Peter CostelloThe World of Books
Such has been the overwhelming attention given in recent weeks to the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare that there have been complaints that, in a truly provincial manner, the British press (always largely sceptical about all things European) has failed to mention the equally important, to the Spanish at least, 400th anniversary of the death of Miguel de Cervantes, creator of Don Quixote – seen by literary historians as the first great European novel – in which medieval romance is thrown off and a modern literary imagination emerges for the first time.
Part of all the chatter in England has been just how many phrases and sayings of Shakespeare are still used in everyday speech. This is put down to his influence. This is hard to believe. Indeed a comparison with Cervantes, and with François Rabelais, whose series of books about Gargantua and Pantagruel are equally important in the history of European literature, suggests otherwise.
Very often the phrases and passages pointed to in Shakespeare are not original, but proverbial. One can find in both Cervantes, and in Rabelais, comparable phrases. All are taken from the parlance of the people.
The plays of Shakespeare were not written for the elite, in the manner of medieval romances, but were performed for a sweaty crowd of London working people and shopkeepers. It was printing that made them more largely available in a manner quite impossible in the Middle Ages.
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There were, in a strict sense, no bestsellers in the Middle Ages. The bestseller is a concept of the age of print, which has these days morphed into the age of the internet.
What transforms the works of all three writers, crowded as they are with poetic passages and intellectual views, is the power of common speech. The voice not of the elites, but the voice of the people.
There is another factor too: the role of religion. A century ago Rabelais was seen as an atheist, which would have been in keeping with the outlook of the Third Republic, for the Republicans were anti-religious to a large extent. Today, he is seen as Catholic and a humanist. Cervantes, too, worked in a Catholic context (though a few scholars these days suggest he may have come of converso stock and that his ancestors were Jews).
These works of both writers appeared at the time when the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation were unfolding. They clearly mark the departure from the medieval into the Renaissance and modern sensibility with the development of modern English, French and Spanish.
If Catholic influences pervade the writings of both Rabelais and Cervantes, the same can be said to be true of Shakespeare as well. Born in 1564 he was of the first generation or so reared in an England that was ostensibly Protestant.
Yet his family we know was a Recusant one. His father, a local council in Stratford-upon-Avon, was fined for non-church attendance and seems to have died a Catholic. Whether the playwright himself was (like Rabelais and Cervantes) a Catholic has been the subject of much dispute, with no very clear solution offered.
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The case was first argued by the liberal minded convert Richard Simpson in a series of articles in the Catholic lay journal The Rambler, owned by Lord Acton. (Simpson’s papers were later made the basis of The Religion of Shakespeare by Henry Bowden, a priest of the Oratory, in 1899)
It is certainly a pity that these wider connections – such as the notion that Shakespeare and Fletcher planned a play drawn from Cervantes – have not featured widely in the current celebrations. The tendency, sustained by the what has come to be called the “siloisation” of modern academics, as well as the curious parochialism of much of the British media, has prevented a broader view of Shakespeare being taken in relation to the European writers of his period and the religious and social movements of his day.