Lmao Lame attempts by Catholics to play at cultural competition and seize our poets for their own legacy: http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/was-shakespeare-a-secret-catholic-98137/
I don't have an opinion whether Shakespeare was a secret Catholic. However, due to Anglican persecution of Catholics, it is not surprise that Catholics would go underground and conceal identities. Centuries later it will be hard to prove this. It is reasonable to propose that Columbus or major figures of his crew were Marranos, and not just ex-Jews but in fact secretly adherents of Judaism who had accepted Judaism due to Catholic pressure. To give a second analogy, it's reasonable to propose that there were a sizable minority of Protestants even before the reformation, like Wycliffe or Tyndale, but due to official pressure, it would be dangerous to openly break with the Church. The article says: This is reasonable to propose that art would be a way that an artist would secretly criticize government of his era. Eisenstein deliberatrely did this with his movie "Ivan the Terrible". The second episode (Part 2) showed Ivan's cruelty and the movie was surpressed by Stalin. The article says: I can see how educated people would oppose such cruelty but be scared to speak out directly. AGREE, DISAGREE? This counts as evidence.
Excuse me it was the papists who have sought to destroy england, the church, with their armadas, terrorists, assassins on the queens and kings, burning our martyrs, as well as jesuit infiltrators who were documented to operate in England from their seminaries across the Channel at Douai-Rheims. Furthermore at this very hour there were hundreds of thousands of Protestants executed, cut down, and burnt by the hateful Papal fanatics on the continent, in particular in France but also the Netherlands, with thousands persecuted and already destroyed in Spain Don't make a blatant blanket statement about our history without setting it in a proper historical context If you are interested in evidence, you'd come out against the papists vain effort to claim major Anglican literary figures. That's all I have to say about this. No actual historian accepts the theory of shakespeare as anything other than a faithful Anglican, as proven by his plays, poetry, his work at court, and his affection for the Queen
In fairness to history: There was a significant hostility between Catholic (in the sense of allegiance to the see of Rome) and those who saw their allegiance elsewhere, be in Hampton Court, Westminster, Lambeth, Kent, or the fathers of the Protestant Reformation in Continental Europe. It is I believe reasonable to ask the questions, and indeed it is also reasonable to argue the case, and it is even reasonable to come to a conclusion for ones own self. The Anglicanism of Shakespeare's period may well have had some more in common with Catholics than some might imagine. Anglicanism has been evolving since Henry VIII declared the separation, and and that development has involved some swings and roundabouts. One may well wonder what Shakespeare would think of the Anglicanism of our own age.
It sounds like you reject historians who teach Shakespeare as Catholic a priori as not actual historians even if they have academic degrees. There were Catholics who were part of the royal court even during the protestant era, and I am sure also they showed affection to the queen.
This is pretty much how Irish Catholics feel about Anglican England, Spherelink, and with good reason. The UK exported masses of grain out of Ireland even as 1 million Irish died of famine. Before the famine Ireland's population was 8 million. The population never recovered. For many years even having Catholic services in Ireland was banned by the English. And then you have the genocide of millions of nonprotestant native Americans and east Indians by Anglo protestant colonists.
Then you've made my point... Shakespeare had the option to mark himself as a Catholic if he wanted to Does your selective presentation of history have a point? You've marked yourself as 'eastern orthodox' wherein your tsarist church condoned many massacres of peasants over the centuries, and Bogomils were extensively exterminated by the Eastern Church itself on an official level. Your point? We can go down this rabbit hole all the way if you want, except the argument I presented was directly on point relating to Shakespeare and papism, whereas your diatribe was an unrelated hit-piece attacking all "Anglo protestants" in all times and places
My statement was "However, due to Anglican persecution of Catholics, it is not surprise that Catholics [like a hypothetical RC Shakespeare] would go underground and conceal identities", which you followed by talking about the Spanish Armada and RCs supposedly trying to destroy the UK. The fact that the Spanish Armada fought Britain, etc., does not contradict the fact that RC recusants would have a major interest in concealing their identifies. Thus what you said was not directly on point to my statement, and I took it as a kind of tangential overall attack on Catholicism, as I do your common use of the term "papists" instead of the polite term "Roman Catholics".
I set the context for your labels of so-called persecution or lack thereof, more like self-protection It's all a matter of proportion... trying to appropriate a legendary Anglican author is a far greater cause for concern than using a historically accepted designation. I notice that that word elicited a far stronger objection from you than colossal cultural piracy which seemed to pose no problem for you at all, nor did an attack on all "Anglo protestants" on your part
There were at least 53 executions of Protestants for religion in England and Scotland between 1527-1546 at least 285 executions during Mary Tudor's reigns, and at least 300 English Catholics executed between 1535 and 1680. (More Than a Memory: The Discourse of Martyrdom By Johan Leemans) Hmmm... You seem to be justifying the persecution of Catholics using brutal methods by calling it self-protection, a fake justification that could be used by either side if they lack ethics of Christian mercy. This mistaken medieval-style justification for cruelty and persecution of "Papists" of course does not show whether or not Shakespeare was a secret Catholic in the vein of Stalin's secret Critic Sergei Eisenstein. Thus it is a tangent of equal worth to reminding how Anglo-Protestant "WASPs", using the same mindset they used on "papists" brutalized Ireland and native Americans and East Indians on a scale for which justifications of "self-protection" is more transparent.
"Negro" is also a "historically accepted designation" that is not considered polite anymore. People who use these terms when requested otherwise I think reflect something of their mindset.
I understand you may have found some amusement in the article, and of course it does bring a wry smile to the face of anyone. It is not a subject to which I have previously given any thought, so thankyou for bringing it to my attention. The scholarship of the author is clearly well renowned and she has much to offer. That she is clearly a Catholic and may have a perceived inclination to see history from those eyes, is neither hidden, nor does it see to be the dominant thread of the article. Thank you Spherelink for bringing it to our attention. I am prepared to look beyond the known. As the ArchBishop of Canterbury recently found his own known family history was not quite what he had been led to believe, and has had to adjust to an alternate rendition of history. It doesn't change anything, however truth is preferable to fiction. I have had such an experience in my own family story. Truth is always better than fiction. The expereince for me has led me to be more open to more questions. A little unsettling at times, but overall for the better. Thank you Sperelink for opening yet another opportunity to grow. Who knows where it will lead.
When you say this, do you mean to object to seizing your poets, ie those who are English, for their, Catholic, legacy? John Dryden (/ˈdraɪdən/; 19 August [O.S. 9 August] 1631 – 12 May [O.S. 1 May] 1700) was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who was made England's first Poet Laureate in 1668. He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden. Walter Scott called him "Glorious John." His other major works from this period are ... The Hind and the Panther, (1687) which celebrates his conversion to Roman Catholicism. He wrote Britannia Rediviva celebrating the birth of a son and heir to the Catholic King and Queen on 10 June 1688.[12] When later in the same year James II was deposed in the Glorious Revolution, Dryden's refusal to take the oaths of allegiance to the new monarchs, William and Mary, left him out of favour at court. Thomas Shadwell succeeded him as Poet Laureate, and he was forced to give up his public offices and live by the proceeds of his pen. ... Reputation and Influence Dryden was the dominant literary figure and influence of his age. ... he established a poetic diction appropriate to the heroic couplet—Auden referred to him as "the master of the middle style"[17]—that was a model for his contemporaries and for much of the 18th century. ... Dryden is believed to be the first person to posit that English sentences should not end in prepositions because Latin sentences cannot end in prepositions.[23][24] Dryden created the prescription against preposition stranding in 1672 when he objected to Ben Jonson's 1611 phrase the bodies that those souls were frighted from... The phrase "blaze of glory" is believed to have originated in Dryden's 1686 poem The Hind and the Panther, referring to the throne of God as a "blaze of glory that forbids the sight." Further reading Stark, Ryan. "John Dryden, New Philosophy, and Rhetoric", in Rhetoric, Science, and Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2009) SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dryden