Tea at Trianon: Campion and Shakespeare

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, August 1, 2016

Campion and Shakespeare

From Supremacy and Survival:

The former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has written a play about William Shakespeare and St. Edmund Campion. Its title, Shakeshafte, refers to the name mentioned in the annals of Hesketh Hall in Lancashire and the Jesuits in Britain are highlighting performance this week. In interviews about the play Williams says he believes Shakespeare was a Catholic and seems to accept one theory about Shakespeare's "lost years" as fact:

As part of his look into Shakespeare’s life and work, Dr Williams has also concluded The Bard was probably a Catholic.

He said of the play: “We know they both stayed at the same house in Lancashire. I found this a wonderful idea to play with: what might a Jesuit martyr and Shakespeare have said to each other?”

Regarding the ages-old debate over Shakespeare’s religion, Dr Wiliams says he now agrees with rumours that Shakespeare may have been a secret Catholic at a time when Queen Elizabeth I was spearheadeding a brutal repression of the catholic faith.

Dr Williams said: “Shakespeare knows exactly where he does, and doesn’t, want to go, in matters of church and state. He deliberately puts some of his plays right outside the Christian, Tudor/Jacobean framework.

“For instance, King Lear takes place in a pre-Christian Britain. Again, some people argue that Cymbeline is about a rupture with Rome, leading to a reconciliation. I think Shakespeare did have a recusant Catholic background. My own hunch though is that he didn’t go to church much.”
(Read more.)