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 enlarge | Author: Joseph Pearce
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 87040
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 216
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.2
ISBN: 1586172247
Dewey Decimal Number: 200
EAN: 9781586172244
ASIN: 1586172247
Publication Date: April 2008
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| Customer Reviews:
 Outstanding! June 16, 2008
3 out of 8 found this review helpful
I saw the author speak about this book at a recent conference: he is a true scholar, passionate, excited, honest and thorough. Blew me away. The book convinced me beyond doubt. Skeptics will always be around... but the case is very, very tight. Outstanding! Can't wait for his next volume on the plays themselves.
such stuff as dreams are made of June 14, 2008
11 out of 15 found this review helpful
Joseph Pearce has written the most delightful book on Shakespeare I've ever come across. First, because the man is truly a gifted writer and has a sense of humor. Second, because he quickly demolishes the many silly myths and weird theories around Shakespeare's life. He pokes gentle fun at the folks who think Elizabeth I wrote the plays, or Daniel Dafoe, or the Earl of Oxford. Next he puts those who want to use Shakespeare to make their own point about sex and religion in their ignoble places. Then he swiftly goes on to the gist of the book. Did Shakespeare in some form or fashion hang on to his Catholic faith in spite of the terrible persecution of the times?
By looking at the evidence Pearce says yes, probably. His father was a discrete but resolute Catholic, his daughter Susanna was also a recussant. He was married by an ordained priest and lived in a town that was known for being a center of hard headed Catholicism. Like William Byrd he was probably excruciatingly careful--- he'd seen relatives and friends jailed and or killed for being Catholic afterall.
Quest for Shakespeare is quick, clever and charming. I'm so glad I bought it.
 Shakespeare In Time May 29, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book details, in great numbers, a myriad of facts regarding WS's life and the record is indeed extraordinary. Others have written about the relationship between his Catholocism and his plays but this book gives us many of the branches and limbs that helped form the totality of
his tree of life. The more I read about WS, his works and the difficult times he lived in, the more amazing his life and output become. I recommend this to any and all.
 "The Play's The Thing" May 27, 2008
35 out of 48 found this review helpful
This book consists of three sections, an investigation into the religious allegiance of Shakespeare the man, a proposed theory for the best way to read his works, and an examination of "King Lear" in light of that theory. The first section, unfortunately, is too largely given over to a frankly tiresome rehashing of the conclusions of such recent journalists and scholars as Michael Wood, Peter Milward, Clare Asquith, and Mutschmann and Wentersdorf on Shakespeare and Catholicism. The evidence presented identifies Shakespeare's father and daughter clearly as recusant Catholics, but leaves Shakepeare's own position as a recusant Catholic pretty much a matter of likely supposition to the very end. Supposition, in fact, comes to play so heavy a part in this section of the book that one begins to suspect Pearce's wishes as much as anything else may be the father of his thoughts. Despite his welcome and pretty consistent qualifying, his tone in places resembles the too flat, eager certitude that used to distinguish the teaching style of grade school nuns. Still, I would call this the best part of the book. Pearce's skills as a historian, in my view, far outweigh his strengths later in the book as a literary critic.
Part Two, a proposal on how to read Shakespeare properly, while it convincingly rules the a-historical, post-modern relativists out of court, becomes itself equally preposterous in its claim that "if Shakespeare was a Catholic, or was greatly influenced by the Catholicism of his parents and the persecution that surrounded the practice of Catholicism in his day, it forces us to reread the plays in an entirely new light." This sounds like not much more than a publisher's blurb for Pearce's next book, which is already, I understand, in the planning stages. At the same time, Pearce himself recognizes "the perspective of tradition-oriented critics...[and] the evident clarity of moral vision that they had always perceived in the plays," so perhaps it's not yet necessary for us to toss the Shakespearean criticism of Maynard Mack, John Danby, David Bevington, or C.S.Lewis among others into the furnace after all. Pearce's suggested way of reading is to understand first an author's belief system so as better to discern what must necessarily be present in a specific literary work. Without denying the reality of an author grounded in history and beliefs, I submit that this procedure is to go about things just backwards. It is unfortunately a revival of what the New Critics rightly pilloried many years ago as the "intentional fallacy." They suggested as a much better mode of approach trying to render through close reading the highest possible justice to what the work itself demonstrably or implicitly contained, to be a reader on whom nothing was lost, rather than one so attuned to preconceptions about an author's belief system as to be in danger of reading things not actually present into a specific work of art, while perhaps simultaneously missing what is there.
Part Three, Pearce's reading of "King Lear" as an unlikely variant of the "divine comedy", in my view bypasses exactly what is essential and from a Christian perspective (Catholic, if you will) what in fact makes the tragedy shockingly and unbearably sad. Just as "Beowulf" is a pagan work retold by a Christian author, "Lear" is a work by a Christian author which is set is pre-Christian Britain. Cordelia and Edgar are what some learned Elizabethans would have identified ethically as "natural Christians." Theirs are the charitable works and "nature" upon which grace will later build. However important charitable human behavior is, though, the play argues that it alone is not enough finally to make our lives bearable in this world. What with its contradictory, disputable attitudes toward the gods, the world of "Lear" is a world desperately in need of an actual Redeemer, one who has yet to appear in human history. The play ends in unrelievable sadness, with the King, in an unrecognized prefiguring of the Pieta, holding the broken body of his virtuous child cradled in his arms. This shocking event is Shakespeare's own addition to the traditional tale - help comes by chance just moments too late to save Cordelia, and Lear experiences ultimate misery. If the heartbroken Lear dies of joy imagining his dead daughter is reviving, it's important to remember that he is mistaken in this assumption. In the pre-Christian world of the play, we are indeed the most miserable of creatures - the death of the wonderful Cordelia lacks any meaning deeper than misfortune nor provides any solid ground for patience in similar trials of affliction. If this is Catholic art after all, it is informed, I'd argue, by a much tougher vision than Joseph Pearce with his notion of a "divine comedy" oddly present in its ostensibly pagan world has recognized.
Excellent book May 8, 2008
10 out of 14 found this review helpful
Joseph Pearce has written a fascinating analysis of William Shakespeare's relationship to the Catholic Church. After reading it, I am convinced Shakespeare was a devoted Catholic and I also admire his family and all those other people who kept the faith alive under such severe persecution. It was one of those books that I found hard to put down. I was only vaguely aware of the conflict between Protestants and Catholics in that time period. It is easy to see how such horrendous religious intolerance led directly to the United States' enshrining freedom of religion in our constitution in the 18th Century. It certainly makes me appreciate America all the more. I also have a greater respect for William Shakespeare as a man, and for all those courageous martyrs who died in service to Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church. I am looking forward to revisiting Shakespeare's plays with this new perspective in mind.
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