The sixteenth century witnessed the novel phenomenon of men who, like Gandhi, were not team players, who declined to be heated partisans of any one religious camp. Preeminent among them was the warmhearted Henry IV, who saw that the peace of a whole country—a country as unique and precious as France—did not require either an unyielding Protestant or a fanatical Catholic at its helm, just a king who loved his country and would look favorably upon his subjects, whatever their religious allegiance. Though such lack of partisanship was an abomination to zealots (and finally resulted in Henry’s murder), it was a supremely rational and balanced course, a sort of grander French flowering of the very virtues that had earlier distinguished the estimable Saxon prince Frederick the Wise, pious Catholic and protector of Protestants.
Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, full of Machiavellian advice for rulers, was published in 1532. The advice is both profoundly realistic and deeply cynical, much of it modeled on the sterling example of the Borgias. The most cynical princes had little need ofThe Prince, of course, for they were already experts in ruthlessness. Far closer to the playfulness of Henry IV are the musings of his fellow countryman Michel de Montaigne, who in his still refreshingly modern essays, published in three volumes over the last two decades of the sixteenth century, urged self-knowledge before all else and a sense of proportion regarding one’s own importance: “Even if we mount on stilts, we still must walk on our own legs. And on the highest throne in the world, we still sit on our own backside.” (If I am not mistaken, this is especially meant as a humorous, if indirect, reference to His Holiness the Pope.)
When it comes to the subject of kings and their ilk, however, there is probably no writer in the world who thought about them more penetratingly than William Shakespeare, who even knew a couple of them (Elizabeth I and James I). Shakespeare hides within his plays, standing behind his great and rounded characters. From these plays we know that Shakespeare understood as much about the inner human landscape as any writer who has ever written. His characters range across the entire gamut of human responses. Is there a note that he does not somewhere sound? I think not.
These things being so, can you tell me what side Shakespeare was on in the religious wars of the sixteenth century? Was he a Catholic like his father, or was he a supporter of Elizabeth’s Church of England, or was he a dissenter of some sort? Though many bookshave been written on the subject of Shakespeare’s religious convictions, in truth no one knows the answer. That’s because he didn’t want us to know. Like Bruegel, he was politically smart enough to keep his religious opinions to himself—or at least to disguise them in such a way that no one could say for certain that he stood here or there on any controversial religious question.
Does this mean that he was agnostic, a skeptic like so many educated men and women of the twenty-first century? Rather, I’d say he was a believer of a kind—of the kind that could, for instance, imagine himself into the fated druidic mysticism of prehistoric Britain, as he does so deftly in King Lear. To my ear, he has more in common with the religiousness of Gandhi than he does with the new scientific atheism of men such as, say, Richard Dawkins.
But perhaps more important, Shakespeare tends to limit himself to this world and its dilemmas. He recognizes the similarity between himself and any king: “I think the King is but a man, as I am. The violet smells to him as it does to me; the element shows to him as it doth to me; all his senses have but human conditions. His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man; and though his affections are higher mounted than ours, yet when they stoop, they stoop with the like wing.” This is King Henry V speaking, while visiting his troops in the night before the great battle of Agincourt and unrecognized by them. Shakespeare’s religious vision embraces everyone, enfolds humanity itself, recognizing that the differences between one human being and another are as nothing when compared to their similarities. He may not be an orthodox believer, but he is surely some sort of proto-democrat—not an insignificant advance in a society of royalists, so many of them adherents of the divine right of kings.
After the English have conquered the French—for they are in the midst of the Hundred Years’ War—King Henry V (in Shakespeare’s play of the same name) goes a-wooing the French princess Katherine. He begins by claiming to lack eloquence and warning her that if she accepts him, she will have to put up with his plain speech and inelegant manners: “For these fellows of infinite tongue, that can rhyme themselves into ladies’ favors, they do always reason themselves out again. What? A speaker is but a prater, a rhyme is but a ballad; a good leg will fall, a straight back will stoop, a black beard will turn white, a curl’d pate will grow bald, a fair face will wither, a full eye will wax hollow; but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the moon, or rather the sun and not the moon; for it shines bright and never changes, but keeps his course truly.”
This, I rather think, is William Shakespeare’s very earthly religion—the Religion of the Good Heart—spoken as plainly and with as little distracting decoration as he can manage. It is a religious expression that would have found favor with France’s Henry IV andMontaigne, as well as with another Shakespearean contemporary, the adventurous Spaniard Miguel de Cervantes.
Cervantes had an exciting youth, fighting in his early twenties at the decisive Battle of Lepanto (this page). He was remembered by his fellow soldiers as a daring combatant who risked his own life without hesitation and lost the use of his left hand, for which loss he was given the admiring nickname of el manco de Lepanto (the one-armed man of Lepanto). Sailing back to Spain, Cervantes and his brother were intercepted by Barbary pirates and sold into slavery in Algiers, where Cervantes spent five years in captivity. His eventual ransom and return to Spain, however, brought him little recognition, two stints in prison, and years of bleak poverty, only alleviated well after the 1605 publication of Part I of his masterpiece, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of la Mancha).
Don Quixote is the world’s first modern novel and, by common assent, the greatest. Its marvelous—and hilarious—doings, its intricate meshing of reality and fantasy, idealism and absurdity, the subjective and the objective, leave us both exhausted and craving more. But, despite more than nine hundred pages of prose, it is impossible to place Cervantes in any known camp or club. His philosophical, religious, and even political opinions, like those of Shakespeare, remain obscure. His themes of self-deception and foolish (but commendable?) idealism give us no entrance into his personal faith, if such he had.
But Shakespeare and Cervantes were knowledgeable gentlemen of the world, who lived through the years that saw Giordano Bruno, a Dominican priest who was a sort of Lutheran Catholic, burned at the stake in Rome’s Campo dei Fiori for daring to suggest that a new model of the cosmos was needed if we were to appreciate its infinite extent. In 1616, the year of the two writers’ deaths (for both men died on April 23, 1616), Galileo Galilei suffered his first papal condemnation for daring to assert that the Earth revolved around the sun. This was a good time for the expansiveness of writers, free to write and stage many plays for eager audiences, free to fill many printers’ pages with the vagaries of their imaginations, so long as they stayed clear of certain topics that could get them killed or confined.