You don’t have to love Shakespeare’s plays to find Clare Asquith’s Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs And Coded Politics of William Shakespeare
The reason for that is that Shadowplay
With convincing clarity, Asquith’s puts William Shakespeare right in the middle of a Catholic community that, with the rise of the Tudor’s and ascension of Elizabeth I, was largely hidden from the rest of the country. Secretly, they hoped for the return of a monarch who would allow them to practice the old religion openly, and they developed a sophisticated coded literature to tell their story and communicate with each other.
Asquith uses this coded literature to examine in turn nearly all of Shakepeare’s play, and certainly all of the important ones, placing each of them in an historical context that concentrates on this secret religious war and the efforts for a Counter-Reformation. I’m not a Shakespearean scholar and can’t comment on the accuracy of Asquith’s interpretation, but it certainly is a compelling story and, if it’s true, it means that William Shakespeare wasn’t just a great playwright, he was a hero in the fight for religious freedom too.
February 21st, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Thankyou for your blog!
God Bless You