SHAKESPEARE AND ANNE LINE - THE CATHOLIC RESISTANCE
SHAKESPEARE AND ANNE LINE
THE CATHOLIC RESISTANCE
Anne Line is one of the Forty Martyrs of the Reformation whose collective feast day is 25th October. Her individual feast day is the date of her execution - 27th February. She was executed for the crime of harbouring priests, an offence of treason under legislation of 1585. Her story is set out in a previous post.
Martin Dodwell, in his biography of Anne Line, “The Neat-herd’s Daughter Anne Line: Shakespeare’s Tragic Muse”, observed that she was considered to be “in the words of the Jesuit Henry Garnet, ‘both the Martha and the Mary’” of the clandestine and dangerous Catholic mission. She dedicated her life and her meagre resources to supporting the underground network of Catholic clergy in England, protected and assisted by aristocratic Catholic families, until her arrest at a Mass and her subsequent execution.
Sonnet 74 is a memorial to Anne Line and her execution, where, before being hanged, she borrowed the executioner's knife to cut off some of her clothes to throw to the crowd, a gesture that figured prominently in accounts of her execution.
Sonnet 74
But be contented when that fell arrest
Without all bail shall carry me away,
My life hath in this line some interest,
Which for memorial still with thee shall stay.
When thou reviewest this, thou dost review
The very part was consecrate to thee.
The earth can have but earth, which is his due;
My sp’rit is thine, the better part of me.
So then thou hast cast but lost the dregs of life,
The prey of worms, my body being dead,
The coward’s conquest of a wretch’s knife,
Too base of thee to be remembered.
The worth of that is that which it contains,
And that is this, and this with thee remains.
It is Dodwell’s belief that Shakespeare likely knew Anne Line personally, (and the tone of the Sonnet suggests so). In his view, further reference by Shakespeare to her is made in Cymbeline, calling for reconciliation of the faith and unification of the society.
Historian Clare Asquith first became interested in the coded language of Shakespeare’s works when, as the wife of a British diplomat, she lived in Moscow during the 1980’s, before the fall of communism. She described watching a dramatization of Chekhov, where, watched by KGB operatives, the players nevertheless used the language of the play to convey allusions to ideals that were readily available to the audience, who were, of course, on side, and opaque and deniable when, or if, challenged by the KGB surveillers.
Ms Asquith said:
“In 1601, [Shakespeare’s] poem, The Phoenix and the Turtle, appeared alongside contributions by Jonson and Marston in Love’s Martyr, a daring volume of dissident poetry anticipating James’s succession. Recent studies have revealed its hidden significance: an elegy for a pair who symbolised all that was best in the separated halves of the Catholic resistance, the married couple, Anne and Roger Line, separated by the Reformation troubles. Anne had just been executed in England for assisting the Jesuit mission: Roger had already died in poverty in exile. The lament over their ashes is set within a meditation on a Palm Sunday Mass evoking the mystical union of the separated couple. They are given the badges of the persecuted Church and its followers-the born-again phoenix and the constant turtle-dove.
“The poem provides an unusual glimpse of Shakespeare’s own profound spirituality. The dense thought is original, and the intense language recalls Southwell’s translations of the hymns of Aquinas, in particular, a setting by William Byrd sung by Father Mark Barkworth as he awaited execution on the scaffold alongside Anne Line. The poem’s haunting tone takes us beyond the death of these two remarkable individuals. Shakespeare is here confronting for the first time the possibility that the spirit of the Catholic resistance would be extinguished in England. He calls his poem, ‘a tragic scene’; its conclusion is resigned: ‘Beauty, truth and rarity,/ Grace in all simplicity,/ Here enclosed in cinders lie…/ truth may seem, but cannot be,/ beauty brag, but ‘tis not she:/ Truth and beauty buried be.’”
Clare Asquith, “Shadowplay, the Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare” Public Affairs, New York, 2005, at p. 182.
Dodwell, too, sees Anne Line as the phoenix and her husband as the turtle-dove in the poem, discerning intentional echoes of the Catholic Requiem Mass in it, suggesting that it was written as a memorial to the martyr after her secret Catholic Requiem at the house of Lady Arundel.
The Phoenix and the Turtle
Let the bird of loudest lay,
On the sole Arabian tree,
Herald sad and trumpet be,
To whose sound chaste wings obey.
But thou shrieking harbinger,
Foul precurrer of the fiend,
Augur of the fever's end,
To this troop come thou not near.
From this session interdict
Every fowl of tyrant wing,
Save the eagle, feather'd king:
Keep the obsequy so strict.
Let the priest in surplice white
That defunctive music can,
Be the death-divining swan,
Lest the requiem lack his right.
And thou treble-dated crow,
That thy sable gender mak'st
With the breath thou giv'st and tak'st,
'Mongst our mourners shalt thou go.
Here the anthem doth commence:
Love and constancy is dead;
Phœnix and the turtle fled
In a mutual flame from hence.
So they lov'd, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.
Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance, and no space was seen
'Twixt the turtle and his queen:
But in them it were a wonder.
So between them love did shine,
That the turtle saw his right
Flaming in the phœnix' sight;
Either was the other's mine.
Property was thus appall'd,
That the self was not the same;
Single nature's double name
Neither two nor one was call'd.
Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together;
To themselves yet either neither,
Simple were so well compounded,
That it cried, "How true a twain
Seemeth this concordant one!
Love hath reason, reason none,
If what parts can so remain".
Whereupon it made this threne
To the phœnix and the dove,
Co-supremes and stars of love,
As chorus to their tragic scene.
Threnos
Beauty, truth, and rarity,
Grace in all simplicity,
Here enclos'd in cinders lie.
Death is now the phœnix' nest;
And the turtle's loyal breast
To eternity doth rest,
Leaving no posterity:
'Twas not their infirmity,
It was married chastity.
Truth may seem, but cannot be;
Beauty brag, but 'tis not she;
Truth and beauty buried be.
To this urn let those repair
That are either true or fair;
For these dead birds sigh a prayer.
<img src="url" alt="alternatetext">;https://www.bl.uk/people/william-shakespeare
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