Peter Milward Bücher

The local tradition in Stratford is that Shakespeare "died a Papist," having sent for a Catholic priest to give him the last rites. It is clear from his plays that he was against the strictures of Puritanism, but in The Catholicism of Shakespeare's Plays, Professor Peter Milward argues that the whole of Shakespeare's work reveals a common thread of sympathy with the plight of the suffering persecuted Catholics under Queen Elizabeth and King James I.

To know Shakespeare is to know his plays, not just one by one but all together or what T. S. Eliot calls "the pattern in his carpet".

Following his recent study, The Catholicism of Shakespeare's Plays, Fr. Peter Milward examines more closely the themes of doomsday and judgement in the great dramas. As recent research establishes ever more securely Shakespeare's own Catholic background, we are invited to consider the symbolism of the plays from the perspective of the Elizabethan and Jacobean recusant community of which the poet was a member.Fr. Milward draws attention to the profound feeling manifest in the treatment of the desolation of England following the destruction of her Catholic culture, and the persecution of the Church by the new Establishment -- long missed in critical studies. At the end of the second Christian millennium, when the popular mind has been preoccupied with strange predictions of doom, we follow Shakespeare's reflections on the real judgement then being visited upon an apostate nation, and see how England's real and only hope lies in a return to her first allegiance to a greater Royal supremacy than that of the Tudors, under a loftier Queen -- not Elizabeth, but Mary who reigns in Heaven.