Shakespeare’s plays teem with plots and images of misrule and division – and a crucial post-Reformation religious element is integral to these.

Shakespeare and the Resistance
CLARE ASQUITH
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Shakespeare’s plays teem with plots and images of misrule and division – and a crucial post-Reformation religious element is integral to these. Hamlet is concerned with “maimed” rites: the ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father, deprived of the viaticum, is doomed to purgatorial fire, “unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled”. The whole ear of Denmark is, by a serpent, “rankly abused”. There are ferocious struggles over linguistic and written authority: “the word itself / Against the word”. Beheadings, rapes, dismemberment and ritualised killings evoke martyrdom, ­icono­clasm and the profanation of the sacred. Even the festive comedies play out a vicious Kulturkampf in which agrarian, ritualised communities are assailed by centralising and enclosing “busy controllers”. In Twelfth Night, Sir Toby Belch asks of the time-serving “kind of puritan” Malvolio: “Dost think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”

In her excellent and important first book, Shadowplay, Clare Asquith explored a committed Catholic humanist Shakespeare, whose plays are full of covert religious and political discourses.

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