William Shakespeare’s religious identity has long been debated, and an academic article has given further proof that Shakespeare came from a family that privately maintained the Catholic faith during intense persecution in England.
The article concerns the authorship of a document known as “John Shakespeare’s Spiritual Testament,” a deeply Catholic text that has traditionally been attributed to John, the playwright’s father. However, in a 2024 academic article in Shakespeare Quarterly, Matthew Steggle, chaired professor of early modern English literature at the University of Bristol, argues that the document was likely written by Joan Shakespeare Hart, John’s daughter and William’s sister.
“One of the thorniest problems in Shakespeare’s biography is the ‘Spiritual Testament,’ the document attributed to John Shakespeare, father of the playwright, in which he appears to declare a radical and personally dangerous devotion to the Catholic religion,” Steggle wrote in the article.
Steggle says in the article that he is making two arguments: “first, that the ‘Spiritual Testament’ cannot belong to John Shakespeare for reasons of date; and second, that its most likely creator is arguably Joan Shakespeare Hart (1569–1646), Shakespeare’s sister.”
Although the document has long been attributed to William Shakespeare’s father, John, there have been doubters. Steggle explains in his article that as early as 1789, a scholar observed that the handwriting style and consistency of spelling and grammar were more consistent with those of documents from the 1630s, and John died in 1601.
The Spiritual Testament also speaks of a strong devotion to Saint Winifred, a Welsh saint who, Steggle points out, was not widely known in England until after John’s death. However, many scholars have previously dismissed this historical fact, since an English Catholic in the time of John could, in principle, have heard of the 7th-century martyr.
For Steggle, the clear proof that John could not have written the document comes from the discovery that the Spiritual Testament quotes Il Testamento dell’Anima, an Italian devotional work that was first published in England in 1603.Steggle argues that Joan Shakespeare Hart likely wrote the document. In his view, readers have misread the name “Joan” in the text as “John” for centuries.
He says that this misreading is very plausible, since it is relatively common for readers to have difficulty telling the two names apart in the handwriting of manuscripts from that time. Additionally, Steggle provides several examples of widows of the time such as Joan who went by their maiden names.
The scholarly article has begun to attract attention from the press in the last month.
Shakespeare’s hometown and extended family have long been associated with the Catholic faith. His distant cousin Robert Southwell is a canonized saint.
A minority of scholars have long argued that William Shakespeare was himself a secret Catholic and that his written works have Catholic elements. One of the best-known advocates of this theory is Joseph Pearce. Pearce was initially skeptical of the idea that Shakespeare was Catholic, but he was eventually convinced and has since written multiple books about Shakespeare and his work.
“The documentary, circumstantial and textual evidence, taken together, forms a case for the Bard’s Catholicism that is effectively undeniable,” Pearce said in 2008.
>> Expert: here’s the evidence for Shakespeare’s Catholicism in the face of religious persecution <<
The post Scholar argues document about Shakespeare family’s Catholicism was by playwright’s sister, not father appeared first on CatholicVote org.