany. Scars he transforms into holy relics. Whenever the play is performed, Agincourt is celebrated anew. The audience/congregation participate in this mystery of faith, piecing out imperfections with their thoughts and making ?imaginary puissance?.

This is the work of a man profoundly marked by his Catholic heritage. Shakespeare?s family were ?Church papists?, outwardly conforming to Protestantism but remaining loyal to the Old Faith. Such practice was widespread across a rural Warwickshire peppered with Romish priests labelled ?dumb? by the exasperated authorities. Shakespeare was educated by crypto-Catholics at the local grammar school.

He would witness the gradual ascendancy and hardening of the Protestant establishment throughout his lifetime. Members of his own family and friends harboured priests ? notably those of the Jesuit missions ? and were implicated in rebellions and plots. His father ? a recusant in later life ? was harried by the authorities, the homes of kinsfolk were raided and they were rounded up. A distant relative was executed in the Tower.

There is an intriguing theory that, during his so-called ?lost years?, Shakespeare was a player, identified as Shakeshafte, in the household of the Lancashire Catholic magnate Alexander Hoghton. Another distant kinsman, the poet and Jesuit martyr St Robert Southwell, who was a one-time confessor to Shakespeare?s Catholic patron, the Earl of Southampton, published a letter to his ?Worthy good cousin W.S.?, exhorting him to write religious poetry. During his London years, he boarded with Huguenots who were not bound by the State?s laws on Sabbath-breaking. Towards the end of his life, he bought a Catholic safe house in Blackfriars.

In the past 10 years, research into Shakespeare?s Catholicism has galloped apace. In a crowded field, Professor Richard Wilson has taken up the baton from Peter Milward SJ and the historian Michael Wood has recently popularised the topic in his television series In Search of Shakespeare. All of them have found remarkable Catholic references throughout his most celebrated works, from the great tragedies of Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello to the history plays and the comedies, including As You Like It.

In Hamlet, the troubled Prince of Denmark (back from university in Wittenberg, the Protestant stronghold where Luther nailed up his 95 theses) is haunted by his father?s ghost. Old Hamlet is doomed to walk the night, while held fast in fires by day, ?Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature/Are burnt and purged away?.

The ghost recounts how he was murdered unshriven and deprived of Catholicism?s last rites ? ?unhouseled? (the Viaticum) and ?unaneled? (Extreme Unction) ? ?With all my imperfections on my head?. He inhabits a vivid, Catholic Purgatory.

Shakespeare?s own father had beseeched his family ?to do Masses? for his soul after his death and pray for his soul in Purgatory in a spiritual testament (translated from St Carlo Borromeo?s original) which he may well have received from the hands of the Jesuit Robert Persons. The testament was found, hidden in the eaves of Shakespeare?s birthplace, in 1757.

Just as the young Prince Hamlet is tormented by his father?s untimely fate (?List! List! Remember me!?), so Shakespeare is haunted by the destruction of Catholic practice and tradition, so dear to his family and friends. The dissolution of the monasteries is still felt as a raw wound: ?the bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang?. Benign friars and ?old religious men? encountered in certain plays hark back to the Marian priests gone to ground during Elizabeth?s reign. The three lamenting queens in Richard III echo the three Marys who came to Christ?s tomb on the morning of his Resurrection. Shakespeare would have seen them in the mystery plays of his youth.

Protestant iconoclasm provoked a profound sense of loss in Tudor England. The assault on Catholicism?s sacraments and communal rituals proved similarly devastating. In their stead, Protestantism espoused a private, inward path to salvation, stemming from an individual?s encounter with God, made all the more possible through the relatively recent translation of the Bible into English.

The ?resurrection? of Hermione at the climax of The Winter?s Tale is a key example of Shakespeare?s replication of Catholic ritual. Broken-hearted at her husband Leontes? jealous rage, her son?s death and daughter Perdita?s disappearance, she did appear to die. For years, she has been kept preserved in a private chapel, ?like a statue?.

Now, following Leontes? ?saint-like contrition? and his reconciliation with his lost daughter, the two kneel before the ?dear Queen? and implore her blessing, their ?faith awakened?. Redemption comes from suffering. The statue comes alive; the audience participate in a profound rite of communion.

Here, Shakespeare?s incarnational art recycles such traditions as devotion to Our Lady and image veneration. Shakespeare?s contemporary Thomas Nashe described a playgoer ?as being wrapt in contemplation ? as if the performer had the power to new mould the hearts of spectators?.

Yet Shakespeare was also an inveterate magpie, as much inspired by the Protestant Geneva Bible and godly inwardness as by ?Romanist? ritual. As a man of the theatre, he was a worldly opportunist and an enterprising businessman, a leading shareholder in his theatre who was able to buy himself a coat of arms and a Stratford country seat.

As an actor, he was ?a double-dealing ambodexter? (to adopt the censorious language of Puritan polemicists); never a single self but a Protean player of many parts, able to exist in several environments. The ability to act ? to hide one?s true nature and identity ? was a crucial attribute in a society becoming ever more paranoid, ever more intolerant of a Catholicism fatally undermined by a papal bull of excommunication, and call to treason against Elizabeth I.

Ironically, the equivocating Shakespeare has the Porter in Macbeth mock the Jesuit Henry Garnet ? implicated in the Gunpowder Plot ? ?who committed treason enough ? yet could not equivocate to heaven?. Equivocation was the ?Jesuitical? practice of avoiding lying under oath by resorting to rhetorical subterfuge. Macbeth ? a claustrophobic play concerned with plotting and regicide ? contains a morbid interest in those who ?palter with a double tongue?.

The Romantic poet John Keats celebrated Shakespeare?s ?negative capability?, his absenting his own subjective presence from his plays while ?bodying forth? all his characters with empathy and integrity. The patrician Coriolanus and the Roman plebs, say, clash with equal authority. Two of the plays? titles ? As You Like It; What You Will ? indicate this authorial self-abnegation in which audience reception and interpretation is what counts. Such authorial invisibility and ?reservation? may, in part, be linked to the man?s natural disinclination to speak his mind. All too often, he had seen declamations of belief and loyalty leading to the direst persecution.

Shakespeare?s ?negative capability? enabled him to infuse an identifiably Catholic (if alien) fearsomeness into some of his villains. The name of the ?demi-devil? Iago evokes Santiago (St James) de Compostela ? patron of hated Catholic Spain.

Perhaps mindful of his own youth, Shakespeare does seem to favour communal, agrarian and festive culture ? habitually linked by its opponents to Catholicism ? which was under attack from centralising legal incursion, enclosure and Protestant zeal. In Twelfth Night, Malvolio (whose name means ill will) is a humourless Puritan prig who seeks to run Olivia?s household according to godly precepts. He berates Toby Belch, Andrew Aguecheek, Feste et al. for being idle, shallow things and prides himself that he is not of their element. Belch answers, ?Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there will be no more cakes and ale??

Shakespeare?s witnessing of anti-Catholic persecution must surely have played a part in developing the sympathy and compassion accorded to those oppressed and vilified (minorities notably) in his plays. He is certainly ?catholic? in his exploration of the universal suffering engendered by the human condition. Nowhere is this more cataclysmic than in Lear running mad on the heath, a Man of Sorrows.

One of the last plays, All is True (or Henry VIII) revisits the time of schism that had changed the face of England: ?Those that can pity here/May, if they think it well, let fall a tear?. The play was first performed in Blackfriars, the very place where Henry VIII?s ecclesiastical court had sat to consider the royal divorce.

Queen Katherine of Aragon ? a stranger and a woman oppressed by her boorish king ? is a paragon of dignity. Her ?Alas, sir,/In what have I offended you? evokes the Reproaches uttered by the suffering servant during the Good Friday liturgy.

The outcast, dying queen falls asleep and has an angelic vision to the accompaniment of ?sad and solemn music?. Six dancing ?personages? clad in white robes, wearing on their heads garlands of bays, and carrying branches of bays or palm in their hands, do reverence to Katherine. At intervals, they place a spare garland over her head. A martyr?s crown? ?At which, as it were by inspiration, she makes in her sleep signs of rejoicing, and holdeth up her hands to heaven?. Angels lead her to her rest; a ritual balm is poured upon the country?s suffering.