1. One point that is strongly made by Newman in his Idea of a University is that from the time of the Elizabethan Reformation English has been a basically Protestant literature. Like English history, so too the literature of England is that of the winners in the great religious conflict for England's soul in the sixteenth century. Even Catholic authors since that time have had to adjust their way of thinking to the harsh reality of their 'poor country' and have had either to disguise themselves, so long as they have chosen to remain at home, or to suffer neglect or rejection on revealing their religious colours abroad. Such has been the fate of Catholic poets like Southwell, Crashaw and Dryden, and even (it may be pleaded) of a crypto-Catholic dramatist like Shakespeare.

2. But with the progressive subversion of the English literary canon undertaken by squadrons of deconstructionists, feminists, neo-historicists and cultural relativists, a gleam of hope is appearing for the oppressed minority of Catholic authors in English literature from the Elizabethan age onwards. The very fact that they are now at last perceived to have been persecuted, exiled and dispossessed by the proud Protestant victors at home has come to elicit the sympathy, if not ideological agreement, of the new critics. And one of the most notable of these new critics, who can speak the language both of deconstructionism and feminism, is Alison Shell, of the University of Durham in England, with her new book entitled Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558-1660.

3. She clearly states her literary manifesto from the outset, in her fine Introduction, with the complaint that 'the criteria that cause some religious groups to be privileged in research terms, and others neglected, are protestantised in origin' (3). Hers is, in other words and in another setting, much the same complaint as that recently made by the Scottish composer James Macmillan, that the Scottish mind even today – with all the talk of ecumenism – is still deeply prejudiced against Catholicism. After all, three centuries of anti-Catholic prejudice in Britain, beginning with the heavy barrage first orchestrated by Thomas Cromwell under Henry VIII, then by William Cecil under Elizabeth I, cannot so easily be repaired within a brief generation – at least in the subconscious minds of the British, and (paradoxically) least of all in the minds of scholars who are so proud of their freedom from the prejudices of lesser mortals.

4. Yes, Shell justly complains, 'coding and censorship are still with us', though in a subtler form than in the Elizabethan age, 'and necessitate an academic discourse which conceals religious belief as well as Catholicism' (8). Yet even while objecting to this necessity and doing her best to subvert it, she has herself in some measure to bow to it by reassuring her readers that she has no axe of her own to grind, she is no Catholic, however much she may sympathize with them as the underdogs both in Elizabethan literature and in modern literary criticism. It is also she who points out, with no small gratification, that 'recovering the voices of the silenced', as she has set out to do in this volume, 'has been an extraordinarily fashionable academic pursuit for the last few decades' (18).

5. But then, strangely enough, instead of turning to this long neglected Catholic literature of the recusant period – now made available to the common scholar through the remarkable series of facsimile texts of 'English Recusant Literature' published by the Scolar Press, a series to which Shell makes surprisingly little reference – the author devotes her first chapter to two rabidly anti-Catholic dramatists of the Jacobean age, John Webster and Thomas Middleton. Why? She hardly seems to advert to the need of answering such a basic question, beyond pointing out that the anti-Catholic inspiration of their tragedies, which have returned to critical popularity since the late Victorian age, has largely been unnoticed. Maybe – but this is my conjecture – she begins with such a chapter to throw lurid light on the violence of that Protestant prejudice with which the Catholic authors of both the previous and the contemporary age had to deal, whether they remained cut off in the isolation of Catholic Europe or attempted to enter the mainstream of the Protestant literature and culture of their native land.

6. When at last she turns to Catholic poets in the mainstream of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, Shell concentrates on two main figures, Robert Southwell and Richard Crashaw – though they are both still regarded as 'minor poets' owing to the baleful influence of such Anglican critics as T.S. Eliot and Helen Gardner. Concerning Southwell she speaks of his 'invisible influence' and shows how considerable it was even in Protestant England, and how it affected committed Protestant poets like Edmund Spenser even while they were clearly trying to cold-shoulder him – sending him, as boys say, 'to Coventry'. Concerning Crashaw she interestingly remarks that 'because [he] himself left England when he converted to Catholicism, he has been refused a re-entry visa' (57), and she adds: 'It is hard not to see in this an outcrop of unconscious anti-Catholic prejudice.'

7. Two interesting chapters, respectively on Elizabethan and Stuart writers, are devoted to the aspect of 'Catholic loyalism', for all that they were excluded from public life. In the former period they were, or some of them were, encouraged by the patronage of the Earl of Essex; and Shell notes the fascinating theory pointing to 'an association between the madrigal, practised by a number of Catholic composers, and the rises and falls of Essex's reputation' (127). In the latter period Catholic courtiers found a measure of protection and encouragement from the Catholic Queen of Charles I, Henrietta Maria. It was she, too, who 'introduced a fashion for neoplatonism to the English court' (155) – a fashion that came to extend far beyond the court and Catholic circle to Anglican poets and writers.

8. Finally, two more chapters deal with the important theme of 'exile', which affected both the Catholic 'literature of tears' promoted by Southwell at home and the Jesuit drama abroad. 'The Jesuits,' it is noted, 'pioneered theatre as an educational tool' (173), which resulted 'in some of the most powerfully subversive texts ever to come from English pens' (174). In them we find a chorus of lamentation both for and by the allegorical personage of 'Weeping England', namely, 'the mourning woman who mourns in some way for England or the English nation' (175). One of the earliest plays in this genre is the anonymous Brevis Dialogismus, dated 1599, which weeps over 'Wretched England', now a stepmother who was once 'of saints a fertile parent' (182). An even earlier contribution, though on a different subject, was made by the Jesuit saint and martyr, Edmund Campion, while he was teaching at Prague in 1578, before being sent on his fateful mission to England in 1580.

9. In all this, however, one great name is glaringly omitted, that of William Shakespeare. Only his collaborative effort on Henry VIII with the younger dramatist John Fletcher is mentioned, and there, the author notes, 'in the play's last scene, the audience is encouraged towards a joyous teleological endorsement of Henry's remarriage' (218). This and the MS play of Sir Thomas More (one scene of which is commonly ascribed to the hand of Shakespeare) are seen as prudently side-stepping 'the difficulty of explaining without offence the religio-political reasons why More's execution might have been expedient' (218). But there is no mention in this book of the poet's nostalgic lament for the 'bare ruin'd choirs where late the sweet birds sang' (Sonnet 73), though the general feeling of nostalgia and a 'yearning after the old religion' (175) are seen as typical of English Catholic writers of the age. Nor, amid the long disquisition on the weeping of Anglia (183), is there any mention of the similar weeping for Scotia in Shakespeare's Macbeth. Nor yet, in the chapters on the theme of exile, particularly 'the concept of exile as dispossession' (197), does the author so much as hint at the frequency with which this theme is presented in such plays as Richard II, As You Like It, and, above all, King Lear. Again, what can be the reason for such silence if not that the author, for all her courageous girding at anti-Catholic prejudice, still feels the sad necessity of kowtowing to that prejudice, if only to avoid the 'coding and censorship still with us'.

10. It would, however, be ungrateful to end on such a negative note, considering how much Shell has done in this book to deserve the gratitude of all her readers, whether Catholic or not. As we read in the apocryphal Book of Ezra, 'Great is truth, and it will prevail' (I.iv.41).

PETER MILWARD
SOPHIA UNIVERSITY, JAPAN

(This review first appeared in The Renaissance Bulletin 26 (Tokyo, 1999))