Peter Milward, „‚The Hot Topic‘ – Shakespeare as Catholic”, http://secondspring.yuku.com/topic/667, p. 10. Last edited by Stratford Caldecott, Second Spring Director, 31 March 2009.
…
One practical outcome of the summer school [at St Benet’s Hall, Oxford, in 2006, organized by Stratford Caldecott, fellow of the Hall and manager of the Centre for Faith and Culture at Oxford] was a pilgrimage I arranged round many of the English recusant houses in the Midlands between Oxford, Stratford and Cambridge [in May/June 2007], under the expert guidance of Mr. Michael Hodgetts, and the efficient organization of Leonie Caldecott. One notable member on the tour was the German scholar Dr. Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel, who had published a fine, detailed study of The True Face of William Shakespeare from the Chaucer Press in London the previous year [2006] (of course, in English translation), and was about to publish her more important book on The Life and Times of William Shakespeare from the same publisher later on that year [2007]. It may safely be said that she is the most outstanding proponent of “the Catholic hypothesis” in Germany, as Lady Clare Asquith is in England. In particular, one interesting discovery she had made through her careful study of the archives at the Venerable English College in Rome is that the probable name of Shakespeare (mentioned as “from Stratford”) recurs in three years among the guests at the college, when Shakespeare might have been expected to visit Rome just before and after his dramatic career. …
Extract from the Book
Review by Andreas Kramarz, LC, “The Historical Shakespeare. A New
Biography Offers New Facts About the Bard’s Life and Faith”,
National Catholic Register (June 22-28, 2008), http://www.ncregister.com/site/article/the_historical_shakespeare/.
[On The Life and Times
of William Shakespeare, 1564-1616 (2007) by Hildegard
Hammerschmidt-Hummel]
Is Prince William, the
current heir to the British throne, a direct descendant of William
Shakespeare? Prince William’s mother is the late Diana Spencer, whose
family can be traced to Baron William Spencer of Wormleighton, who, in
1615, was married to Penelope, who was the (illegitimate) child of
Elizabeth Vernon and ... William Shakespeare, according to a new book.
That none other than
Shakespeare was Penelope’s father is only one of the many breathtaking
disclosures found in a new biography of William Shakespeare, issued
last October in an updated English translation by Chaucer Press,
London/England ...
In a column for the
Register (May 2006) about new proof regarding the hypothesis that
Shakespeare was an underground Catholic (titled “The Shakespeare
Code”), I quoted Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel, professor of English
literature and cultural studies at the University of Mainz, Germany.
The book I referred to most
was The Hidden Existence of William Shakespeare: Poet and Rebel in
the Catholic Undergrund, written in 2001 in German and never
translated into English. Now, Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s extensive
biography of the English poet is available for the English reader
under the title The Life and Times of William Shakespeare.
The impressive bibliophile
volume contains 420 atlas-size pages and 195 mostly-colour photos and
illustrations. Its extensive chronological outline of Shkaespeare’s
life includes valuable historical background information, but above
all a very detailed exposé of what recent research has revealed about
the English playwright.
The author shares step by
step the result of meticulous studies of historical documents, pieces
of art and Shakespeare’s own works.
For instance, through 17
pages, Hammerschmidt-Hummel unveils how the mysterious “Dark Lady” of
Shakespeare’s sonnets can be identified with Elizabeth Vernon, who
married Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, although she was
already pregnant [by Shakespeare].
Besides textual hints in
the sonnets and historical data, the author has discovered in the
Portrait of Countess Elizabeth on her right elbow the face of a man, a
hidden hint by the (unknown) painter “at the presence of a lover.” His
facial features have been identified by a German criminologist “as
identical with those of William Shakespeare.”
Moreover, an analysis shows
that the woman in this portrait is identical with another painting
called The Persian Lady [at Hampton Court], which has written
on it the text of a sonnet.
”Linguistic and literary
analysis has revealed that it must have been written by William
Shakespeare,” she writes, ”turning out to be the hitherto missing
final sonnet of the ‘Dark Lady’ sequence.” And this would then
identify Shakespeare as her (unhappy) lover, Penelope his daughter,
and Prince William his descendant.
Apart from these and many
other surprising discoveries, the whole work provides an abundance of
material to substantiate the theory that Shakespeare was and remained
a Catholic throughout his life, a fact that offers ”conclusive answers
to many of the unresolved problems of the Bard’s life” and allows
”unexpected insights into Shakespeare’s plays,” she writes.
...[Alan]
Jacobs [professor of English at Wheaton College] ridicules some
examples of naive ‘code-breaking’ attempts in Harry Potter or
the Bible, and rightly so.
Insinuating, however, that
Hammerschmidt-Hummel is among those who are falling into a ‘ceaseless
over-reading of trivia’ and lacking true understanding that ‘is
achievable only by years, even decades, of scrupulous attentiveness to
work after work after work,’ and those who ‘tell us that we don’t need
to read carefully or think hard or labor for years on end’ - this
would not do justice to the scholarship she [Hammerschmidt-Hummel] has
shown in her present work.
‘This Shakespeare biography is a fruit of
a decade of research of labors,’ she reports in the afterword.
A careful review of her study will
certainly come across hypotheses and theories, but the weight of the
arguments as a whole, ‘applying interdisciplinary research methods
from fields including medicine, physics, botany, criminology,
architecture, history of art, archaeology, paleography, jurisprudence,
theology, historiography, linguistics, and cultural and literary
studies,’ lead to conclusions that can’t be dismissed. Its many small
pieces make up a mosaic. This is not a petitio principii (that
one only finds what one has previously decided to find) work.
...
Jacobs makes the following comment at the
Anglican blog TitusOneNine:
‘The Da Vinci Code, the
Gospel of Judas, and the new Shakespeare-was-a-closet-Catholic
books all demonstrate just how eager readers are to believe in secret
meanings. ... Give me a break.’
Break granted. During the break,
Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s new Shakespeare biography might make
for very profitable reading.
Extract from the Book Review by
Emeritus Professor Peter Milward (Sophia University, Tokyo): ‘Notes
on The Life and Times of William Shakespeare, by Hildegard
Hammerschmidt-Hummel (Chaucer Press, London, 2007)’, The
Renaissance Bulletin 34 (April, 2008), pp. 55-65.
Almost every year for almost as long as
I remember there has appeared one formidable biography of ‘the Bard’
after another till I can’t help crying, ‘What, another?’ and then
yawning. But last year, 2007, I had the happiness of exclaiming, ‘At
last!’ Here at last is a real biography, the first since the
publication of Shakespeare the Evidence, by Ian Wilson, which
was the first biography of Shakespeare to take into account the
reality of his long hidden Catholicism. And now Hildegard
Hammerschmidt-Hummel has given us the second in point of time, while
being in many respects the first in point of content. This is a
substantial volume of some 420 pages and some 200 illustrations,
filled with a fascinating account of Shakespeare’s life and times,
when religion was the central issue as well in the life and mind of
Shakespeare himself as in the Elizabethan age in which he grew to
maturity both as man and as dramatist. It is in this aspect of his
genius which has been sadly neglected by the great majority of the
dramatist’s would-be-biographers, who willfully close their eyes to
what they vaguely regard as a merely ‘sectarian’ consideration. For
them Shakespeare’s was a universal genius, as his friend and rival Ben
Jonson said of him, ‘not of an age, but for all time’. So they put him
on a pedestal, as ‘the god of their idolatry’, and so they fall into
the blindness of misunderstanding. But in this new biography the
author takes the place as it were of Paulina in The Winter’s Tale
and exhorts the statue, ‘Beneath to death your numbness, for from
him/ Dear life redeems you.’ (v.3) During the past fifteen years, it
is true, what may be called ‘the Catholic hypothesis’ concerning
Shakespeare’s life and writings has gradually been gaining ground and,
even though it is still controverted in some cultural backwaters,
scholars are generally aware of the main points urged on its behalf.
But what is unique to this biography, in constrast to all that has
gone before even on the committed Catholic side, is the body of
circumstantial evidence the author assembles to indicate the presence
of Shkaespeare in Rome, at the Pilgrime Hospice attached to the
English College, on three or four occasions between 1585 and 1590, as
well as on another occasion in 1613, as representative of a secret
Catholic organization going back to the time of the arrival in England
of the first two Jesuits, Edmund Campion and Robert Persons, planned
on their behalf by George Gilbert. It is, however, not for me to go
into the details of this evidence, which I may leave to the author
herself and the readers of her book. ...
Finally,
I must commend the author for having gone into such detail - more than
any previous biography of Shkaespeare, apart from Ian Wilson - on the
significance of Shakespeare’s purchase of the Blackfriars Gatehouse in
1613. It comes as an appropriate preliminary to the subsequent
testimony of the Anglican Richard Davies that the dramatist ‘died a
papist’ - not just as a momentary death-bed conversion to the faith of
his fathers, but as a conclusion to what he had always aimed at being
in both his life and his writings.
Extract from the Book
Review by Stephen Goranson on The Life and Times of William
Shakespeare by H. Hammerschmidt-Hummel, (December 15, 2007)
http://www.amazon.com/Life-Times-William-Shakespeare-1564-1616/dp/1904449557/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335885730&sr=8-1
Here’s a very impressively-researched and well-illustrated book (and
given the high quality of illustrations, many in color, reasonably
priced). She [Hammerschmidt-Hummel] claims Shakespeare was a life-long
secret Catholic. Others have claimed this before. ... But this book
goes beyond that, claiming that Shakespeare studied in continental
European colleges [sic] set up for English Catholics. ... It is at
least quite plausible that Shakespeare had more education than grade
school would have provided. And he could not have attended Oxford or
Cambridge [the author states] without taking an oath of loyalty to the
Queen ... I think his apparent education is one reason that so many
theories have been proposed and enthusiastically promoted that really
Francis Bacon or de Vere or Marlowe (with a supposedly faked death) or
someone else really wrote Shakespeare. Years ago I read several of
these alternate author scenarious and conspiracy theories, all of
which I found, besides being contradictory, unpersuasive. Also,
there’s the relatively sparse documentation of his life - lesser
authors contemporary with him left a bigger personal paper trail. For
some reason - temperament or a need to hide his religion, or both? -
he kept a low profile ... When asked to write a poem honoring Queen
Elizabeth, who persecuted Catholics, he declined [Hammerschmidt-Hummel
says]. That last item is merely circumstantial evidence, but she piles
up many such circumstances, and she gives a plausible chronology of
his trips to Europe, even giving plausible names and photographs in
the school registers that he might have used to prevent English spies
from identifying him. At a minimum, she has reopened some old
questions in an interesting way, and has provided at least some new
relevant evidence. ... that’s remarkable - especially when the
subject has been investigated before as much as Shakespeare has. (A
review of the earlier German edition by E. A. J. Honigmann and her
energetic response to the review is available online.)
Extract from the book review by Emeritus Professor Peter Milward
(Sophia University, Tokyo) on Hildegard Hammerschmidt, The Life and Times of William Shakespeare, 1564-1616 (London: Chaucer Press, 2007). Pp. XII+420, with c. 200 illus., mostly in colour, in: The Heythrop Journal (2008).
Every year new lives of William Shakespeare are churned out by the ever flourishing Shakespeare industry, prompting us to wonder, ‘Whatever next?’ What new information or new interpretation remains to bring us to a new understanding of this most enigmatic, most traumatic and most tantalizing of dramatists? Yet in the past two decades a new vein of research has been opened up with new light thrown ... on various aspects of Shakespeare’s religious background, a field which till then was dismissed as, if not taboo, at least irrelevant to an obviously secular drama in an equally secular age. But now ... it is realized that religious studies may also have something important to contribute to our understanding of the motivation and inspiration of the dramatist ... . After all, ... it [religion] was certainly the topic uppermost in men’s minds throughout the sixteenth century, and the very fact that the dramatist seems to avoid touching on it in his plays may well imply that he had to be wary of doing so in an age of strict censorship and surveillance ... .
Now, therefore, following on the many recent studies of this subject, from Ian Wilson’s Shakespeare, The Evidence (1993) to Clare Asquith’s Shadowplay (2005) – to which I may venture to add my own Shakespeare the Papist (2005) – there has appeared this outstanding survey of The Life and Times of William Shakespeare by the German scholar, Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel, lavishly presented with no fewer than 154 illustrations by the Chaucer Press, after having been translated from the original German which was published in 2003. One’s first impression of the book is that it should make an ideal volume for the coffee-table, it is such a delight to turn the pages and to pause over the illustrations, each provided with a detailed caption and each closely connected with the adjacent text. As for the text, we find a full and critical discussion of all that is known of the life and times of the dramatist with special attention to his Catholic background, his boyhood formation and dramatic inspiration – though with less emphasis on the literary interpretation of the plays and poems. Inevitably there is much that is repeated from previous discussions of Shakespeare’s life and probable Catholic upbringing, but what is unique to this discussion is the author’s elaborate and convincing hypothesis that the young William received his education not only at the Stratford grammar school (for which we have no evidence, though it is commonly taken for granted) but also on the Catholic continent at the English College founded by William Allen at Douai in 1568 for just such Catholic boys who avoided Oxford and Cambridge because of the Oath of Supremacy. In 1578 this first Catholic English College on the Continent was forced by Protestant troops to move to Rheims where it stayed until 1593. Then from Rheims it is very likely that the young Shakespeare proceeded about 1580 to Lancashire, to take up a position as tutor to the rich recusant family of Hoghton, according to the general evidence provided by an actor in Shakespeare’s company that he had been ‘a schoolmaster in the country’ and the particular mention of one William Shakeshafte in the will of Alexander Hoghton in 1581. And there we are left with the fascinating possibility of a meeting between Shakespeare and Edmund Campion, who (we know) stayed with the Hoghtons in the spring of 1581. Shakespeare was, however, back in Stratford in 1582, when he married Anne Hathaway, and from her he had three children in 1583 and (twins) in 1585. In that year he left Stratford again. In particular, there is precise evidence of a visitor from Stratford on three occasions in the register of the English Pilgrim Hospice attached to the English College at Rome. The first visit took place in the year 1585, when William Allen and Robert Persons were meeting in Rome to discuss a strategy to topple the Protestant regime in England.
Further emphasis is laid on three successive noble patrons of the dramatist, beginning in Lancashire with Ferdinando Lord Strange, heir to the Earl of Derby, who kept a group of players for performances in both Lancashire and London, continuing with Henry Wriothesley Earl of Southampton, to whom the young poet dedicated his two volumes of long poems, and culminating in Southampton’s friend Robert Devereux Earl of Essex. It is Essex who appears explicitly in one of the Choruses to Henry V in 1599, implicitly in a performance of Richard II revived at the request of the Earl’s followers on the eve of the Essex Rebellion in 1601, and influentially on the composition of Hamlet in 1601-2.
Less attention is paid to the literary criticism of the plays than to their precise historical background. That culminates in a detailed account of Shakespeare’s purchase of the Blackfriars Gatehouse in 1613 for the apparent purpose of assisting priests in their journeys between Protestant England and the Catholic continent, and above all in a study of the unique statement of the Anglican clergyman Richard Davies, that Shakespeare ‘died a Papist’. Here I have only been able to give a brief outline of all the fascinating wealth of evidence to be found in this volume, to which one may do well to return again and again for fresh enlightenment on the enigma of WS.
Sophia University, Tokyo Peter Milward
****
Extract from the book review by Dr Tom Merriam on Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel, William Shakespeare. Seine Zeit - Sein Leben - Sein Werk (Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2003. Pp. Xiv + 383, with 151 color and 97 black-and-white illustrations, in: Religion and the Arts (2004).
This lavishly produced book in coffeetable format might seem yet one more product of the Shakespeare industry, a hefty souvenir to take home with one from Stratford-upon-Avon. If it be a souvenir, it is a Trojan horse. ... its premise that Shakespeare was a religious activist is too removed from the Weltanschauung of English-speaking Shakespeare studies.
These studies derive their non-ideological assumptions from the notion of ars gratia artis advanced by Romanticism and its underlying Transcendental Idealism. According to this view, the Bard Shakespeare, God-like imaginative genius par excellence, created his literary works ex nihilo. ...
The corollary to this view is that Shakespeare is for all time, and therefore his social, historical, political, and theological context - Seine Zeit, and his actual biography - Sein Leben, are of marginal importance to his art - Sein Werk. Therefore read the plays and not Schoenbaum or Honan or Holden or Sams or Duncan-Jones or Hammerschmidt-Hummel. “The play’s the thing.”
[Hammerschmidt-]Hummel’s premise, however, is that Shakespeare was a committed agent of Rome whose life and work were united in dedication to the restoration of Catholicism in England. ...
The central issue raised by [Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s] William Shakespeare is whether the extraordinary tension attendant upon such hazardous political and social involvement on Shakespeare’s part provided the sheer force needed for, and commensurate with, the extraordinary physical, mental and spiritual energy manifest in his writing. Ars gratia artis implicitly denies the need (or relevance) for such external, social stimulus for creativity or innate genius.
“The play’s the thing.” is merely the opening phrase of the sentence which ends, “Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.” Catching the conscience of the ruler is a prophetic/moral activity within a political context. In the eyes of Hammerschmidt-Hummel, it is the heart of Shakespeare’s unified life and work. And the fulcrum was the political débacle of the Essex rebellion in 1601.
The hope of a legalised Catholicism within a Protestant-led England was Essex’s expected succession to the throne. He was the sole anchor for many Catholics who saw their persecution under Elizabeth as the consequence of her excommunication by Pope Pius V in 1570. This precipitated the dilemma in which Elizabeth’s legitimacy as Queen was a matter of divided conscience among Catholics. Essex, unlike Elizabeth, was born and bred a Protestant, exempt from papal excommunication and, influenced by his well placed contacts on the Continent, willing to accept a tolerated Catholicism.
[Hammerschmidt-]Hummel suggests that the failure of Essex’s Irish mission in 1599 was due partly to his willingness to acceded to Irish demands in connection with the Catholic religion. His precipitous return to England, immediate house arrest, and the abortive uprising of 1601 spelled the end of Catholics expectations for emancipation in England.
The recruitment of Shakespeare’s theater company to perform Richard II as a morale booster just prior to the February Essex rebellion was, according to [Hammerschmidt-]Hummel, more than the inadvertant faux pas which J. Dover Wilson and Schoenbaum have suggested. Shakespeare was deeply involved with Southampton, and Southampton was deeply involved with Essex.
Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in the aftermath of the execution of Essex. The parallel between Essex and Shakespeare’s Hamlet was noted by Wilson in The Essential Shakespeare (1932). Essex wore black at his trial; Hamlet wore black. Hamlet attended university at Luther’s Wittenberg; Essex was educated a Protestant. The likeness of Polonius to Burleigh who[se son, Robert Cecil,] plotted the downfall of Essex has long been recognized. ... Hamlet thrust Polonius through the arras. The Queen was said to have stabbed the arras as if aiming for the one who had engineered Essex’s downfall in the months after his execution; Robert Cecil hid behind the arras to eavesdrop at the trial of Essex in 1601. Both Essex’s rebellion and Hamlet’s revenge were of dubious morality. Hamlet’s funeral was a military one; Essex was a general.
Behind these parallels lies the all-important question of regicide which Shkaespeare examined in Julius Caesar - before the Essex desaster. Only Catholicism envisaged regicide as a theoretically possible moral option, although ironically the act of regicide was committed by Governour of the Church of England against the Scottish Queen Mary, and later by the Puritans against King Charles I.
Why should Shakespeare wish to catch the conscience of the Queen? The only correlative which makes sense of such an intention of Hamlet in light of the circumstantial evidence evinced by [Hammerschmidt-]Hummel is the persecution of Catholics under the same queen, guided by the anti-Essex Cecils. A recent statement of the new director of the RSC, Michael Boyd, parallels [Hammerschmidt-]Hummel’s thesis: “... instead of the Bard being co-opted as ‘the unifying oak tree of Englishness’, Shakespeare (with his Catholic background living in a Protestant hegemony) will be revealed as a ‘dramatist of schism’.”
[Hammerschmidt-]Hummel’s case reveals a remarkable cornucopia of circumstantial evidence. I can not attempt to weigh the pieces for their merits: John Shakespeare’s glove mark on the fresco painting in the White Swan in Stratford, the identification of the Curzon portrait of Anne Hathaway as, in, in fact, that of Mary Arden Shakespeare by the shape of the lips, the coincidence of Jesuit theatrical theory of mixed genres with Shakespeare’s later practice, the almost unique legal arrangements of Alexander Houghton’s will and the supposed encoding of its provisions, the legend of deer poaching on Sir Thomas Lucy’s estate as a cover-story for Shakespeare’s political reasons for leaving Stratford, the entries in the guest book of the English College in Rome which coincide with Shakespeare’s “lost years”, Shakespeare’s connections in high places on his return to England, Greene’s reference to Shakespeare as a puppet master as coded for safe-keeper of priests, the identification of the face of Richard Burbage with that of Tamora in the Peacham sketch from Titus Andronicus, the connection for the four-leaf clover pattern in the four-cornered bows of aristocratic and royal portraits with the crosses on the seal of Stratford, the historical association of the Shakespeares with Henry VII, the recalling of the statue of Gobbo in Venice in Merchant of Venice and its association with the dwarf-like Robert Cecil, the anti-Elizabeth portrait ‘Eliza Triumphans’ with its crown to the right of her head, the possible meeting of Shakespeare and Marlowe at the Englsh College in Reims, the mis-en-scene of As You Like It in the Ardennes of the Low Countries where English Catholic exiles congregated with possible reference to the Houghtons as the two estranged noble brothers, the remarkable mask-like face of Shakespeare on the right sleeve of the portrait of Elizabeth Vernon Wriothesley to which her index and last finger of her left hand are pointing, the facial resemblances of her daughter Penelope Wriothesley, and even the granddaughter to the Shahespeare portraits.
More important to my mind are the following, - in no order of priority: [Hammerschmidt-]Hummel suggests the possibility of deliberate arson on the feast of St. Peter, 29 th June 1613 (Old Style), because of the day’s papal association and because of the play’s dangerous political content. No critic I know of has raised such a possibility, even if to dismiss it. [Hammerschmidt-]Hummel has looked steadily at Sir Sidney Lee’s treatment of Richard Davies’ statement “He died a papist” as an irresponsible report and idle gossip in order to evaluate its own credibility.
[Hammerschmidt-]Hummel’s treatment of the authentic portraits and the Darmstadt death mask, with their evidence of the cause of death, is a serious histoircal and medical examination which is more responsible than the amateurish view that Shakespeare dies as a consequence of conviviality with Ben Jonson and friends or, more recently, of syphilis. [Hammerschmidt-]Hummel’s detailed discussion of Shakespeare’s purchase of the East Gate House at Blackfriars compares favorable with the casual treatment of what Schoenbaum referred to as an apparent investment “pure and simple”.
[Hammerschmidt-]Hummel’s discussion of Shakespeare’s Testament will undoubtedly incur the opprobrium of special pleading. It is not without interest. Her epilogue concerning the mysterious octagonal pedestal that has disappeared from the garden at New Place poses a number of intriguing questions.
****
Book review by the American literary scholar and journalist Muriel Mirak-Weissbach: Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel, William Shakespeare. Seine Zeit - Sein Leben - Sein Werk / William Shakespeare. His time - his life - his work (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2003), Symbolism. A New International Annual of Critical Aesthetics VI (New York: AMS, Summer 2004) - Excerpt:
A new study on Shakespeare has appeared, which is destined to generate turmoil in the ranks of the academic Shakespeare scholars. Frau Prof. Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s new book, ”Shakespeare: Seine Zeit - Sein Leben - Sein Werk,” is the latest in a series of original discoveries the Mainz University professor has made. She was the one to prove the authenticity of several Shakespeare portraits (the ”Flower” and ”Chandos” portraits), and to identify the Darmstadt Shakespeare death mask as Shakespeare’s. She then provided a convincing solution to the mystery of the ”Dark Lady” in the sonnets, showing that it was Elizabeth Vernon Wriothesley, Countess of Southampton. In 2001, she published ”Die verborgene Existenz des William Shakespeare. Dichter und Rebell im katholischen Untergrund,” which documented Shakespeare’s Catholic faith. Now, in her latest work, she has elaborated a full biography and examined the works, from the standpoint of this religious factor.
The author is fully aware of the implications of her findings. As she writes in the Foreword, ”The statements of this book cohere with many findings and mooted facts, which are here developed, expanded and not least verified. However, they also contradict dominant teaching, and to a not in significant extent. The author took care to link her theses together in a network free of contradictions, in that they support and confirm each other. With her in many ways new kind of attempt to come closer to the historical truth, she hopes to stimulate a discussion, which can lead to further research and knowledge about Shakespeare’s time.” (p. IX)
To introduce her presentation of Shakespeare’s Catholicism, Prof. Hammerschmidt-Hummel starts by setting the historical record straight, by characterizing the legal statutes which were established under Queen Elizabeth, against Catholics, following her accession to the throne in 1558. During the short reign of Queen Mary I, Catholicism had been reintroduced, and massive persecutions of Protestants carried out. Elizabeth reversed this again. After reintroducing the Supremacy Act of Henry VIII in 1559, Elizabeth had leading Catholic bishops arrested. Scottish Queen Mary Stuart’s flight to England in 1568 provoked a Catholic rebellion the following year in northern England, which was brutally suppressed. After Pope Pius V had excommunicated Elizabeth in 1570, many Catholics went into exile, especially to Flanders and France. Educational institutions were established, like the Collegium Anglicum in Douai, Flanders, in 1568, which was later transferred to Rheims (1578-1593). These schools were designed to offer a thorough lower and higher academic education and to prepare Catholic priests for the missionary work.
Starting in 1580, a movement was launched by Rome, for the re-Catholicizing of England, obviously on a covert basis. The missionary movement, was led by Edmund Campion and Robert Parsons, both Jesuits. Priests entered England secretly, and worked under protection of the Catholic gentry, who provided them housing as well as hiding places (known as ”priest holes”). The priests used the ”spiritual testament” of Milanese Cardinal Carlo Borromeo, which Catholics would sign, declaring their faith.
In response to this missionary effort, Elizabeth’s government and parliament issued a series of new rigid laws, in 1581. The gist of the new legislation was that any missionaries and those converted, were to be considered traitors. There were fines for celebrating mass, fines and jail terms for those who attended mass, fines for those who did not attend Protestant services (called ”recusants”), fines for employing a Catholic teacher, etc. The most draconic punishment was meted out to those who incited to treachery, gave refuge to traitors, or kept secret information about the same for more than 20 days. Such persons had their belongings confiscated and were jailed. By 1585, a new law was introduced, which banned all Jesuits and priests from England, and foresaw the death penalty for a second offence. People belonging to these circles were also considered traitors, and could be executed, their belongings confiscated. Anyone who supported Catholic institutions (schools), or sent his children abroad to such schools, was fined.
The author writes: ”The new legal position created by Elizabeth I’s anti-Catholic legislation had devastating consequences for the Catholic population. The English Catholics were not only deprived of their rights, ostracized, criminalized and persecuted, but also had to endure draconic punishment. This changed only with the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 (Catholic Emancipation Act). In (authoritative) English historiography to date, all of this is only marginally discussed, if at all.” (p. 27)
In England, Catholics who refused to accept the new Protestant faith, the ”recusants,” set their hopes on Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex (1566-1601), known for his religious tolerance and his determined opposition at court to the all-powerful Cecils: William, Lord Burghley,. who ruled as advisor to Elizabeth from 1558 to 1598, and his son, Robert, later Earl of Salisbury, who, as successor to secret service chief Walsingham, carried on his father’s policy. The Cecil faction led the persecution drive. Essex’s attempted coup d’etat on February 7, 1601, and subsequent execution, was a blow to Catholics. Only when King James VI of Scotland assumed the throne (as James I) after Elizabeth’s death in 1603, did they revive hopes in a more tolerant regime, as James I, who had been an ally of Essex, had promised to relax the strict religious laws. Many exiled Catholics returned to England full of hope, but the king betrayed their aspirations, and on February 10, 1605, issued an ultimatum, allowing Catholics one year to accept the new religion. It was in this context that the Gunpowder Plot was organized on November 5, 1605, a plot to blow up the Parliament in Westminster. The plot was discovered in time, and the conspirators, tried for high treason.
Against this background, Prof. Hammerschmidt-Hummel traces the biography of Shakespeare. As family records document, John Shakespeare, the poet’s father, was a Catholic, whose Borromeo testament, hidden in the attic, was discovered in 1757 and published in 1790. John Shakespeare, who served as mayor, alderman and justice of the peace, suddenly stopped attending meetings of the council in 1577, an odd occurrence which the author puts in connection with the first execution of a Catholic priest, Cuthbert Mayne, that year, after the introduction of the new laws. In 1578-1579, the poet’s father sold and/or rented out several pieces of land, in an effort to raise funds required to send young William to school on the Continent. Since students who went to Oxford or Cambridge had to swear an oath of allegiance to the new religion, Catholic families would send their sons to the schools in Douai or Rheims, for a Catholic education. This required cash funds, for a two-year period of study. Bolstering her hypothesis that indeed, this is what father John sold his land for, are two pieces of evidence: first, that John Shakespeare was fined in 1580, as one of 140 persons in England, probably for having sent their children abroad; and secondly, that among the names on the student register in Douai/Rheims, were entries, partly erased, corresponding to Shakespeare’s name (p. 47). In March 1592, John Shakespeare’s name was officially placed on the recusants list.
The author’s reconstruction shows that William studied those two years (1578-1580) abroad, then returned to England, where he married Anne Hathaway in November 1582. His first child was born in 1583, and twins, in 1585, whose godparents were Catholics. Then from 1585 to 1592, there is no trace of the poet in any English records. Prof. Hammerschmidt-Hummel solves the mystery of the ”lost years,” again by considering the religious factor. It was in 1585, the year William fled, that the fate of Mary Stuart was sealed. She was executed in 1587. 1585 was the year in which a recruitment drive was launched in England, for supporting the war of the Netherlands against Spain; in 1585 the English Catholic opposition, supported by Philip II of Spain and the Pope, began organizing in Rome for armed struggle against the Protestants.
William Shakespeare had been mentioned in the will of Alexander Hoghton, a leading Catholic named as recusant, at whose home the young William had lived two years as a teacher. In the will, Hoghton (whose family head had helped establish the Collegium Angelicum in Douai) established regular, lifelong payment for several people, organized in a trust, among them William Shakeshafte alias Shakespeare. It is known that the name Shakeshafte had been used by William’s grandfather. The author, who has studied the coded language used by underground Catholics, has offered a decipherment of the entire will (and other documents), according to which it would appear that the trust was a secret Catholic organization, which was to provide ”players” with ”playclothes” and ”instruments belonging to musics,” which refer to priests, garments and liturgical instruments. In another important document, published in 1592 and newly found by the author, the ”puppets” just like the ”players” also stand for priests, and William’s job, therefore, was to serve as a liaison for the priests. In this document an Elizabethan actor, identified as William Shakespeare, states that in the last seven years he has been an ”absolute Interpreter to the puppets” (p. 69). The author’s hypothesis is, that William spent the lost years on the Continent, especially in Italy, mainly Rome, in such activities. According to the author’s new documentary evidence, the poet used to lodge in friaries. Since all English friaries or monasteries had been destroyed by Henry VIII, William must have stayed in cloisters on the Continent.
The most striking evidence given, that William was on the Continent, and in contact with Catholic circles, are the three (perhaps four) entries in the pilgrims register at the hospice of the English College in Rome. There, in the years 1585, 1587, and 1589 (perhaps 1591), the author found entries of names that correspond to Shakespeare, again quasi-coded. For example: ”Gulielmus Clerkue Stratfordiensus,” Latin for ”William, Clerk of Stratford”. All names were in coded form, given the massive espionage networks that Elizabeth had deployed to the Continent, in search of English missionaries. The entries correspond exactly to the time period of the ”lost years,” and provide a convincing argument for the author’s hypothesis.
It is well-documented that Shakespeare was in London in 1592, and started a meteoric career as a playwright,-- with ”Henry VI,” an instant success -- which he continued, with brief interruptions, until 1613. At that time, he purchased a building of the old cloister of Blackfriars in London, together with three trustees. The building (Gatehouse II - opposite the Wardrobe - cf. p. 248) had been used for decades as a hiding place for Catholic priests and monks. The author suggests that the trustees engaged in support activities for Catholics. Seven years after Shakespeare’s death, the ceiling of the third floor of another building in Blackfriars (Gatehouse I - near Ludgate) collapsed, and about 100 people died. It was thus revealed that the 300 people convened in the room, were there to practice a secret Catholic mass. In 1613, Shakespeare seems to have travelled to Rome once more. Among the October entries of the pilgrims register at the English College in Rome the author found the name ”Ricardus Stratfordus.” It appears as if the poet had used the name of his hometown again and, in addition, the Christian name of his brother Richard who had died in February 1613.
When looking at Shakespeare’s works from the standpoint of his Catholic faith, the author is able to provide answers to hitherto open questions, regarding the kinds of plays Shakespeare wrote, their dating, and their publication. Prof. Hammerschmidt-Hummel reports that the reason why Shakespeare stopped writing history plays dealing with English history, was that a ban was issued by John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1599, affecting satires, epigrams and plays on English history. At that point, Shakespeare started the Roman plays, and later dealt with history in the great tragedies, but always located in countries other than England (Denmark, Scotland, etc.).
The reason why the playwright gave up writing comedies, according to the author, lies in the trauma provoked by the execution of Essex. Shakespeare knew Essex and Essex’s close friend Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, who was the poet’s patron, friend and later on) rival. After the rebellion Southampton was also condemned to death, then jailed and later released by James I. Shakespeare’s poem, ”The Phoenix and the Turtle,” published in 50 copies after Essex’s and Southampton’s death sentences, is shown by the author to be dedicated to the two men. In addition, she provides further evidence to support the claim, first made by the English Shakespeare scholar John Dover Wilson, that Essex supplied the model for Hamlet, hero of the play by the same name, completed in 1602. She also sees William Cecil as the historical figure behind the character Polonius. It was Cecil who had been responsible for the anti-Catholic Elizabethan legislation and had arranged the execution of Jesuit priest and missionary Edmund Campion in 1581.
That Shakespeare was a member of the Essex circle is also indicated by the fact, noted by the author, that he did not compose one line of eulogy or commemoration on the occasion of the death of Queen Elizabeth -- quite unusual considering his stature as the leading playwright of his time. It was, of course, Elizabeth who had ordered Essex executed; she reportedly kept the man’s decapitated head in her chamber, and showed it to French Marshall Biron, on his visit to her in London in September 1601.
The author moots that Shakespeare went into a sort of ”internal emigration” in the period between the death of Essex, 1601, and the death of the queen in 1603. With the ascent of James I to the throne, the poet, like other Catholics, hoped for improved conditions; when such hopes were dashed, Shakespeare turned to the great tragedies, including ”Othello” (1604), ”King Lear” (1606) and ”Macbeth” (1606). The hero of the latter play, according to the author, may have been modelled on James I, not only because of the Scottish context, and the role of witchcraft (which James I was an expert on), but also because the protagonist turns from a great hero into a monster. The view that Rome had of the king was that he was a traitor.
Reviewing the plays for explicit references to Catholic rites and concepts, the author turns up a treasure trove of findings. Fully recognizing Shakespeare’s universal genius, the author in no way tries to ”reduce” his works to a Catholic factional view; rather, she points out references, showing the poet’s intimate knowledge of this culture, in many of the plays. The most obvious are in ”Romeo and Juliet” and ”Measure for Measure.” In the former, there are many metaphorical references, for example, to pilgrimages, and numerous references to Jesus Christ, Mary, and the saints; the two lovers place their faith in the monk, and are secretly wed according to Catholic rites. ”Measure for Measure” features the heroine Isabella, a novice who is willing to become a martyr, and the hero, Vincentio the Duke, who disguises himself as a monk. But there are also references in other plays. The ghost of Hamlet’s father, for example, complains of having been killed without having had confession, and describes his torment in Purgatory, a doctrine which had been eliminated by Henry VIII. The notion of mercy argued by Portia in the ”Merchant of Venice,” is another example.
In the late plays, written after 1606, ”Pericles,” ”Cymbeline,” ”Winter’s Tale” and ”The Tempest,” the author sees a tone of reconciliation, and the predominance of supernatural powers, which intervene to solve tragic situations happily.
Prof. Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s study, it has been said, reads like a mystery story. What indeed makes it gripping, is the fact that the author proceeds from one fundamental hypothesis -- that Shakespeare maintained the old faith -- and moves from one nested hypothesis to the next, to explain biographical events as well as features of the works, which had been hitherto incomprehensible. The hard evidence she presents in the form of historical documentation supports each of the hypotheses most convincingly.
... And, most important, she notes that in the educational institutions of the Jesuits, not only did theatre play a central role, but the kind of theatre was strictly anti-Aristotelian, with the rejection of the unities of time, place and action -- typical of Shakespeare’s theatre.
Prof. Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s wonderful book is richly illustrated, with almost 250 pictures, including portraits of all the leading personalities, maps, paintings of buildings, and other monuments, all which contribute to reinforcing the author’s theses. There is also a very useful time line, and a Shakespeare family tree. It is to be hoped that this book may be available in English, soon.
[With kind permission of the editor of Symbolism, Professor Dr. Dr. h. c. Rüdiger Ahrens (University of Wuerzburg, Germany,
e-mail: ruediger.ahrens@mail.uni-wuerzburg.de]
****
Book review by the German Anglicist and Shakespeare scholar Professor emeritus Dr Kurt Otten, University of Heidelberg, Visiting Fellow, Clare Hall, Cambridge University, in: Anglistik. Zeitschrift des Deutschen Anglistenverbandes (March 2004) - Excerpt:
Until now it could be assumed that principal new discoveries about Shakespeare’s life could not be expected. But the present biography by the Mainz Shakespeare scholar Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel interlinks the older material with new important findings from the perspective of Catholic resistance in [Elizabethan and Jacobean] England so convincingly that it leads to a thorough new interpretation of Shakespeare’s life viewed from the standpoint of the struggles of conscience in the age of Reformation. The author opens up unexpected but plausible views on the complete work, which, hitherto neglected, disclose astonishing connections and political circumstances of the time. In doing so, she made use of the latest technological possibilities and methods of historical and cultural historical research, cooperating with important public personalities, selected institutes, scientists and specialists of related disciplines. The names range from Queen Elizabeth II, outstanding private collections of aristocratic country seats, archivists, Renaissance scholars, art and costume historians, criminologists, archeologists, heraldic experts, curators, physicists, experts of photogrammetry, architects, cartographers, gynaecologists and other medical experts, biologists, botanists and lawyers down to literary scholars and philologists.
To some readers the author’s attempt to interlink anew Shakespeare’s work with his time and a new and comprehensive biography may seem too motley and polypragmatic but from the wealth of detailed, newly interpreted and interlinked observations a carefully reconstructed picture is created and a fascinating interpretation of Shakespeare’s life and literary work against the background of the (for Elizabethan Catholics) rigid reality of religious policy.
At first the author deals with the reasons for the gaps and misunderstandings of former biographers. Shakespeare’s life in London is relatively well documented, but many findings and details were removed by zealots during the republic of Oliver Cromwell and even before, partly because of political and religious prejudices. Others got lost through negligence. Why is it that this should have happened to Shakespeare of all people? Could the poet’s resistance towards the crown’s religious policies have played a major part in this?
In the province and the neighbourhood of ancient and influential Catholic country seats the poet’s personality was already coined in his youth, as the author illustrates. Hitherto this had only been presumed. The fate of his parents as persecuted adherents of the forbidden ‘old faith’ was seminal for the poet’s religious and philosophical views. Up to now it had practically not been made accessible.
...
By marrying Mary Arden, John Shakespeare had married the daughter of a respected Catholic country gentleman and officiated as chamberlain, alderman, bailiff (mayor) and justice of the peace. Then the abrupt break of his career, for which, according to the author’s investigations, his secret affiliation to the Catholic religion accounts for.
...
John Shakespeare had employed and paid secret Catholics as teachers of the Stratford Grammar School several times - obviously in agreement with the Stratford town council. Later these teachers became prominent Catholics and Jesuits in exile and founded abroad seminaries for the sons of the Catholic English gentry and bourgeoisie. William Shakespeare and his schoolmates were taught by such teachers, who contributed decisively to the astonishingly successful re-Catholicising of England.
The father’s mortgaging of a house and lands, the amount of his pecuniary penalties and an entry in the Douai diary, deleted only in the 19th century, point to the fact that John Shakespeare had sent his son to the Collegium Anglicum which had adopted the Jesuit concept of education. For it was depressing for English Catholics that their sons were excluded from the (English) universities because of the compulsory oath of supremacy, which was incompatible with their conscience.
If William Shakespeare left Stratford in 1585 hastily, this is now less due to the legend of his poaching rather than - and more conclusively - to his flight from the hunter of Catholics and justice of the peace Sir Thomas Lucy, who is later skilfully ridiculed by the playwright. Prior to that he had been employed as a private teacher by the distinguished aristocratic family of the de Hoghtons in Lancashire under the name Shakeshafte (E.A.J. Honigmann) and, as the author could prove, had committed himself to actively participate in the resistance that aimed at re-Catholicising England. Up to the end of his life Shakespeare held firmly to these principles.
Both gatehouses of the former London cloister Blackfriars were devoted to the service of English crypto-Catholicism. There Mass was said regularly and cure of souls pursued. And it was there that persecuted Catholic priests and believers were sheltered and received aiding and abetting of an escape. In 1613, Shakespeare purchased the eastern gatehouse of Blackfriars, through which, among others, the Jesuit priest John Gerard could escape his hunters after the Gunpowder Plot (1605). Hitherto scholars had inquired in vain into the commercial benefit of this Shakespearean accession.
Lancashire and Warwickshire were Catholic isles in a Protestant landscape. With great probability, Shakespeare could have spent the seven ‘lost years’ (1585-92), about which nothing was known before the author’s researches, at the Collegium Anglicum, which at that time was based at Rheims, and making visits to Rome, the dates of which the author was able to establish because of the pseudonyms Shakespeare had used in the pilgrims’ hospice of the English College at Rome. This would account for Shakespeare’s superior theological and mundane education, his knowledge of patristics and legal practices, but also his being well grounded in French and the true to life scenarios of his plays, set in the cities of Upper Italy.
The explosive conclusions the author has already drawn in her book on Shakespeare’s hidden existence (Die verborgene Existenz des William Shakespeare) (2001) - because of her presentation of spectacular new sources or sources that she has made newly accessible - are now confirmed in an amazing way by two further documents from Shakespeare’s lifetime, independent of each other, which she has (re-)discovered. These concern the poet’s activities in the Catholic underground, his travels to Rome and others. Now we know what kind of employment he pursued during the ‘lost years’ (cf. pp. 68-71) and are informed about his lodgings on the Continent (cf. p. 165).
For the new image of Shakespeare, now present, pioneering methods of modern historiography were convincingly employed. At the beginning, there was the process of identifying the Darmstadt Shakespeare death mask. Contrary to many expectations, the mask proved to be genuine and to be the model for Shakespeare’s funerary bust at Stratford-upon-Avon, after having undergone a criminological test of authenticity executed by the German Federal Office of Criminal Investigation and employing the latest technology. It was a discovery of the first order. By cooperating with medical and arthistorical experts, it allowed further insights into Shakespeare’s illnesses and secure knowledge about the hitherto disputed interdependences of Shakespeare portraits and the benefits of knowledge derived from them.
In addition, the author succeeded in proving Shakespeare’s friendship with Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and his close connection with the court circles of Elizabeth I. She disclosed the mystery of the ‘Dark Lady’ of the sonnets, the Lady Elizabeth Vernon, a lady-in-waiting to the queen, and her relationship with Shakespeare and his high-ranking friend, who won the favour of his (Shakespeare’s) mistress and replaced him. The Earl of Southampton had been the longstanding friend and patron of Shakespeare and his theatre company. This identification also proved the hitherto disputed self-testimony of the sonnets to be true. Thus the sonnets allow us to gain an insight into Shakespeare’s emotional life at the time of origin of this poetry and demonstrate the open and courageous literary representation of a ménage à trois, which scholars hitherto would never have thought the poet or his noble friend capable of doing with such uprightness and which they would not have thought possible within the framework of the then valid concept of virtue or tolerance of the Elizabethan aristocracy. The late Oxford historian A. L. Rowse had already provided us with some partial findings. He suspected that the high-ranking friend was Southampton. Highly pregnant, Elizabeth Vernon was expelled from the Court in the summer of 1598. She married the Earl of Southampton and left behind the proud picture of the pregnant ‘Persian Lady’, then a daughter, who bore Shakespeare’s facial features, and a hitherto unpublished Shakespeare sonnet - a brilliant way of giving evidence by the author.
This personal experience, which moved the poet, is - as the author demonstrates - closely connected with an event of Elizabethan contemporary history which took a tragic course for Shakespeare and the English Catholics. Southampton was thought of as a radiating figure. He was - as Essex - the pride and joy of the court, according to the concept of the gentleman in Cortegiano: ‘The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s eye’ (Hamlet, III, 1). He failed politically and as a human being because of court intrigues - just like the Earl of Essex. On the latter the ‘commons’ and Catholics had placed their expectation, as far as the future of England was concerned. Essex - Shakespeare was his enthusiastic adherent - became the model for Hamlet. Southampton, his closest friend, stood by his side at the time of the rebellion in the year 1601. Essex’s condemnation and his execution as a traitor as well as Southampton’s death sentence that was turned into life imprisonment now throw a new light on Shakespeare’s tragic phase. For a long time scholars have rightly discussed the general darkening in the plays - immediately after the turn of the 17th century. After the failure of the Essex rebellion, in the eyes of Shakespeare and the English Catholics, the great political hopeful (Essex) had died, who stood for reconciliation and religious tolerance. It has long been assumed that Denmark in Hamlet meant England, that Hamlet in the sense of sonnet 66 would have to be regarded as Shakespeare’s personal evidence and that Polonius is modelled on Lord Burghley (=William Cecil), but only in the author’s biography on Shakespeare these connections prove to be part of the historical reality.
In all of Shakespeare’s works the bitter experiences of the crisis year 1601 are echoed, the year of the failure of the Essex rebellion and of the execution of the political hopeful Essex. In the allegorical elegy ”The Phoenix and the Turtle”, written immediately after the condemnation of Essex and published in a small print run for his adherents, the Shakespeare scholar Hammerschmidt-Hummel has brought to light all hidden hints on the Essex circle and his political opponents convincingly. Elizabeth I is encoded as crow and hangman’s bird. When the queen died (1603), Shakespeare was silent.
Some of the material the author had published previously (cf. Die verborgene Existenz des William Shakespeare / The hidden existence of William Shakespeare, Freiburg im Breisgau: Verlag Herder, 2001). Now this has become one of the central points of reference of her Shakespeare biography and of the origin and interpretation of Shakespeare’s works against the background of the rigid scenarios of contemporary history and religious policies under Elizabeth I and James I.
...
Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel, in a well thought-out, clearly structured process of historical documents and as a lively experience, has reconstructed Shakespeare’s singularity in connection with the age of the great Tudors and the first Stuart king. Her evaluations will not remain undisputed, but they are a basis from which we can think ahead. She has managed to gain a magnificent success. She has given a decisive work to the humanities whose pluralism has become increasingly questionable, a work by which not only a single discipline can orientate itself but also a big reading public. To put it in a nutshell: In this biography on Shakespeare on a scholarly basis - it is the very first in the German language - the reader will find everything he always wanted to know about Shakespeare and of which he believed that no one would ever find out about. In the meantime we do speak again of an educational canon: This pictorially and lexically very well equipped work, which also has a comprehensive chronological table, is part of that canon and an absolute must.
(With kind permission of the editor of Anglistik: Professor Dr Dr h. c. Rüdiger Ahrens, University of Wuerzburg, e-mail: ruediger.ahrens@mail.uni-wuerzburg.de)
*****
Letter from Mr Graham Nattrass, Head of West European Collections, British Library, London, to Ms Sally-Ann Spencer, Goethe Institute, London (28 January 2004) - Excerpt:
”Prof. [Hammerschmidt-]Hummel is a very distinguished Shakespeare authority, whose work could be said to revolutionise our understanding of Shakespeare as a man, and consequently also as a writer. Whilst her conclusions are not entirely new, the methods by which she has reached them are extraordinarily interesting. Prof. Hummel is convinced that Shakespeare’s life can only be properly understood against the background of secret Catholic resistance to Elizabeth and James I, and she produces a wealth of evidence to support this view. Not only are many of her discoveries new, but they also support each other and form a fascinating nexus of evidence.
On those occasions when I have met Prof. Hummel, I have been deeply impressed by the force of her arguments, and feel that, whether or not one accepts all her conclusions, her books are so important that English-speaking scholars need to engage with them and they can only do so properly if they are translated into English. Indeed I am quite amazed that this has not happened already.
It is not altogether unfitting that such important work is taking place in Germany, since ‘unser Shakespeare’ is in a sense (paradox!) Germany’s national poet. But it is also imperative that its results should be more widely disseminated in the English-speaking world.
[…] I hope you will find the above background helpful. If you are able to help her either by publicising the above-mentioned titles [‘Die verborgene Existenz des William Shakespeare’ (Freiburg: Herder, 2001) and ‘William Shakespeare: Seine Zeit – sein Leben – sein Werk’ (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2003)] through ‘New Books in German’, or perhaps by utilising any other contacts you may have, I am sure you would be doing a great service to international Shakespeare scholarship.”
*****
”34 invitations to browsing. For presents or for your own reading: Editors and staff members recommend books for Christmas and long winter evenings”, Tages-Anzeiger [Switzerland]- Culture (13 December 2003) - Excerpt:
”A world celebrity, a forgotten writer . . . - an entertaining Christmas is well provided for. The world celebrity is Shakespeare. Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel has reseached him with spectacular results. Even if one does not follow the Mainz Professor totally, her publication ‘William Shakespeare. His time, his life, his work’, enriched with illustrations, will be appreciated. Here everything is to be seen: from the birthplace to the death mask, identified by the German Federal Office of Criminal Investigation as that of the classic author (Shakespeare).” - Peter Müller
*****
|
