Will, what were you really saying?

Clare ASQUITH’S interest in the coded writings of authors began in the winter of 1983 in a shabby Moscow theater while watching a dramatization of Chekov’s short stories. “A group of KGB operatives hung about the door.... The KGB men smiled at what they took to be a standard dig at Western capitalism. But they missed the covert meaning.... It was my first experience of the subtleties of political drama under a repressive regime.” This disarming epiphany introduces “Shadowplay,” Asquith’s passionately argued, compellingly readable “unmasking” of William Shakespeare’s complete works for theater.

Some readers may be skeptical of finding hidden messages, systemic codes and symbolic “markers” in any well-known writer’s text. Even more so in the case of a poet embraced by cultures around the world for the universal and apparently timeless human truths that flowed from his pen. These skeptics might also append a little sigh of weariness, given how often during the last century our picture of poor Will has been upended, reinterpreted, re-costumed. Battling theories abound, casting him variously as plagiarist, toady, closet homosexual, female, pseudonymous nobleman.

One of the latest and most startling assertions offers us a Catholic Shakespeare -- a sympathizer, even an underground communicant, who, like his father, John, and his daughter Susannah, held fast to the “old faith,” censured since Henry VIII defied the pope to wed Anne Boleyn. Amid subsequent bloody storms of religious violence, especially after the Roman Catholic Church’s brief Counter-Reformation -- during the long reign of Elizabeth I and James I’s thereafter -- recusant papists risked dispossession by the Crown and Protestant poursuivants, as the Crown’s priest catchers were called. They also faced imprisonment, torture and gruesome forms of execution (“The extraction of the still-beating heart was the last stage of the ordeal”) for their treasonous faith.

Was this a risk that Elizabeth’s favorite dramatist would or could have assumed? At first glance, despite the mounting number of reasoned essays published in, for example, the Times Literary Supplement, the notion of Shakespeare, widely envied for his success both at court and as a London impresario, holding to the outlawed faith has looked more provocative than plausible.

For Asquith, however, the indications of the Bard’s papist identity are incontrovertible. Gracefully and persuasively, she pulls together the findings of those who have labored before her in the academic vineyard. There is, for example, “a document ... found hidden in the rafters ... signed by John Shakespeare, affirming his Catholicism ... one of the spiritual ‘testaments’ distributed by [the Jesuit Edmund] Campion.” There is the ambiguous character of the playwright’s powerful first patron, Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, regarded by suspicious contemporaries as “a threat to the regime, one of the few men with the authority to lead a Catholic rebellion” and who was later poisoned. And there is Shakespeare’s early, hugely popular long poem, “The Rape of Lucrece,” plainly allegorical, lamenting the “despoiled and desecrated” soul of England and concluding, “O be remembered no outrageous thing / from vassal actors can be wiped away; / Then kings’ misdeeds cannot be hid in clay.”

But the presumption of Shakespeare’s staunch Catholicism merely lays the groundwork for Asquith’s further speculation. She radically reinterprets each of the plays in chronological sequence, relating their “coded” messages to the events and intrigues of the times. To give a taste: symbolic pairings such as “fair” and “dark” and “high” and “low” stand for Catholic / Protestant (“The Taming of the Shrew,” “Othello”). Storms mirror religious strife and the breakdown of order (“Julius Caesar,” “The Tempest”). The moon represents Elizabeth, who delighted in word games and unraveling codes and whose sympathy and mercy for the Catholic cause the playwright hoped to win (“Twelfth Night” and many others).

For minds schooled to view the Reformation as a vehicle of liberal progress (despite some initial excesses), Asquith’s take on English history from the time of the Spanish Armada in 1588 to Shakespeare’s death in 1616 sounds as radical as her fresh reading of the plays’ meanings and purpose. To make a long and fascinating story very short: Elizabeth’s vast spy machine, run by the father-son team of William and Robert Cecil, so ruthlessly persecuted, blackmailed, robbed and killed -- and so skillfully managed with divisive tactics and crumbs of mercy -- the Catholic majority that all hope of their “Phoenix’s rebirth” died. In this reading, Shakespeare’s mission was not only to convince the queen but also to preserve the truth -- the facts, the flow and ebb of hope, rage, perfidy and sacrifice. Finally, the Bard would memorialize the loss.

Does “Shadowplay” convince? A few of Asquith’s reinterpretations feel stretched. But this reviewer happened to see a West End performance of “Julius Caesar” just before reading her book. The urgently contemporary political references were like a falling ax. Call it Elizabethan, call it Soviet, call it here and now. According to his latest interpreters, Shakespeare pleaded for tolerance, for the transcendent beauty of tradition, for ritual spirituality. And for the need to renew, reform, remain open to inspiration. As do we. *