Last week, with the first scene of Julius Caesar we talked about how overtly religious this play was, and how Shakespeare uses the first scene to highlight for his Christian audience that this is absolutely a story about the Christian faith. The two commoners, one a carpenter and the other a cobbler who is a mender of bad souls, highlight descriptions that apply to Jesus, the carpenter and healer of our souls. Someone not familiar with the Christian faith might see the interchange between the Roman tribunes and the commoners and simply see something that is akin to a totalitarian police state, and that's true. But a Christian might notice these other details, and see the play for what it is, not only a political thriller but a religious allegory.
And a Catholic might notice something more in the first scene. The way the tribunes speak of the “cruel men of Rome” who “make holiday to see Caesar and to rejoice in his triumph” and how the tribunes go to the Capitol to “disrobe the images,” these items remind us of the separating lines between Catholics and Protestants. For example, Flavius, one of the tribunes is clear, they will bring down the images,
Flavius It is no matter, let no images
Be hung with Caesar’s trophies. I’ll about,
And drive away the vulgar from the streets.
So do you too, where you perceive them thick.
These growing feathers plucked from Caesar’s wing
Will make him fly an ordinary pitch,
Who else would soar above the view of men
And keep us all in servile fearfulness.
The talk from the tribunes (government servants) of “cruel men of Rome” on holiday and their need to destroy images would have been things that Catholics deal with even to this day. For example,
Why are you a slave to the Pope in Rome?
Why talk to priests when you can talk to Jesus directly?
Why do you worship statues?
Why do you worship Mary and the saints?
Do you really need so many fasts?
Asking these questions in sincere faith is important, we all need to search for truth and asking questions is a key component of that. But making statements thru the guise of questions that you don’t really care to hear the answer to, that’s difficult soil for the word of God to grow. The mind is made, the question is based on severe misunderstandings and hardly open to a genuine response.
And as Americans, some of the anti-Catholic bias has been handed down to us thru our English culture where the State seeks to own and control the church. Their usurpation of the church is against the American (and ultimately Catholic) principle of the separate and distinct roles for Church and State.
Still, the Catholic influence has impacted our American culture in that even Protestants celebrate some of our holidays, even though they do so in different ways. So All Hallows Eve is transformed into tricks and treats, Saint Patrick’s day has become a drinking day clad in green, and Saint Valentine’s Day becomes a romantic night for couples, and Christmas no longer needs a mass nor Easter good Friday. But even if they transform our holidays into something new for them, the remnants of Catholic culture still impacts Protestants today as evidenced by those days on our calendar.
And so, with the way the first scene of Julius Caesar ends, we know we’re not only about to witness a Christian allegory, but specifically one that deals with themes that would be the things that mark what separates Christians into Catholics and Protestants even to this day.
To see these themes clearer, I recommend Catholics read Eamon Duffy’s Stripping of the Altars. Eamon Duffy is a Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge and Stripping of the Altars is a powerful examination of Traditional Religion in England during the years 1400 - 1580. King Henry VIII began the Anglican church in 1531 and Shakespeare was born in 1564. Duffy does a wonderful job highlighting daily Catholic life before and into these momentous days. Shakespeare, who lived thru it and can’t see it with the hindsight that centuries provide, is very truly a boots on the ground historian of these monumental times when the Catholic voice was banned and censored. To beat the government censors, Catholics like Shakespeare had to resort to creative mediums like the play theater in order to have their story told. A little like today, when medical voices are silenced for going against a particular narrative by the main stream media, and so they resort to other means to tell the other half of the story that’s being squashed by government, big pharma, big tech, and other corporate entities and interests. Creative doctors have to resort to other means to tell truth in order to get the truth to the masses.
Duffy’s research is important to because he’s able to lay out the truths more explicitly. What Shakespeare had to disguise thru allegory, Duffy can deal with explicitly. Duffy can state explicitly what’s going on in England, so Duffy’s insights help make sense of the religious-political issues Shakespeare is commenting on and dealing with.
One of the things as an American Catholic that I never saw until I began reading Eamon’s works is how much the Protestant religion began by stripping away from the traditional religion. If you go to daily mass, you realize how many feast days we have throughout the year, sometimes we have a few each week. We even have feasts that last not a day but weeks, and fasts that last 40 days. We are frequently feasting and fasting. And so, we’re constantly celebrating something or fasting for something and the few American holidays like Thanksgiving and Independence Day got woven into our religious calendar and absorbed into our religious life, inseparable from our daily lives.
A Protestant, on the other hand, has very few holidays to celebrate in a religious sense, mostly just the days of Christmas and Easter. For Catholics, we celebrate Christmas for 12 days, and Easter is not only a prayerful triduum but lasts 50 days as we prepare for Pentecost. Religion has a very different impact on the daily lives of these both types of Christians, something Shakespeare alludes to in Twelfth Night.
Duffy helped me recognize this simple insight that I had always simply overlooked by chronicling the lives of Englishmen prior to the usurpation of the church in the 16th century.
So, yes, Shakespeare tells the story of Catholics in England during the Protestant revolution, a story that was suppressed, censored, and withheld by the government from the people. Shakespeare is an important historian and Catholics who learn to hear Shakespeare have a powerful reminder of why our divine religion is so important to hold in purity. We are simply messengers of the good news of Jesus Christ, we don’t write or change the message, we simply deliver it as received.
But, if we don’t know details of English history, details recorded not only in books like Duffy’s Stripping of the Altars, but also William Cobbett’s A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, GK Chesterton’s The Catholic Church and Conversion as well as St. John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, we’ll miss the themes that Shakespeare draws out. It’s all to easy to miss Shakespeare’s insights for those of us so far removed from the split in Christendom in England. These historians offer a valuable compliment to Shakespeare’s works by teaching us English history, and giving us a view that’s different than the mainstream narrative passed down to us.
And so, by the end of the first scene in Julius Caesar, the alert audience realizes Shakespeare didn’t just retell a political thriller about conspiracy and revolution and tyranny, but used a Roman historical moment as the cover for telling a religious allegory about the usurpation of the Catholic church in England by the royals and nobles of England.
Two weeks and only one scene, looks like we’re taking things slowly with Julius Caesar. We’ll take this opportunity to dive deep into the historical details of Catholic life in totalitarian England.
Let those with ears to hear hear Shakespeare.