Like the present Supreme Pontiff, William Shakespeare channeled an inner Franciscan. Despite Elizabethan persecution of Roman Catholics, the dramatic genius who, according to Harold Bloom, invented the human personality, gave several pivotal roles to characters belonging to an order that had virtually disappeared from England several generations earlier during Henry VIII’s first dissolution of the monasteries. These characters, while not leading protagonists, were much more than bit parts. Shakespeare took a huge political risk in overtly portraying them in their traditional garb onstage, where the royal censor, the Master of the Revels, might well have objected, demanded their removal, or even prosecuted the playwright’s company. What reasons, dramaturgical, political, and religious, might have led Shakespeare to take such a risk to his livelihood and person? And might those reasons explain what Pope Francis is now doing with—and how the world media and media consumers are responding to—his bold public-relations strokes?
Shakespeare’s most famous Franciscan character is Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet. He appears first in his cell, not praying lauds but ready to gather medicinal herbs at first light like that great natural philosopher, the Franciscan proto-scientist, Roger Bacon of Oxford. Filling up his “osier cage” with both “baleful weeds and precious-juicèd flowers,” he muses on theological paradoxes:
O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies
In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities;
For naught so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some
