Shakespeare and the Martyrs

Abstract

Whereas Graham Greene, in his well-known Introduction to Fr John Gerard’s Autobiography of a Hunted Priest (1952), expresses surprise that “the martyrs are quite silent” in Shakespeare’s plays, it is precisely the opposite that transpires from a careful reading of them, if only “between the lines”—according to the literal meaning of “intelligence”. The case of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus would have been immediately recognized by an Elizabethan audience with reference to the “lopping” of limbs of those who similarly suffered on what the dramatist elsewhere calls “Love’s Tyburn that hangs up simplicity”. Not a few scenes in such famous plays as Hamlet, Macbeth and The Merchant of Venice that clamour to be cut by an impatient producer have distinctly recusant implications, not least Hamlet’s famous but misunderstood soliloquy, “To be, or not to be,” which evidently refers not to modern existentialists but to Elizabethan recusants, for whom existence had been made intolerable by their cruel persecutors.