Abstract
shakespeare’s indebtedness to Samuel Harsnet’s A Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures for material embodied in the Tom o’ Bedlam passages has been universally recognized for more than two centuries.1 However, despite the long availability of evidence proving his intimate acquaintance with the Declaration,no substantial reason for his interest in this one particular book has been thus far advanced. The wide scattering of page locations at which he found names and phrases later copied into Tom’s part2 indicates he read the whole of it. Yet the main tenor of the work is cast in a key into which Shakespeare neither in King Lear nor in any other of his plays allowed himself to modulate — that of partisan religious controversy. Of all the literature he can be shown to have digested, the Declaration has the distinction of being the one piece of polemical divinity.
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A Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures, to with-draw the harts of her Majesties Subjects from their allegeance, and from the truth of Christian Religion professed in England, under the pretence of casting out deuils. Practised by Edmunds, alias Weston a Jesuit, and diuers Romish Priests his wicked associates. (London, 1603). An Argument and an Epistle “To the Seduced Catholiques of England” precede the first chapter. Theobald first made the discovery of Shakespeare’s debt, publishing his discovery in the 1733 edition of King Lear (The Works of Shakespeare,V, pp. 163–164, n. 29). Both Johnson and Steevens later in the century added further instances of Shakespeare’s borrowings from Harnset. Malone went further than any other eighteenth-century editor in adducing concrete proofs of Shakespeare’s indebtedness. “He has used the very words” of Harsnet’s Declaration Malone observed (The Plays and Poems,1790, viii, 589, 0. 2). Malone listed eight specific locations in the Declaration where he found instances of Shakespeare’s borrowings. See also Kenneth Muir, “Samuel Harsnett and King Lear,” Review of English Studies,new ser., H, 3 (January, 1951), P. 21-
Declaration,pp. 47, 49, 136, 194-195, 225, 268, 278. (See Malone, viii, 597, n. 6; 594, n. 9; 619, n. 3; 603, n. 5; 603, n. 5; 597, n. 8; 619, n. 2; for discussion of each specific borrowing in seriatim order.)
Fray Diego de Yepes was Philip II’s confessor. His work has never been translated, and thus far seems to have eluded the scholarly attention that it deserves. Yepes stated Debdale’s exorcisms were a means of reconciling hundreds to the church (p. 97; cf. p. 898).
Historia particular de la persecuciOn de Inglaterra (Madrid, 99), p. 104.
Harsnet, op. cit.,p. 176.
Aid,p. 193.
Ibid., p,199.
At the time of his execution she still had a purse of gold of his intended for this purpose (p. 205).
Ibid.,p. 67.
At the time of writing his exposé Harsnet was chaplain to Bishop Bancroft of London. After Bancroft’s elevation to the archbishopric of Canterbury the ensuing year (1604) Harsnet made steady ecclesiastical progress; he became bishop of Chichester the year before Bancroft’s death. During Charles I’s reign he was made archbishop of York.
Richard Challoner, Memoirs of Missionary Priests,ed. by J. H. Pollen (London, 1924), p. 117.
The Foot out of the Snare,3rd edn. (London, 1624), P. 58 (recte 48).
Among them were the following: Harsnet’s own 1599 A Discovery of the Fraudulent practises of John Darrel… concerning the pretended possession and dispossession of William Somers.. detecting in some sort the deceitful! trade in these latter dayes of casting out Deuils; John Darrel’s 1599 The Trial! of Moist. Derrell.. To cleare him from the Imputation of teaching.. counterfeit possession of Diuells; Darrel’s 1600 A True Narration of the Strange and Grevons Vexation by the Devil, of 7. Persons in Lancashire; John Deacon and John Walker’s s 601 Dialogical! Discourses of Spirits and Divels, Declaring their proper essence, natures, dispositions, and operations: their possessions and dispossessions; and, of course, King James’s 1603 Daemonologie (issued as a reprint of the 1597 Edinburgh original).
E. I. Fripp, Shakespeare: Man and Artist (London, 1938), I, 180–181. Robert Debdale’s birthdate has been disputed. In 1579, according to the Douay Diaries (London, 1878, p. 159), he was adolescens. He had already before 1579 spent time in Rome as a student of theology, returning from Rome to Rheims in the company of William Kestel.
T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greek (Urbana, Ill., 1944), I, 482–483.
This letter (quoted by Fripp) read in part: “commending vnto you my especial’ friend Mr. Cottame, who hathe bene vnto me the to halfe of my lyfe. I cannot sufficiently commend vnto you his loving kyndnesse showed and bestowed vppon me. Wherefore I beseche you to take consayle of hyme in matters of great wayt.”
Fripp, Shakespeare’s Haunts (London, 1929), p. 30.
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Stevenson, R. (1958). Shakespeare’s Interest in Harsnet’s Declaration. In: Shakespeare’s Religious Frontier. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-3851-0_5
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