Abstract
On Easter Sunday, 1641, a stand-off took place at Morley Hall, the home of Sir Thomas Tyldesley, in the village of Astley, Lancashire. A Catholic priest named Ambrose Barlow, the youngest son of a local knight, had been denounced by the Protestant vicar of the nearby town of Leigh. A few days earlier, on March 7, 1641, King Charles I had signed a proclamation requiring all Catholic priests to leave the realm within one calendar month or face arrest and execution as traitors. But Barlow, who was in his fifties, could not leave England even if he wanted to, for he had been partially paralyzed by a stroke. The manor house in which he was celebrating Mass was surrounded by a mob of four hundred Protestants armed with staves and pitch-forks. The Catholic congregation, which numbered about one hundred, defended the house and refused to abandon their beloved priest. Eventually, Barlow gave himself up in order to protect his flock against prosecution. While their names and addresses were being written down by the officials present, the hapless priest was tied to a horse and conveyed to the regional capital of Lancaster, where he was put on trial (actually, a show trial since the verdict was a foregone conclusion) and sentenced to death by hanging, drawing, and quartering.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974), xix.
Julia Reinhard Lupton, Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life (University of Chicago Press, 2011), 18.
Clare Asquith, Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), xiii.
For a Catholic reading of the plays, see Joseph Pearce, Through Shakespeare’s Eyes: Seeing the Catholic Presence in the Plays (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010).
For the question of secrecy in Shakespeare, see Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (Manchester University Press, 2004).
Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford University Press, 1999), 64.
For a uselul and lucid discussion of these contested issues, see Arthur F. Marotti, “Shakespeare and Catholicism,” in Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare, ed. Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson (Manchester University Press, 2003), 218–41.
See Peter Milward, SJ, “Shakespeare’s Jesuit Schoolmasters,” in Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare, ed. Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson (Manchester University Press, 2003), 58–70.
Jack Lynch, Becoming Shakespeare: The Unlikely Afterlife that Turned a Provincial Playwright into the Bard (New York: Walker, 2007).
See Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (London: Continuum, 2011), 5–6.
See John Gerard, SJ, The Autobiography of a Hunted Priest, trans. Philip Caraman (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 71–77 (“Search at Braddocks”).
See Lindsey Hughes, The Romanovs: Ruling Russia 1613–1917 (London: Continuum, 2008), 4.
Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton University Press, 1998), 166.
See Stephen Greenblatt, “Shakespeare in No Man’s Land,” New York Review of Books LVI/20 (December 17, 2009), 58–61 (60).
See Robert Hornsby, Protest, Reform, and Repression in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
See Kieran Williams, The Prague Spring and its Aftermath: Czechoslovak Politics 1968–1970 (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
For the centralization of censorship under Elizabeth I and James I in the figure of the Master of the Revels, see Janet Clare, “Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority”: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (Manchester University Press, 1999), second edition.
Ethan H. Shagan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 228.
See Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979).
Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 222–23.
See Robert Fuller, Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession (Oxford University Press, 1995).
Wendy Z. Goldman, Inventing the Enemy: Denunciation and Terror in Stalin’s Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 34.
Stephen Allord, The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012), 116.
Quoted from Ronald Hingley Pasternak: A Biography (New York: Allred A. Knopf, 1983), 3.
James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).
See Howard Louthan, The Quest for Compromise: Peacemakers in Counter-Reformation Vienna (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Peter Holmes, Resistance and Compromise: The Political Thought of Elizabethan Catholics (Cambridge University Press, 1982), 61.
Tom Stoppard, The Real Inspector Hound and Other Plays (New York: Grove Press, 1998), 175–211.
Grigori Kozintsev, Shakespeare: Time and Conscience, trans. Joyce Vining (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966).
See Spencer Golub, “Between the Curtain and the Grave: The Taganka in the Ham let Gulag,” in Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance, ed. Dennis Kennedy (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 158–77.
Eleanor Rowe, Hamlet: A Window on Russia (New York University Press, 1976), 152.
See Philip Caraman, Henry Garnet 1555–1606 and the Gunpowder Plot (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964).
Alvin Kernan, Shakespeare, the King’s Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603–1613 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 76.
For a discussion of this question, see Alfred Thomas, A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), chapter 6.
For the belief that Shakespeare has a valid appreciation of freedom, see Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare’s Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 2010).
Quoted from Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Campion: A Life (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 207.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Alfred Thomas
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Thomas, A. (2014). Introduction. In: Shakespeare, Dissent, and the Cold War. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137438959_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137438959_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-49415-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-43895-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)