The Shakespeare Workshop: A Catholic Activity

The Shakespeare Workshop is, primarily, a Catholic activity. In the Workshop, the students will learn about scholars' opinions that William Shakespeare was a recusant Catholic during the Protestant Reformation in Tudor/Stuart England and how his possible Catholic faith influenced his writing. That is our focus, and really, the entire reason for The Shakespeare Workshop to be. There's a lot of information about William Shakespeare's life and writing out there, but the theories of his Catholic faith are fairly new. These theories bring us a whole new way of looking at his life and his body of work -- a way that Catholic students (and all others) ought to know about.

I am particularly excited about teaching this Macbeth class in the fall of 2008, mostly because of the tangled Catholic and Protestant history surrounding its writing and performance. Macbeth was written to placate King James I, who had just come through the Gunpowder Plot, an assassination attempt supposedly plotted by angry Catholics who were frustrated that his reign had not led to greater tolerance of the Catholic faith.

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Remember, remember the Fifth of
November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why
Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t'was
his intent
To blow up King and Parli'ment.
Three-score barrels of powder
below
To prove old England's overthrow;
By God's providence he was
catch'd
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys,
let the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the
King!

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The guilty parties were all men from William Shakespeare's home county, Warwickshire, and the plan was put together at the Mermaid Tavern in London, which was Shakespeare's neighborhood pub. Considering the fact that some of the conspirators were immediately put to death without benefit of trial, it's not difficult to imagine Shakespeare's perilous position. It was already well-known that his parents were quiet yet defiant Catholics.

Macbeth is considered to be one of William Shakespeare's most intriguing plays, both in the history that surrounds it writing and performance in London before King James I, and in its plot: with witches, ghosts, murderous ambitions, guilty consciences and invisible bloodstains galore, it is a show to keep one on the edge of one's seat.