SOURCE: “New Light on Shakespeare's Catholicism: Prospero's Epilogue in The Tempest,” in Renascence, Vol. 40, No. 3, Spring, 1997, pp. 158-74.

[In the essay below, Beauregard charges that Prospero's epilogue provides convincing evidence that Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic.]

Shakespeare's religious affiliation has never been convincingly determined. It has long been known, of course, that Shakespeare's family background was heavily Catholic. His mother Mary was from the Catholic Arden family. His father John concealed in the roof of his house a signed Spiritual Testament in the popular Roman Catholic form devised by Charles Borromeo, in the recent judgment of Patrick Collinson “very nearly conclusive” evidence that he was a Catholic (38). Similarly, we have long been aware that, during Shakespeare's youth in the 1570s, two out of three of the teachers at Stratford's grammar school were Roman Catholics (Schoenbaum 66).

Over the last twenty-five years, some interesting evidence has surfaced and suggested even more strongly that Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic. In 1972, on the basis of the records of the Stratford ecclesiastical court for May and December 1606, E. R. C. Brinkworth concluded that Susanna Shakespeare and Hamnet and Judith Sadler, for whom the Shakespeare twins were named, were most probably “church papists.” He cautiously admitted that “although Susanna Shakespeare appears among Stratford Church papists we cannot be absolutely certain that she was indeed one of them. But it certainly looks like it.” Less plausibly, and somewhat inconsistently, he went on to suggest that Susanna and her father were “primitive anglo-catholics” (46-48, 132-34). Subsequently, E. A. J. Honigmann, in 1985, argued that the young Shakespeare had spent some time in Lancashire as a school teacher in the employ of a Catholic family. Following the research of D. L. Thomas and N. E. Evans of the Public Record Office, Honigmann further maintained that John Shakespeare's Spiritual Testament and withdrawal from meetings of Stratford's Corporation “drives us to the conclusion that [he] was a Catholic” (118). In 1989, after a study of the recusancy return of 1592 for Stratford, F. W. Brownlow came to the same conclusion. Somewhat earlier, examination of the communion rolls of the parish of Southwark, carefully kept during the period Shakespeare lived there (ca. 1599), revealed that the poet did not take communion in the Church of England, a fact suggesting that, like his father and daughter, he did not conform (Schoenbaum 222-23; Collinson 38-39; Duffy, “Shakespeare” 537). All of these recent lines of converging evidence point to a Catholic Shakespeare and to a continuity of Catholicism in the Shakespeare family. Thus, it is not surprising that several recent books and articles by Peter Milward (24-42), Gary Taylor (99-100), E. A. J. Honigmann (114-25), Eric Sams (11-16), Ian Wilson (410-12), and Margarita Stocker (318-20) contend that Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic, albeit not always throughout his entire lifetime.

Moreover, if we place all of this in the context of recent revisionist historiography of the English Reformation, which has documented a popular reluctance to accept the Protestant revolution, the probability of Shakespeare's Catholicism does not appear at all incredible (Todd 1-32; for Stratford specifically see Collinson 36-38). The tide of opinion in favor of a Protestant Shakespeare may indeed be going out. After recently surveying all the evidence, Eamon Duffy has justly concluded that “whether or not Shakespeare can be claimed as a Catholic writer, he was certainly not a Protestant one” (“Shakespeare” 538). Even the skeptical Samuel Schoenbaum, who gives the nod to an Anglican Shakespeare, admits that we “need not find [a Catholic Shakespeare] too puzzling” (62). Nevertheless, one must concede that conclusive and unambiguous documentary evidence of Shakespeare's Catholicism is still lacking. I will argue that such evidence exists in the plays, particularly in The Tempest.

Let us begin with a bit of late seventeenth-century “tradition.” The testimony of Richard Davies (d. 1708), chaplain of Corpus Christi College and Archdeacon of Coventry, that Shakespeare “dyed a papist” (Chambers 2: 257) has been generally considered a bit of unsubstantiated seventeenth-century legend and has never been accorded full credibility. Yet nearly every biographer of Shakespeare mentions Davies, indicating perhaps a lingering suspicion that his notation might be more than an idle and unfounded report. E. K. Chambers himself refused to accept Sidney Lee's dismissal of Davies' report as irresponsible “idle gossip” and assessed Davies as “a man of scholarly attainments” (1: 86).

Coming in the form of a notation on the record of Shakespeare's birth and death dates by William Fulman, scholar of Corpus Christi, Davies' claim at first carries some impression of historical and biographical accuracy, largely because of his credentials as an antiquarian scholar and non-Catholic clergyman, as one who would be expert in matters of parish records. That impression dissipates somewhat with the realization that on two counts Davies displays an imperfect memory. In mentioning Shakespeare's youthful poaching of deer, he cannot remember Sir Thomas Lucy's first name—he leaves the space blank—and he confuses Justice Clodpate from Thomas Shadwell's Epsom Wells with Justice Shallow from The Merry Wives of Windsor. To be sure, there is a difference between remembering the name of an obscure character from a play and remembering Shakespeare's deathbed papistry, but even the fact that Davies has the substance of Shakespeare's epitaph right—“He lays a Heavy curse vpon any one who shal remoove his bones”—does not carry enough weight to warrant accepting his final statement—“He dyed a papist”—as an unquestionable fact.

The possibility that Davies' notation is accurate, however, cannot be summarily dismissed, for there exists a very plausible line of tradition from Judith Shakespeare-Quiney—whose Stratford wedding took place two and a half months before her father died—to John Ward—vicar of Stratford from 1662-81—to Richard Davies, who was chaplain of Corpus Christi (ca. 1675-6 to 1681) and whose notations were made sometime between 1688 and 1703 (Chambers 2: 255-57). Ward in his Diary (for 1661-63) mentions the apparent fever that led to Shakespeare's death, knowledge that Judith Quiney (d. 1662) would have had:

Shakespear, Drayton, and Ben Jhonson, had a merry meeting, and itt seems drank too hard, for Shakespear died of a feaver there contracted …

And at the same time he makes an intriguing mention of Judith, indicating he apparently knew her:

A letter to my brother, to see Mrs. Queeny, to send for Tom Smith for the acknowledgement.

(Chambers 2: 249-50)

As Oxford clergymen with antiquarian interests and a curiosity about Shakespeare, both Ward and Davies had certain things in common. Since Davies seems to have visited the grave and read its warning, it would be odd if he had not talked with the vicar during his visit. And since both Ward and Davies provide information about Shakespeare's death, it seems clearly possible, if not likely, that Davies got his information from the vicar who got it in turn from Judith Shakespeare. This is all conjecture, of course, and without further substantiation Davies' testimony still stands on a fragile, but not entirely implausible, base.

However open to question is Davies' notation, there is one piece of significant evidence that confirms his claim, though not without ambiguity. And that is the final couplet of Prospero's epilogue in The Tempest: “As you from crimes would pardoned be, / Let your indulgence set me free.” The Catholic tenor of the last line was noticed long ago by DeGroot (174) and by Mutschmann and Wentersdorf (248-49), but the full theological meaning of the epilogue has never been fully explored. What I shall argue is that The Tempest, most pointedly in Prospero's epilogue, contains a peculiar series of references to sin, grace and pardon that are the expressions of a sensibility rooted in Roman Catholic doctrine.

In its general dimensions, of course, the entire play is concerned with bringing “men of sin” to a penitent state, restoring them to their “proper selves” (3.3.53-60; 5.1.28-30; 212-13), and making them aware of the need for grace, a larger concern of Prospero's project that is repeated in the epilogue where it is applied to the author himself. Not only the characters, but the author as well, are in need of the grace of indulgence and “pardon.”

On a more particular level in the play, there are two minor allusions to Roman Catholic doctrine touching on grace. In remembering Miranda as a child, Prospero describes her as “Infusèd with a fortitude from heaven” (1.2.159), a phrase that alludes to the distinction between infused and acquired virtues. And while the infusion of supernatural virtues—especially faith—is a cardinal point in Reformed doctrine, the infusion of a moral virtue seems more probably Catholic. Another doctrine involving grace, that of the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is also alluded to by Prospero in consoling Alonso:

Alonso:
Irreparable is the loss [of his son]; and patience
Says it is past her cure.
Prospero:
I rather think
You have not sought her help, of whose soft grace
For the like loss I have her sovereign aid
And rest myself content.

(5.1.141-44)

Grammatically, “her help” refers to the help of Patience, but the sense of the passage precludes that meaning since Alonso has already sought the help of Patience who has told him she cannot cure him. Previously, in a phrase analogous to “her [Mary's] sovereign aid,” Shakespeare refers to Juno as “the queen o' the sky … with her sovereign grace” (4.1.70-72). Thus, it seems clear what Shakespeare has in mind. He takes care to avoid explicit expression of the intercession of the Blessed Virgin but, especially with the phrase “her sovereign aid,” puts us in mind of her. Understandably, Shakespeare's references to Catholic doctrine are non-explicit, a discreet practice, or perhaps inadvertent lapse, we would expect of a “church papist” concerned with avoiding detection. In view of these general and particular indications, then, it is not surprising to find a concentrated but cleverly ambiguous expression of Roman Catholic doctrine on grace in the epilogue of the play, culminating in the last two lines.

Before turning to the final couplet, however, it is necessary to point out that Prospero's epilogue can be plausibly interpreted as Shakespeare's personal farewell to the stage (I hasten to add that such an interpretation is not essential to my argument—the lines still are among Shakespeare's last and still have a Catholic tenor). There is a strong autobiographical motif in the play itself. Prospero gives an early recounting to Miranda of their past life (1.2), and in the play's concluding lines he promises to tell “the story of my life,” a phrase twice repeated (5.1.303, 312). In conjunction with these lines, the referential discontinuities between the play and Prospero's farewell occur with their rich suggestiveness. Everyone is familiar with the “revels” speech in which the phrases “our revels,” “our actors,” “the great globe itself,” and “this insubstantial pageant” (4.1.148-58) allude to dramatic realities outside the play itself. So also with the epilogue. At the finish of the action of the play itself, Prospero-as-character is not bound, he is no longer confined to “this bare island.” His project has not been merely to please, he is not in despair, and he has no need of the aid of others, discontinuous details which would seem clearly to provoke an autobiographical interpretation of the speech. Shakespeare-as-actor is bound and confined to the stage, he has been concerned to please, his old age would dispose him to despair, and he clearly would have need of others. These dramatic discontinuities force us to look for referential continuities outside the speech itself in the actor's life. The objection that The Tempest was not Shakespeare's last play can be easily answered by a simple distinction between actor and composer. Very probably this was Shakespeare's last play as an actor, but not as a playwright, although Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen by virtue of their composite authorship suggest that even as a playwright Shakespeare had retired. To be sure, he visited London during his last years, but this too suggests a state of permanent retirement to Stratford. Several elements in the speech, in any case, require and are completed by an extended sense, an extra-dramatic sense, beyond the literal. Why, for example, Prospero as lead character, or Shakespeare as lead actor, should need prayer, mercy, and “indulgence” is not at all clear, unless there is some fuller personal sense beyond the immediate literal words. Certainly if Shakespeare is speaking autobiographically and out of character anywhere, it is here (Yachnin 130-33).

To return to the epilogue: given voice by a persona who appeals for intercessory prayers to relieve his despair at his impending death, the twenty lines of the epilogue are interlaced with the technical language of sin and grace.

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint. Now 'tis true
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
And my ending is despair
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

In the religious context of Jacobean England and the court of James I, “indulgence” was obviously an important and risky word, a word fraught with powerful theological implications to which Shakespeare could not have been insensitive. Indeed English theologians seem to have preferred the term “pardon” to “indulgence.” “Indulgence” was the Latinate technical term, “pardon” a more vernacular English one. Typically, Hooker in his Learned Discourse of Justification refers to partial and plenary indulgences as “pardon for terme” and “plenary pardon” (5:112). Interestingly, Spenser and Marlowe never use the Latinate word.

As an originating cause of the larger controversy over justification, the indulgence question had an important sixteenth-century history, beginning with Luther's debate against Johannes Tetzel in 1517. Luther, Baius, Bañez, Suarez, and Bellarmine all wrote on indulgences, and it is unlikely that Shakespeare was ignorant of the question. The Council of Trent propounded the essential doctrine on indulgences for general instruction. In a work like Bellarmine's An Ample Declaration of the Christian Doctrine (1602-06), an elementary catechetical source, the terminology of “captive” souls, bound by their “faults” and sins in purgatory, able to be “loosed and freed” by Papal powers through the intercession of indulgenced prayers on the part of the living faithful, is clearly in evidence. Regarding the words of absolution spoken by the priest in the sacrament of penance, Bellarmine writes that

so God inwardly by meanes of those words of the Priest, looseth that soule from the band of sinne, with which it was tyed, and restored it to grace, and deliuereth it from that it had deserued, to haue been cast head-long into hell.

(210)

The same terminology occurs in his definition of an indulgence:

Indulgence is a Liberty which God doth vse by meanes of his Vicar, with his faithful, by pardoning their temporall paine, either all or some part, which they were to suffer for their sinnes in this life, or in purgatory … [but] by Indulgence is satisfied onely, for the bond of paine, or punishment …

(214, 217)

Prior to the Council of Trent, the Council of Constance (1414-18) had directed questions against the Wycliffites and Hussites on the subject of indulgences using the same phraseology as the epilogue with its appeal to “the help of your good hands”:

Likewise, whether he believes that the pope, for a pious and just reason, especially to those who visit holy places and to those who extend their helping hands, can grant indulgences for the remission of sins to all Christians truly contrite and having confessed. And whether he believes that from such a concession they who visit these churches and they who lend helping hands can gain indulgences of this kind.

(Denzinger 217)

Again, in referring to “faults” and “crimes,” Shakespeare uses terms implying the distinction between venial and mortal sin. In Reformed theology all sin tended to be the same, all sins making the sinner equally damnable before God (McAdoo 98-119), and the distinction between mortal and venial sins was usually rejected by the Reformers. King James I, before whom The Tempest was first performed at court on November 1, 1611, shows a self-conscious awareness of this Roman Catholic distinction, linked with the vocabulary of “faults” and “crimes.” In the Basilicon Doron he advises his young son:

A moate in anothers eye, is a beame into yours: a blemish in another, is a leprouse byle into you: and a veniall sinne (as the papists call it) in another, is a great cryme into you. Thinke not therefore, that the highnes of your dignity diminisheth your faults (muche lesse giueth you a licence to sinne) but by the contrarie, your fault shall be aggrauated, according to the height of your dignity.

(James I 1:27)

The language of indulgences or “pardons”—with such words as “bands,” “helping hands,” “faults” and “crimes”—is not, then, unique to the epilogue of The Tempest and was used in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theological contexts.

More pertinent to the matter at hand, one can see implicit in Prospero's epilogue a constellation of four important doctrines that have a bearing on its meaning. The presence of one doctrine might perhaps amount to simple coincidence, but the presence of four distinctly Catholic doctrines in an interrelated complex constitutes rather formidable evidence of a Papist sensibility at work.

First, the uncertainty of salvation. Halfway through the epilogue Prospero expresses anxiety over the prospect of his death:

Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
And my ending is despair
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.

In the Reformed theology predominant in the Church of England, the merits of Christ sufficed completely to atone for sin, and at the moment of death the sinner was either redeemed or not. In the ordo salutis, or order of salvation, of Reformed theology, the stages of predestination, calling, justification, sanctification, and glorification proceeded with the assurance that the elect could not fall away, that salvation was certain (Wallace 44-46; Lewalski 16-20). Thus Reformed theology saw no need for prayers for the dead, whose salvation or damnation had been decided before the moment of death, nor apparently for the living about to die who were urged to rely on the certainty of faith. In the funeral service of the Prayer Book, the minister was required to declare of each person about to be buried that he died “in sure and certain hope” of salvation (Duffy, Altars 590). In the Homilies, the sermon “An Exhortation against the feare of Death” urges us to have faith over against the fear of death:

Now the third and speciall cause why death indeede is to bee feared, is the miserable state of the worldly and vngodly people after their death: but this is no cause at all, why the godly and faithfull people should feare death, but rather contrariwise, their godly conuersation [sic] in this life, and beliefe in Christ, cleauing continually to his mercies, should make them to long fore after that life, that remaineth for them vndoubtedly after this bodily death. Of this immortall state, (after this transitory life) where wee shall liue euermore in the presence of GOD … there be many plaine places of holy Scripture, which confirme the weake conscience against the feareof all such dolours, sicknesses, sinne, and bodily death, to asswage such trembling and vngodly feare, and to encourage vs with comfort and hope of a blessed state after this life.

(Certaine Sermons 65)

With Roman Catholics, on the other hand, there was no such assurance and certainty. Trent pronounced some three times on the matter.

… everyone, when he considers himself and his own weakness and indisposition, may entertain fear and apprehension as to his own grace, since no one can know with the certainty of faith, which cannot be subject to error, that he has obtained the grace of God. … Let those “who think themselves to stand, take heed lest they fall,” and “with fear and trembling work out their salvation” in labors, in watchings, in almsdeeds, in prayers and oblations, in fastings and chastity.

(Denzinger 253-55).

Prospero with his need to be “relieved by prayer” lest his “ending [be] despair” faces just such an uncertainty of salvation. The issue of his salvation remains in doubt. In conformity with the formulation of Trent, Prospero considers his “own weakness and indisposition,” and entertaining “fear and apprehension as to his own grace,” works out his salvation by recourse to “prayer.” The certainty of salvation by faith does not find expression in the epilogue, as it should according to the doctrine of assurance.

Second, the efficacy of intercessory prayer. Prospero can only be “relieved by prayer.” On three counts the kind of prayer suggested here is Catholic. For one thing, while personal prayer may be implied, the lines clearly appeal for intercessory prayers on the part of the audience. Thus the call for “the help of your good hands.” The Reformed tradition conceived of prayer as a direct and unmediated appeal to God for mercy. The Roman Catholic tradition allowed for intercessory mediation through the saints and others. Indeed, the driving motive behind the foundation of the pre-Reformation chantries, those “bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang” (Sonnet 75), was precisely by means of intercessory prayer to secure relief for souls suffering in purgatory (Kreider 40). A second point is that the emphasis on the human action of prayer in “relieving” and “freeing” Prospero of “faults” suggests a Roman Catholic form of “works,” as does the hyperbolic description of prayer as actively “pierc[ing] and assault[ing] Mercy itself.” The phraseology smacks strongly of the human effort implicit in the Tridentine formulation of “working out” one's salvation. Finally, one must note that the work of prayer brings about the effect of “freeing all faults” or remitting all sin. Both Aquinas (ST 3a 87.3) and the Council of Trent maintained that venial sin could be remitted by recitation of the Lord's prayer and other means (Denzinger 275). This notion was attacked by the Reformers (e.g. Hooker 5: 111-12).

Again, the reference in the epilogue to intercessory prayer, not only in the light of the uncertainty of salvation but even more pointedly in view of purgatorial suffering, is not unique in Shakespeare's works, when we remember the “charitable prayers” mentioned at the Catholic funeral of Ophelia (Noble 84) and the narrator's request concluding “The Phoenix and Turtle”: “For these dead birds sigh a prayer.” Additional lines in Romeo and Juliet (1.5.103-7) and All's Well That Ends Well contain the same sense of intercessory prayer working the “relief” of the sinner:

                                                                                                    What angel shall
Bless this unworthy husband? he cannot thrive,
Unless her prayers, whom heaven delights to hear,
And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath
Of greatest justice.

(3.4.25-29)

Third, the doctrine of justification and the remission of sin. In the sixteenth-century Reformed tradition, salvation was achieved through a forensic or imputed justification—“Impute me righteous,” as John Donne has it—in which the still sinful soul was covered or cloaked over by the merits of Christ, as opposed to the Catholic conception which claimed that a real and interior transformation of the soul took place. The Council of Trent defined the matter carefully in its Sixth Session (Jan. 13, 1547):

Justification itself … is not merely remission of sins, but also the sanctification and renewal of the interior man [sanctificatio et renovatio interioris hominis] through the voluntary reception of the grace and gifts, whereby an unjust man becomes a just man, and from being an enemy becomes a friend.

(Denzinger 251)

According to this conception, justifying sanctification consists of two movements, the negative remission of sins and the positive interior renewal of the sinner by an infusion of grace. Justification is instantaneous and complete in the remission of all sin. Thus Aquinas argues that it is impossible for the sacrament of Penance to take away one sin without another, since this would both imply imperfect contrition on the part of the sinner and be contrary to the perfection of God's mercy (ST 3a 86.3). The crucial point is therefore that the grace of justification in Roman Catholic theology works a thoroughgoing instantaneous remission of sin, not a partial and gradual one, as the Reformed tradition maintained (Allison 1-30, 178-89; Wallace 51). The sinner is immediately sanctified by an interior renewal, not ultimately sanctified after an initial external or “imputed” justification. Richard Hooker, in his “A Learned Discourse of Justification” (1612), articulated the essential distinction and difference between the two positions, employing a distinction between the grace of justification and that of sanctification:

The righteousnes wherewith we shalbe clothed in the world to comme, is both perfecte and inherente: that whereby here we are justefied is perfecte but not inherente, that whereby we are sanctified, inherent but not perfecte. … This grace they [Roman Catholics] will have to be applied by infusion … so the soule mighte be rightuous by inherente grace, which grace they make capable of increase … the augmentacion whereof is merited by good workes, as good workes are made meritorious by it … But the rightuousnes wherein we muste be found if we wilbe justefied, is not our owne, therefore we cannott be justefied by any inherente qualitie. … Then although in ourselves we be altogether synfull and unrightuous, yett even the man which in him selfe is ympious, full of inequity, full of synne, hym god beholdeth with a gratious eye, putteth awaie his syn by not ymputing it, taketh quite awaie the ponishemente due therunto by pardoninge it, and accepteth him in Jesus Christe as perfectly rightous as if he had fullfilled all that was comaunded hym in the law.

(5:109-13)

In the light of the theological distinction between imputed and inherent justification, the phrase “frees all faults” clearly refers to the remission of all sin and implies a real and complete alteration of the soul, an inherent, instantaneous grace, by which it is freed from sin and restored to its former whole integrity, as opposed to an imputed justification in which the justified soul paradoxically remains partially in its sinful condition—“simul iustus et peccator,” as Luther put it (Allison 181-89). In the more general context of the play itself, a similar conception appears at work in Prospero's actions, wherein those who have sinned against him are by his merciful ministrations moved to penitence and restored to their former undistracted “proper selves” (3.3.60; 5.1.28, 212-13). The overall movement of the action is from the penitential confinement of sin to the recovery of nature and “their clearer reason,” implying once again an interior restoration (5.1.66-68, 79-82).

Fourth, indulgences. The last two lines allude to the indulgence controversy, but, it must be observed, with considerable reserve and careful ambiguity:

As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

The subject of indulgences was normally closely related to that of purgatory, where departed souls were confined for the duration of their punishment for sins and relieved of such temporal punishment upon the saying of intercessory prayers. Indulgences could be had for the living as well as the dead, whether for oneself or for others, by way of absolution and suffrage (Denzinger 239). At the Council of Trent, indulgences and Purgatory were discussed at the 25th session (Dec. 3-4, 1563), and the doctrinal formulations respective to each were included in the same paragraph of its final profession of faith.

On the Protestant side, the efficacy of indulgences in remitting punishment was denied. As perhaps the most well-known doctrinal expression in Shakespeare's English milieu, there is the condemnation contained in the Thirty-Nine Articles appended to the Book of Common Prayer, again linking the two subjects of purgatory and indulgences:

XXII. OF PURGATORY.

The Romish Doctrine concerning purgatory [and] pardons [Doctrine Romanensium de purgatorio, de indulgentiis] … is a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the word of God.

(Bicknell 347)

Prior to this there is Luther's claim that indulgences are necessary only for convicted criminals, a claim reiterated and condemned by the papal bull “Exsurge Domine” of Leo X in 1520:

21. Indulgences are necessary only for public crimes, and are properly conceded only to the harsh and impatient.

22. For six kinds of men indulgences are neither necessary nor useful; namely, for the dead and those about to die, the infirm, those legitimately hindered, and those who have not committed crimes, and those who have committed crimes, but not public ones, and those who devote themselves to better things.

(Denzinger 241-42)

In general, the text of Prospero's epilogue shows a consistent use of these interwoven theological terms and doctrines. The central dramatic posture of a man facing final despair and appealing for relief to intercessory prayers to set him free from his “faults” or sins is emphatically not Protestant. Neither is the concluding statement that an indulgence can set him free from the pain of purgatorial confinement. Moreover, Shakespeare's discreet use of doctrinal language is consistent with what we might expect of the sensibility of a “church papist,” ambiguously alluding to but not explicitly stating the whole complex of doctrines surrounding indulgences.

Indeed, it is precisely in the last eight lines, with the mention of “my ending,” “despair,” “prayer,” “mercy,” and “faults,” that the sense of the epilogue becomes clearly religious and purgatorial: the artist has faults which cause him to despair, but he can be freed of his sins, given hope, and relieved only by intercessory prayers on the part of his audience. The last two lines seal this interpretation, but, as I have said, with considerable reserve and careful ambiguity:

As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

Thus, they can be read in two ways, as a dual appeal employing a clever ambiguity. They are, on the one hand, a courtly plea for special favor and permission to retire from the stage, in which case the terminology employed still alludes to Catholic doctrine on indulgences. And they are, on the other hand, an allusive religious plea for prayers, with Shakespeare addressing his audience in terms of an apparent contrast, i.e., as you English Protestants would be legally pardoned for your public crimes or sins, let me, as a Catholic, be set free from temporal punishment and purgatorial confinement by an indulgence. The terminology of “crimes” and “pardon” expresses an English Protestant tendency, “faults” and “indulgence” a Latinate Catholic one. The lines thus reflect the contrast between the Protestant notion of grace as mercy pardoning “crimes” over against the Roman Catholic conception of it as the rectification and restoration of nature, freeing one from “faults” and from temporal punishment or purgatorial confinement (Gustafson 9, 11). Rather summarily, they conclude a series of allusions to Roman Catholic doctrine—the doubtful issue of salvation, the power of prayer as effective intercession in relief of souls living or dead, the inherent nature of justification, and the efficacy of indulgences in remitting temporal punishment.

Before a theologically sophisticated audience, a non-religious sense of the lines, it seems clear, cannot have been intended as the only meaning. If here Shakespeare is asking for freedom to leave the stage through “your indulgence,” the foregoing contextual thrust of the words “prayer” and “mercy” and “faults” generates an undeniably theological meaning in the final couplet. The phrase “your indulgence” is no doubt ambiguous, but it is unquestionably more continuous with the preceding theological context. If we read it in a purely mundane and secular sense, it is discontinuous with that context, not to mention its being a potential affront to king and court in accusing them of public “crimes.” In either case, the vocabulary and phraseology are those of a Roman Catholic sensibility well-schooled in Tridentine doctrine and diverging from the Reformed theology of grace embraced by the Church of England.

Quite obviously, the double meaning of the lines implies a dual audience, Reformed Protestant and Roman Catholic. The court was composed mainly of “Protestants,” and King James I was a man who had a known interest in poetry and theology. Hence Shakespeare had to employ a careful ambiguity with his courtly plea asking this first group to “indulge” him by allowing him to retire from the stage. But there were also Catholics enough in the audience to serve as receptive auditors of the disguised religious meaning of the final line, the allusion to an indulgence. Queen Anne and some of her retinue, various ambassadors, and perhaps others would have constituted a small but significant Catholic presence at court. In fact, Queen Anne had refused to receive communion at her husband's coronation, had requested of Pope Clement VII “absolution and a blessing” for having attended Protestant ceremonies, and was discreet enough to confuse those around her on the matter of her religion (Loomie 305-06). If Shakespeare was in sympathy with such a group, his epilogue and final couplet would have been in accord with their sensibilities. They too would have felt the same sense of exile and confinement, and the same need for cautious expression, that had come with the tempest of the Reformation.

The notation that mysteriously emerges with Davies, therefore, accords with the language and substance of Shakespeare's farewell. Recognition of its validity would force us to rewrite some of our description of Shakespeare's background and education, namely the rather recent tradition of the poet's English Protestant education and supposed conformity, for which there is very oddly no hard evidence. One would expect Shakespeare's conformity to have achieved at some point documentary recording or explicit expression, whereas one can easily understand why his Catholicism did not. Even the closely documented biographical study of Schoenbaum, while attempting a balanced account of the poet's faith and knowledge, still gives the final nod to the notion of a Protestant Shakespeare, steeped by the educational system in the literature of the Elizabethan Settlement, the Bible, the Prayer Book, and so on (55-62). But much of this “background” is merely assumed, useful to fill in for a lack of more specific context, yet ineffectual in explaining the presence of Catholic matters in the plays. The favorable treatment of religious life (called “thrice blessèd” in A Midsummer Night's Dream 1.1.74, a very early play), the ethical structures in several of the plays (Beauregard passim), the scholastic theological terminology in “The Phoenix and Turtle” (Cunningham 203-09), the change of name from Oldcastle to Falstaff in 1 Henry IV (Taylor passim), the purgatorial sufferings of Hamlet's father, the indulgence language in The Tempest, all suggest a Catholic and not a Protestant perspective. The whole evidence, a complex compound of allusions to Catholic belief and echoes of Protestant liturgy, seems to increasingly project the profile of a church papist, vindicating Richard Davies' claim that “He dyed a papist.”

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