Merchants And Jewels In 16th Century England

William Shakespeare Life

An excerpt.

Four of the six schoolmasters at the grammar school during Shakespeare’s youth were Catholic sympathisers, and

Simon Hunt, likely one of Shakespeare’s teachers, later became a Jesuit.

While none of this evidence proves Shakespeare’s own Catholic sympathies, one historian, Clare Asquith, has claimed that those sympathies are detectable in his writing. Asquith claims that Shakespeare uses terms such as “high” when referring to Catholic characters and “low” when referring to Protestants (the terms refer to their altars) and “light” or “fair” to refer to Catholic and “dark” to refer to Protestant, a reference to certain clerical garbs.

Asquith also detects in Shakespeare’s work the use of a simple code used by the Jesuit underground in England which took the form of a mercantile terminology wherein priests were ‘merchants’ and souls were ‘jewels’, the people pursuing them were ‘creditors’, and the Tyburn gallows where the members of the underground died was called ‘the place of much trading’.

The Jesuit underground used this code so their correspondences looked like innocuous commercial letters, and Asquith claims that Shakespeare also used this code.

Link to the full article (here)