SHAKESPEARE AN ANTI-VATICANIST CATHOLIC (IV)

In the heat of August, I am turning the pages of a book whose pages hold the scent of my beloved's fingers, some notes in the margins.

Memories of when we were both students in the city of Hull are stamped on it, one of the ugliest cities in the Kingdom but which was the scene of a great love. Memories of 441 Beverley Road. She is now an old lady and me a poor decrepit Spaniard living with a woman who yells at me etc.

But I am straying from the subject. Today I am going to talk about Shakespeare's Christian values. Perhaps he was a hidden Catholic, subtle, imperceptible to all the showbiz that hung around The Globe in London.

The playwright could not be a papist. Popery is a term repugnant to any good Englishman who believes that God should not be mixed with politics. This is revealed in his conversations, and is evident in the respect he feels for the ancient liturgy, the epacts, the missals, the saints of the Christian calendar.

He lived in a deeply religious England in changing times and, unlike Spanish writers, almost all of them of converted origin, he sought his inspiration in characters from classical mythology. Not in the Bible.

He was a humanist who honours the Seraphic Order in the person of Friar Lawrence, the humble Franciscan expert in medicinal herbs, who marries the two lovers in secret in his cell. Romeo goes to him to ask for advice to cure his anguish: he has fallen in love with a Capulet. He has gotten himself into a real mess. Is there a remedy for this? I thought you came to talk to me about Rosalind.

There is no Rosalyn, my father.

But where were you all night, baranda?

Another character described wonderfully according to the Catholic code of values ​​where faith coexists with the picaresque and the celestinesque is Juliet's wet nurse.

With her tasty speeches she puts Chaucer's Old Merry England and all medieval poetry on stage. Her sparkling paragraphs are received by Mercucho with a certain skepticism and words of strong caliber:

─ Bawd, bawd (whore, whore)

In the 16th century there were many women practicing the oldest profession throughout Europe.

Of course that was the century of love as I show in my book “La Lozana Andaluza”.

Trotaconventos near the barracks, brothels door to door with the cathedrals in the humid neighborhoods and soldaderas who returned to sweet Albion after having contaminated a multitude of lansquenets in the Sack of Rome or in the Siege of Vienna against the Turk.

Shakespeare's works refer to all of this: the buboes of the French disease and the soldiers returning from the campaigns in Flanders.

The lexicon is almost infinite in the English language: hare (hare), whore, tarts, broads, wenches, boars, harlots etc. Juliet's mistress, who is older and plump but still good-looking, may have been part of this infinite group of greeters.

However, her husband Peter, a true gentleman, is about to draw his dagger when he hears Marcucho's insults against his wife. In the third act, she comes on stage to say that she has just spoken to Friar Lorenzo and the good Franciscan will marry them in his cell the next morning.

The wedding was clandestine, as was ours on an autumn afternoon in 1969 in Hornchurch.

Suzanne was beautiful. We were neither Romeo nor Juliet, but we felt like the happiest couple in the world.

Two rebels wounded by Cupid's dart in the hippie era, unconscious and crazy, ignoring social conventions. I long for them 54 years later.

Suzanne Hugh, the prettiest girl in England, deserved a wedding in style. I cry and regret the great sin of my life, that disaster and disrespect of my crazy youth, but things are beyond repair now.