Shakespeare and Pilgrimage

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This is an essay I produced for the Journal of The Confraternity of St James. It is relevant to the ideas of Pilgrimage that are involved in the Kenelm walks.


Many writers have attempted to make a connection between Catholicism and the life and work of William Shakespeare. While there is little doubt that his family history does include Catholic connections, too often there has been a tendency to overplay conjectural biography at the expense of hard evidence. Nevertheless, the notion that Shakespeare’s intellectual inheritance may include ideas originating in pre-Reformation religion should not be entirely dismissed. The Reformation preceded his career by no more than fifty years; furthermore, many would argue that the theatre functioned in late Elizabethan society as a repository of much of the life-force that had previously found an outlet in medieval Catholicism. One way of exploring this debate is to consider the tantalising references Shakespeare made to the practice of pilgrimage.

When he began his writing career in the late Sixteenth Century, the practice of pilgrimage had been largely discontinued for reasons directly connected with the Reformation. Theologically, the pilgrim’s emphasis on the physicality of religious experience, represented by the veneration of sacred relics, was as clearly opposed to Protestantism as a belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Unsurprisingly, this opposition had led to pilgrimage becoming a potent symbol of Catholicism; the major act of Catholic resistance arose in 1536 and was called the Pilgrimage of Grace. Shortly after, pilgrimages, hitherto discouraged, were formally banned by the injunctions of 1538 which forbade ‘wandering to pilgrimages, offering of money, candles or tapers to images or relics, or kissing or licking the same’.  Eventually, the Thirty Nine Articles drawn up in 1563 included a declaration that

‘worshipping and adoration, as well as images as of relics and also invocation of saints is a fond thing, vaguely invented, and grounded on no warranty of scripture, but rather repugnant to the word of God’.

Nevertheless, the idea of pilgrimage seems to have remained an important component of religious thought, even within the reformed church. When Walter Raleigh believed he was about to be executed he is credited with having written the famous poem known as The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage. The first stanza reads as follows

Give me my Scallop-shell of quiet,
My staff of faith to walk upon
My scrip of joy, immortal diet, My bottle of salvation,
My gown of glory, hope’s true gage,
And thus I’ll take my pilgrimage.

These lines invoke all of the most familiar icons of pilgrimage; the scallop shell, scrip, bottle, staff and gown. We can see, however that Raleigh is positioning himself between the old and the new faiths. While invoking the spirit of humility and simplicity which he finds in the iconography of pilgrimage, the journey has been internalised and is a metaphor for the inner life of the Christian man. The symbols of pilgrimage are only important for what they represent – quiet, faith, salvation – and so the poem can be seen as demonstrating a Protestant theological understanding. This theme of internalisation of pilgrimage was taken further by George Herbert in his religious poem, The Temple and, most famously by John Bunyon in A Pilgrims Progress. This religious allegory takes the process of the internalisation of pilgrimage to its logical conclusion, ostensibly describing a physical journey, but in fact referring to the thoughts, impulses and temptation that populate the minds of the Christian individuals. It is also of note that the motif of pilgrimage was used by Raleigh and other writers such as Samuel Purchas to describe journeys to the New World.

A different way in which the ideas and understandings of the Old Religion adapted themselves to the reformed world was in the theatre. Its emphasis on physical personation, festival and celebration, together with its direct line of descent from medieval mystery plays serve to explain the hostility it provoked in the Puritan London City Fathers. They were eventually to win their battle against the stage by closing all theatres in 1642, but even in Shakespeare’s lifetime the acting profession had to contend with a series of temporary bans. Bearing this in mind and given that Shakespeare was, above all else, a man of the theatre, it is worth attempting to examine his by stance in relation to religious controversies by considering how he handled the question of pilgrimage. There are four brief but significant references in his plays, all of which offer particular insights into his relation with this most emblematic of practices of the proscribed religion.

The first passage is an extract from Orphelia’s mad scene in Hamlet. When rejected by the Prince, who has also killed her father, she declines into madness and communicates by singing snatches from old half-remembered songs, one of which is a reference to a Santiago pilgrim

How should I your true love know
From another one?
By his cockle hat and staff,
And his sandal shoon. (4.5.23-26).

In this extract she associates truth and constancy with the iconography of pilgrimage. There is a clear contrast here between this unnamed man of virtue, an adherent of the Old Religion and the erratic character of her false love, Hamlet who was, as we are constantly reminded, educated at Wittenberg – the university of Martin Luther. We should not however miss the obvious point that Orphelia is deranged at this point, and in any case, fails to exhibit any judgement throughout the course of the play. Her works, seeking comfort in the distant past, are not unequivocally supportive of the practice of pilgrimage.

The second extract consists of the first words exchanged between Romeo and Juliet. Many commentators have observed that this extract is, in essence, an embedded sonnet so this is how it is arranged it below, with Romeo’s lines emboldened.

If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.
Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too ?
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do:
They pray; grant thou lest faith turn to despair.

Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.
Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take. (1.5.90-107)

The first point to explain is that Romeo’s name, to our ears unequivocally associated with the concept of romantic love, in fact means ‘pilgrim’, being derived from the pilgrimage to Rome. This image like behind the entire passage, as Romeo identifies himself as a pilgrim and Juliet as the object of his worship. The penultimate line of the extract makes a striking theological point, saying that saints only move in order to intercede on behalf of  a supplicant, a statement totally at odds with the Thirty Nine Articles and reformed theology generally. Is it then fair to assume that the identification of Romeo and Juliet, the two characters who stand for honest feeling in the violent and divided world of Verona, with the language and belief of the Old Religion is a symbolic identification of the playwright with such beliefs ? We should be wary of making such a judgement for other interpretations are certainly available. One suggestion is that Romeo’s regard for Juliet is a type of ‘cupidas’ – a form of pseudo-worship in which one’s deity is a creature rather than the creator. Thus Romeo is not giving vent to honourable love but to blasphemous idolatry, so perhaps the association with Catholicism is an explicit criticism rather then a implicit endorsement.

Thirdly, we turn to an extract form a rarely performed play, All’s Well That Ends Well. Curiously, this extract is a second instance of an embedded sonnet, but of more direct relevance is that is also leans heavily on the symbolism of pilgrimage. The background is that Helena is deserted by her new husband, who has gone to fight with the army in Florence. In order to track him, Helena adopts the guise of a pilgrim and this sonnet is the letter she left behind explaining her actions.

I am Saint Jaques' pilgrim, thither gone.
Ambitious love hath so in me offended
That barefoot plod I the cold ground upon,
With sainted vow my faults to have amended.
Write, write, that from the bloody course of war
My dearest master, your dear son, may hie.
Bless him at home in peace, whilst I from far
His name with zealous fervour sanctify.
His taken labours bid him me forgive;
I, his despiteful Juno, sent him forth
From courtly friends, with camping foes to live,
Where death and danger dogs the heels of worth.
He is too good and fair for death and me,
Whom I myself embrace to set him free. (3.4.4-23)

In this play, Helena is clearly the most sympathetic character and it is natural that her portrayal should engage our attention. The image she paints of herself in this passage, especially when she writes of her intention ‘to barefoot plod … the cold ground upon’ places her firmly in the Catholic tradition. Indeed it should not be overlooked that in at least four of her five final appearances she is clothed as a pilgrim, making the identification all the more explicit. The passage itself speaks of earning virtue from sacrifice – a phenomenon referred to elsewhere in the play as ‘inspired merit’ – A succinct definition of the catholic theology of grace. Like the other passages examined however, this text is not without ambiguity. Quite how Helena, a Frenchwoman, can explain her presence in Florence by saying she is on the way to Santiago is never explained. At a more symbolic level, it must be said that she is not a true pilgrim at all, and her letter is misleading in that she has no intention of setting her husband free, but fully intends to meet with him and re-establish their marriage. The pilgrim garb is perhaps the garment of the impostor, a mantle of convenience only adopted to meet a secular, rather than a sacred purpose.

The final text I wish to refer to comes from the character of Edgar in King Lear. Often regarded as a problematic character in view of the many disguises and voices he adopts in the course of the play, he in fact represents hope and the future. It is he who is allocated the task of uniting the shattered kingdom at the end of the drama, of repairing the damage caused by Lear’s neglect, the mishandled succession and the war with France. That he is able to accept this responsibility represents a major advance for one who at the start of the play was gullible enough to accept anything his manipulative brother Edmond told him. His transformation seems to be directly linked to the extraordinary mental and physical journey he undertakes in the course of the play, encountering the poor, the mentally deranged, his blinded and estranged father, the fallen King as well taking on soldiers of the ruling corrupt regime. Fascinatingly, he describes this journey as ‘my pilgrimage’ (5.3.195) and we can readily see how apposite this identification is: a physical journey leading to inner growth.

What then are we to make of these fleeting references to pilgrimage ? While very little in Shakespeare is free of ambiguity, at the very least we can say that he was familiar with one aspect of the iconography of Catholicism and was aware of its potency in the popular imagination. Furthermore, while we should understand the necessity for playwrights to employ strong visual images in order to maximise the engagement with the imagination of the audience, it may well be the case that these apparently supportive references to pilgrimage go some way to suggest the debt Shakespeare owed to the ideas and mind-set of pre-Reformation Catholicism.

John Price

7 October 2001