Shadowplay by Clare Asquith

Author:Clare Asquith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2018-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

Truth and Beauty Buried Be

THE EXCITED PREFACE does all it can to signal the concealed meaning of Troilus and to invite the reader to enjoy the witty caricatures hidden within. There is more to comedies than meets the eye, it urges, ‘especially this author’s comedies’. ‘Were but the vain names of Comedies changed for the titles of Commodities, or of Plays for Pleas you should see all those grand censors that now style them such vanities flock to them’. But by now Shakespeare was plainly finding it difficult to find any comic capital in ‘the matter of England’. In 1601, his poem The Phoenix and the Turtle appeared alongside contributions by Jonson and Marston in Love’s Martyr, a daring volume of dissident poetry anticipating James’s succession. Recent studies have revealed its hidden significance: an elegy for a pair who symbolised all that was best in the separated halves of the Catholic resistance, the married couple Anne and Roger Line, parted by the Reformation troubles. Anne had just been executed in England for assisting the Jesuit mission: Roger had already died in poverty in exile. The lament over their ashes is set within a meditation on a Palm Sunday Mass evoking the mystical union of the separated couple. They are given the badges of the persecuted church and its followers—the born-again phoenix and the constant turtle-dove.

The poem provides an unusual glimpse of Shakespeare’s own profound spirituality. The dense thought is original, and the intense language recalls Southwell’s translations of the hymns of Aquinas, in particular a setting by William Byrd sung by Father Mark Barkworth as he awaited execution on the scaffold alongside Anne Line.23 The poem’s haunting tone takes us beyond the death of two remarkable individuals. Shakespeare is here confronting for the first time the possibility that the spirit of the Catholic resistance would be extinguished in England. He calls his poem a ‘tragic scene’; its conclusion is resigned: ‘Beauty, truth, and rarity, / Grace in all simplicity, / Here enclosed in cinders lie… / Truth may seem, but cannot be; / Beauty brag, but tis not she: / Truth and beauty buried be’.

One opportunity remained for English Catholics. Essex’s leading supporters were still behind bars in the early weeks of March 1603 when a fellow prisoner, Father William Weston, recorded a strange phenomenon. He knew nothing of the Queen’s last illness—‘so completely was I cut off from converse with men… But this I did witness. During those few days in which she lay dying beyond all hope of recovery, a strange silence descended on the whole city, as if it were under interdict and divine worship suspended. Not a bell rang out. Not a bugle sounded—though ordinarily they were often heard…’.24 On the morning of 24 March, he looked out of his cell window to see members of the Council assembling below his cell to proclaim the new King, James of Scotland, ‘crying out and publishing the proclamation with great pomp’. Elizabeth’s long reign was over—and with it their own confinement.

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