The Shakespeare Plot

...The actors, she realized, were transmitting coded comment over the heads of their political minders...

...Allegory, which she thrusts into the dominant role, was indeed a familiar literary form in Shakespeare's time, the mode of a contemporary masterpiece, Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), in which the figures and events are merely emblematic—"Gloriana" is Elizabeth I. But, so far as her book reveals, Asquith has no privileged access to the "coded" allegories she alone discovers in Shakespeare's plays and poems...

...and Asquith's guesswork is ambitious and ingenious...

...We know almost nothing, just to begin with, of where the poet was, or what he was doing, in the so-called "lost years," between the documented baptism of his twins in 1585 and his being denounced as an "upstart crow" by a rival playwright in 1592, although it is plausibly presumed that, by the late 1580s, he was beginning to make a splash as an actor and dramatist...

...cerer's apprentice, the amateur magus who deploys the master's powers but finds them uncontrollable...

...The author treats the works, chronologically, as a series of intricate and dazzling allegories, caviar to the general reader, perhaps, but clear to listening and watching insiders...

...Richard III, the evil hunchback, is the Queen's adjutant Robert Cecil (the author's bête noire...

...and the results are sure to try the patience of any reader who dares to imagine that Shakespeare's works are about what they seem to be about...

...As for the later masterpieces, Hamlet, she asserts, is yet another elaborate shadow play or allegory in which the Prince of Denmark is modeled on Sir Philip Sidney, whom she identifies as a secret Catholic...

...But even there, the evidence is flimsy—a passing reference to one "Shakeshafte" in a Hoghton family document...

...Romeo and Juliet is a "cautionary tale for the [Catholic] resistance," and The Merchant of Venice "a cat's cradle of cryptic meanings...

...Which is to say that there are master sorcerers in the background, notably Stephen Greenblatt, doyen of the "new histori-cist" school of lit crit, whose recent biography, Will in the World, is a publishing sensation...

...Green-blatt speculates that young Shakespeare, fresh from his Stratford grammar schooling, may have served as a tutor to certain Catholic families in Lancashire...

...When the dutiful Cordelia declines to swear exclusive love to her father, the besotted King Lear, this stands for the refusal of dissident Catholics and Puritans to take the Oath of Allegiance to the Crown...

...The ultimate result is this curious and contentious book, whose central claim it is that the greatest English poet, a secret and militant Catholic, encrypted his poems and plays with the aim of transmitting forbidden truths about the English Reformation...

...and, accordingly, relies for the most part upon mere assertion...

...Readers of the sonnets have often wondered if the allusion to "bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang" is a threnody for the usurped religious houses, closed and looted by the Protestant reformers...

...There are fine pages and passages here, so it is too bad that Asquith's stylistic prowess is unsupported by notable skills or seasoning in historical and literary analysis...

...She makes the boldest claims for encryption regarding early plays that are commonly thought of as Shakespeare's apprentice work—for instance, the crude and bloody Titus Andronicus, which she reads as a masterpiece of veiled commentary...

...Shadowplay, brightly written as much of it is, may appeal to rationalist readers of a conspiracist kidney who think that things are never what they seem to be, and that the world is so orderly that the most intricate designs invariably work out...

...If Shakespeare had been a zealous detractor of the English Reformation, using his plays as instruments of coded propaganda, none would have been likelier to know it than the editors of the Folio, and surely none less likely to make a mockery of their colleague's memory by including a play that treats the Protestant reformers—even Archbishop Cranmer—sympathetically...

...Julia, traditional English religion...

...In any event, in less than Spenserian hands, allegory can be an inferior and tedious literary form, certainly unworthy of Shakespeare's genius...

...Those who want a sane and seasoned antidote to the conjectures of the new historicism would do well to turn to a small masterpiece, Frank Kermode's recent The Age of Shakespeare...

...As for the poet himself, he remains, for most of us, veiled in biographical mystery, not least with regard to his personal convictions...

...In Macbeth, for instance, it has generally been agreed that after finding a keen patron in James I (who permitted Shakespeare's company to be called the King's Men) Shakespeare tipped his pen to the king's notorious interest in witchcraft and, by the way, supplied him with royal descent from Banquo...

...Sylvia the new religion...

...The rest—so far, anyway—is silence...

...And on and on—this is a mere sampling...

...There is a second category of exposition, topical "echoes" and evocations...

...Among other defects of her argument, Claire Asquith fails to acknowledge a distinction between two crucially different orders of interpretation...

...While attending an evening of Chekhovian drama in Moscow some years ago, Claire Asquith experienced a revelation...

...If 20th-century Soviet oppression, why not the oppression of Roman Catholics in the reign of Elizabeth I and her Stuart successor...

...Of course, one problem with allegorical interpretation is that more than one may play at the same game...

...Asquith is aware of the difficulty, but brushes it aside impatiently, on grounds that Henry VIII was probably written by another hand and, in any case, was simply too popular and profitable to leave out...

...Asquith's reading of the sonnets is equally unpersuasive...

...Venus in the narrative poem "Venus and Adonis" is Queen Elizabeth, pursuing, with rape in mind, a virginal Adonis, emblem of the Catholic Church...

...In the First Folio of 1623, its two editors, Shakespeare's professional intimates, included the late play Henry VIII while excluding others as uncanonical on grounds of adulterated authorship...

...Asquith rushes forward with a heavy tread...

...In Troilus and Cressida, Agamemnon is Philip II of Spain, Ulysses the Jesuit father Robert Persons, and the Trojan camp is the king's privy council...

...Surely the most striking aspect of his unrivaled plays and poems is his insight into an all-but-bewildering variety of personalities and characters, minds, attitudes, emotions, and sensibilities—small-c catholicity in the truest sense...

...Indeed, she is manifestly of the thin-air school of conjecture, since she focuses this book upon an aspect of the poet's life and mind about which nothing is known, though much may be inferred...

...Thus, in the early comedy Two Gentlemen of Verona, Proteus is England...

...And by the way, the play within the play that Hamlet casually calls The Mousetrap is actually The Murder of Gonzago, a fact the author seems to have forgotten...

...Indeed, Asquith's book is marked by that technique of rigorous deduction from dubious premises that is the hallmark of con-spiracist thinking...

...The most serious embarrassment to her keystone theory, however, is not critical but bibliographical...

...Recent scholarship has been bemused, moreover, by the possibility that Shakespeare was a Catholic, as his father almost certainly was, at a time when open profession of Catholicism was growing dangerous...

...In this and other plausible guesses, Asquith pays a fleeting visit to consensus interpretation...

...There, the master, not the apprentice, is fully in charge...

...Since Hamlet explicitly mentions Wittenberg (with its Luther associations), and alludes in a macabre passage about Polonius's corpse to the Diet of Worms, where Luther was tried for heresy, why isn't it more plausible to read the play as a Reformationist allegory, to picture Hamlet's detention at Elsinore as thwarting England's natural affinity for Reform theology...

...Where seasoned Shakespeare scholars have stepped lightly, Mrs...

...At any rate, it is a wholly speculative possibility in William Shakespeare's life and outlook—a zealous but undocumented Catholicism—that Asquith runs away with, in the manner of the sorcerer's apprentice, deploying polemical fireworks that are sometimes brilliant but for the most part fanciful...

...The technique of the new historicism is to conjure from texts (and other places of concealment, including thin air) a conjectural reality...

...but no one knows...

...and for that ever-entertaining speculative enterprise, no life is more inviting than Shakespeare's, about which we know pitifully little...

...She found it powerfully suggestive: If Chekhov, why not Shakespeare...

...In the absence of reliable fact, the fallback must be guesswork...

...As for his own, there are suggestive hints, fleeting glimpses, and nearly inaudible voices, as if heard dimly from a distance...

...In fact, this performance calls to mind the tale of the sorEdwin M. YoderJr., a former columnist and editor in Washington, taught journalism and the humanities at Washington and Lee University...

...Where the poet-narrator of Sonnet 111 famously apologizes for a "public" identity that stains his reputation as the dye stains the dyer's hand, she is sure that he is confessing shame for dissembling his Catholic creed...

...In Hamlet, the "leprous" encrustation caused by the poisoning of the late king stands for the whitewashing-over of religious painting...

...Everyone else believes that the allusion is to the disreputabili-ty of the theatrical profession, which in that age was legally classified with vagabondage, and is the subject of related and neighboring allusions in other sonnets...