Setting the Record Straight: Shakespeare’s Secret Catholicism

If Shakespeare’s father and daughter were Catholics, what about the bard himself? No one argues that, after the Lancashire years, and during his writing career, Shakespeare was known as a Catholic. Still, there are tantalizing events and, above all, there are things in the plays and poems that arrest. These were times when it was worth your life not to conform. Edmund Campion and other Jesuits were brutally martyred for ministering to the pockets of Catholics who remained loyal to the Old Faith.

Shakespeare did not volunteer for a martyr’s role, but, retired to Stratford, “He died a papist.”