An Upstart Crow

This day the world celebrates the birth and death of the "upstart Crow, beautified by our feathers", William Shakespeare, the greatest writer in the English language and among the foremost dramatists in history.[1]

For centuries there has been much debate over Shakespeare's religious beliefs and today the question still remains, was he a Roman Catholic? Though no definitive documentation has been provided, not the least in his own hand, there is circumstantial evidence which suggests that he was a Catholic, albeit in secret. However this evidence depends to a great extent on Shakespeare, and his parents before him, having practiced the faith during the reign of Elizabeth I and not having subscribed to the new religion.

Among the evidence which has been put forward in support of his Catholicism are: accusations of recusancy against both his father and daughter for not attending Protestant services; Catholicity of his mother's family; influence of Catholic schoolteachers in Stratford; his possible kinship to the Jesuit martyr Robert Southwell; discovery of a pamphlet written by another Jesuit martyr, Edmund Campion, and hidden in the rafters of the family home, which includes a formal profession of Catholicism by his father; absence of Shakespeare's own name on registers of those attending Protestant services; his purchase of Blackfriars Gatehouse, which was purportedly a Catholic hiding place; and the Catholic character of his writings.

While no one piece of evidence is enough, together they at least lend weight to the idea that Shakespeare was at least sympathetic to the Catholic faith, going as far as to incorporate its vision into his works.

For those wanting to read a little more in the claims for Shakespeare's Catholicism, readers may wish to look at the following articles:

Shakespeare's Millenium by Edward T. Oakes in First Things December 1999
Assurances of Faith: How Catholic was Shakespeare? How Catholic are his Plays? by Paul J. Voss in Crisis July/August 2002
Cracking Shakespeare's Catholic Code: An Interview with Clare Asquith by Debra Murphy of Godspy.com

[1] The first published reference to Shakepeare as a playwright was in a pamphlet written by another playwright, Robert Greene. In it Greene criticises Shakespeare the actor for believing he can put his hand to writing plays and produce anything equal to the works of university educated playwrights such as Christopher Marlowe and Greene himself, who were considered the only ones capable of writing poetry.

The pamphlet is also an attack ad hominum against the power which actors wielded in the Elizabethan age, when there were no copyright laws to prevent them staging plays and playwrights received no royalties. As such Shakespeare was in the unique position of being to earn a living from his plays by staging them as well.

Of Classes, Divisions and Sections

As a means to introduce readers to the works of the Library we are starting a new series of posts which will feature extracts from books in the collection. These extracts will cover various topics and to provide some continuity, will follow the order of the catalogue. For those unfamiliar with the Library's catalogue it might be helpful to provide a short introduction.

The catalogue follows what is known as the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), with some modifications. The DDC is the most widely used classification system in the world and divides information into ten main classes. Each class is further divided into ten divisions, and each division into ten sections. Each section can be further divided to classify ever more specific information. The unique feature of the DDC is that starting with a simple three digit number to represent the ten classes, modifying a single digit allows the divisions and sections to be generated.

For example, the class Religion has been assigned the number 200. By changing the second digit to a '2' we arrive at the division Biblical Studies (220). By again changing the third digit to a '7' we have the section Epistles (227). This section can be further divided by adding '.9' so we have the Catholic Epistles* (227.9) and again by adding a '0.02' we finally arrive at the First Epistle of St. Peter (227.92). One can thus conceive the DDC as a game of addition which could be extended to encompass thousands of individual subjects.

Getting back to the Library's catalogue, one will notice that it specialises in the following classes: Philosophy & Psychology (100), Religion (200), Literature (800) and History (900), which should not come as any surprise. Therefore if you are after books on Social Science (300), Languages (400), Science (500), Technology (600) and the Arts (700) you can most certainly come in to the Library but it might be worth first visiting your local library or the State Library since they will have a greater range of books on these subjects.

Brideshead Revisited Again

For lovers of Evelyn Waugh's study of "what is theologically termed 'the operation of Grace', that is to say, the unmerited and unilateral act of love by which God continually calls souls to Himself", there will be a new screen adaptation released in England in September and presumably in other countries before Christmas. According to the press release Chatsworth House, Derbyshire will be the location of Marchmain House.

Concerning Chatsworth House it is owned by the Duke of Devonshire and the first house was built in 1552 by Bess of Hardwick, having subsequently undergone various renovations and restorations through the centuries. It is of historical interest to Catholics since Mary, Queen of Scots, was detained there intermittently between 1569-1584.

Among the most recent additions to the Library's collection are the following titles:

A Danger to the State by Philip Trower
A Soldier Surrenders: The Conversion of St. Camillus de Lellis by Susan Peek
A Walk to Rome by Dennis Larkin
A Yearbook of Seasons and Celebrations by Joanna Bogle
Christian Theology by Alistair McGrath
God is Near Us by Pope Benedict XVI
Memory and Identity by Pope John Paul II
Swimming Against the Tide edited by Angela Kennedy
Teresa of Avila by Archbishop Rowan Williams
The Glass Walking Stick and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton
The Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary
The Modern Theologians edited by David F. Ford
The Pope's Body by Agostino Paravicini-Bagliani
The Spirit of the Liturgy by Pope Benedict XVI
The Spiritual Direction of Saint Claude de la Colombiere transalted by Mother M. Philip IBVM
The Spiritual World of Issac the Syrian by Fr. Hilarion Alfeyev
Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity by Otto F.A. Meinardus
Virginity by Fr Raniero Cantalamessa OFM Cap

Days of Grace

It has become a tradition with many of us to give up something during Lent. That, surely, is what fasting means? And, if for one reason or another, the holy season finds our breakfast-tables no less generously spread than they were wont to be, we make compensation for it by doing without some little luxury. The effect of this is to produce a gratifying sense of irritation; such is our human make-up that the grasshopper can become a burden, and a deliberate abstention, though it be only from sweets or the cinema, pricks like a hairshirt. Which is why the forty days of Lent seem to pass so slowly; will it never be Easter Day? And no doubt it is good for us.

Only, in a curious way, this impression of Lent makes on us is the exact opposite of what the Church intends. Lent ought to pass like a flash, with a sense of desperate hurry. Good Heavens! The second Sunday already, and still so little to show for it! Lent is the sacramental expression of the brief life we spend here, a life of probation, without a moment in it we can afford to waste. That is why it begins with St. Paul's metaphor of an ambassador delivering an ultimatum; we have only a few "days of grace" to make our peace with God. Ash Wednesday recalls our ignominious, earthly origins, Easter looks forward to our eternity. The space between is not, if we look at it properly, a sluggish declension; it is a mill-race.

Why is why, saving the better judgment of the Church, I always encourage my friends, when Lent comes round, not to do without something but to get something done. For many of us, it would be something if that pile of unanswered letters on the writing table - with all their background of disappointment, distress and inconvenience - could disappear by the time Easter comes. The manuscript we promised to read, the aunts we promised to visit - if only we could cheat ourselves into the feeling that these forty days were our last chance, how quickly we would run their course!

Taken from Lightning Meditations by Msgr Ronald Knox

Ad Eigilum de libro quem scripserat

Nullum opus exsurgit quod non annosa vestustas
expugnet, quod non vertat iniqua dies.
grammata sola carent fato, mortemque repellunt,
preteria renovant grammata sola biblis
grammata nempe dei digitus sulcabat in apta
rupe, suo legem cum dederat populo,
sunt, fuerant, mundo venient quae forte futura,
grammata haec monstrant famine cuncta suo.

No work of men's hands but the weary years
Besiege and take it, comes its evil day:
The written word alone flouts destiny,
Retrieves the past and gives the lie to Death.
God's finger made its furrows in the rock
In letter, when He gave His folk the law.
And things that are, and have been, and may be,
Their secret with the written word abides.

Hrbanus Maurus (776-856) was successively a disciple of Alcuin, abbot of Fulda and archbishop of Mainz. He was a omnivorous reader and a voluminous writer, who famously said of his administrative duties at Fulda Abbey "seeing that these young ones have enough to eat is a great hindrance to one's reading." The verse above is taken from Mediaeval Latin Lyrics edited by Helen Waddell and published by Constable & Co.

Catholicism is the heart of every great artistic achievement, for the simple reason that truth is the subject matter of great art and Catholicism is truth. Great art is the one earthly immortality, the one way in which the soul may live on earth after death. Long ago Plato told us, "Books are the immortal sons defying their sires." St. Thomas, who built his philosophy of the beautiful on the teachings of Aristotle, tells us that the reason for the continuance of great art is its power to give mental pleasure, no matter how often the mind comes back to it.

Books that live have in them this power to give pleasure to the mind. In every great book, no matter how purely emotional it may seem to be, is that something in which the mind rests. This rest of the mind is not a simple inertia or sleep; it is rather an active feeding of the mind, exemplified in poor fashion by the sleep during which the body rebuilds its energy. Just as great books feed the mind on good food, so do evil books give the mind small doses of poison. Though the human body can get rid of small doses of poison the mind cannot do so, for it has a fatal power of storing everything that enters it in the subconscious.

In an issue of The Bookman I read of an old man who said that he never reads anything except catalogues because he considers reading a waste of time. Life, according to him, is too full to allow time for reading. Though it is true that the development of the mind is aided by the study of other people, though it is true that we become cultured by association with cultured people, it is rather stupid to think such association should be confined to those immediately about us. Culture may be secured by association with the great ones of the past, and the only means to such association is books. In books we find the intimate stories of some of the greatest people who have graced the earth by living on it, for example, the saints of God. Shutting oneself off from the cares and distractions of daily living, in the company of the saints, is without doubt the highest kind of cultural pursuit.

From "The Fine Arts of Reading and Writing" in Certitudes by Sister M. Eileen (New York: D. Appleton & Co, 1927)

People read old books, but they do not read old newspapers. The quaint old volume about heraldry and the Howards is sometimes picked up on the bookstall; but the newspaper-files ... have long ago been used to light the fire.

GK Chesterton in the Illustrated London News, November 12 1927

There is a passage in Richard de Bury, of Durham's, medieval treatise on the love o books which Catholic publishers might display in order to put the Catholic public on its metal. He is discussing all the ways in which grimy clerics can injure books, sticking straw to mark the places, and spilling things between the pages, and cutting off the margins to write letters and he goes on from them to crying children, who must never be allowed to admire the pretty capital letters, because they instinctively want to touch whatever they see.

And from the crying children he descends lower still, and says 'moreover, the laity, who look at a book turned upside down just as if it were open in the right way, are utterly unworthy of any communion with books. Let the clerk take care also that the scullion reeking from his stew pots does not touch the lily leaves of books all unwashed, but he who walketh without blemish shall minister to the precious volumes.

I am grateful to him for that 'also', marking a certain transition in his mind; and it is only fair to add that his next sentence reads: 'And again, the cleanliness of decent hands would be o great benefit to books as well as scholars, if it were not that the itch and pimples are characteristic of the clergy.'

He was, in short, an exacting and fussy bishop, whose motto was 'Do not Touch', and his temper was not sweetened by the knowledge that unlettered hands spoke uncharitably about his great collection of books, and though he said mind their vituperation no more than the barking of dogs, he spent pages answering them that library building was a good work, as it assuredly was in the fourteenth century. He was, indeed a generous lender, who knew that books exist to be read, and not least when they are all rare and valuable.

Taken from Woodruff at Random edited by Mary Craig

Fortunately the Library does not take have such a policy but we do require members to handle our books with the greatest care because they are rare and valuable.

Religious Writing

When I read in libraries in my youth I was always impressed by the number of diligent religious who made immense historical compilations, like careful lists in many volumes of all the men who were bishops anywhere over several centuries, and so on. Only now in my more experienced years do I begin to understand how and why this happened.

These works were protective walls, ramparts which cagey religious erected so that they could never be asked by priors and superiors to do anything unappetising. 'I have my work', they would say. And soon all the younger monks would accept it as a tradition that Dom Scholasticus must never be asked to do anything, because he was engaged on the next volume of the majestic compilation that would bring so much honour to the abbey. There is nothing like a magnum opus as an abiding pretext for doing nothing else.

From Woodruff at Random edited by Mary Craig