Saint Will
I should have expected it, and in some ways I did. William Shakespeare was an Anglican. Hang on: that’s actually a controversial statement for some. I may receive comments and messages about how William Shakespeare was actually a secret Catholic or actually not himself at all. We will save this discussion for another time. Short version in the meantime: Shakespeare was born in what was then an Anglican parish in the English countryside. He was baptized at a church named for the Trinity. He lived in a time when it was legally required for folks to attend church services regularly. He was sponsored at various times and by various government officials with direct ties to the Church of England. He took money from and wrote about issues that interested those people. His plays demonstrate the kind of sophisticated and charming insight into ecclesial life that you’d expect from a guy swimming in all that soup and who has also since become known as, you know, a pretty good writer.
I go to a church also named for the Trinity. As it happens, this church has hosted a lot of Shakespeare plays from my own theatre company over the last decade or so. We’ve performed in the back meadow or in a little grove of trees between the parish hall and the rectory. Sometimes, we’ve even shifted all of the church stuff around and set up right in the nave and right on the giant labyrinth in the middle of it. We’ve put up curtains or our playhouse and done the thing right there. Antony & Cleopatra. Midsummer. Merry Wives.
In my work both in churches and in theatre companies and as a college professor of theatre and the humanities, I find myself in conversation and practice in the exact spots where liturgy, ritual, and theatre intersect. At this intersection, we talk about how everyone wears a special costume. There’s music. There’s a script (or, depending on the context, Scripture). There are roles to play. There is blocking — church folks at the seminary I attend even use that word, to my great delight, to describe the movements of the liturgical leaders around the space. There’s a stage. Props. Specialized gestures. There’s the act. It happens over there in the emptier space while people gather to watch.
Dr. Paul Woodruff, a theatre geek who happened to have taught humanities at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of the book, The Necessity of Theatre, offers a broad definition of what theatre is: the art of watching and being watched. With that definition in hand, church is theatre. Parades are theatre. Classes are theatre. Sports. Almost anywhere a community gathers.
You’ve no doubt picked up on the fact that I’ve run a theatre company in the town where I live for most of the last twelve years. It is, I can tell you, not unlike running a church. Many of the needs are the same in these creative, communal, nonprofit spaces. More on that another day.
And so I say all this to say that I should have expected it, and I suppose I guessed at it a bit. But not all of it clicked. I expected to find at seminary a lot of connection between theatre and church, and I’ve been pleasantly rewarded in that expectation. But I didn’t expect so much Shakespeare. Oh, my Lord, he’s everywhere.
He came up in a friendly debate about the difference between Rite I and Rite II. If you’re not familiar, shoot me a comment or a message and we’ll talk. Simply, Rite I is older language closer to the prayer book put forth in the decades before Shakespeare became Shakespeare and is full of that Tudor and Jacobean language that sounds like his writing (because he sounds like it). Rite II is more contemporary language straight out of the florid 1970s.
He came up in a conversation about favorite quotations. It was an icebreaker thing and because folks know my background, they asked specifically for a Shakespeare quotation. My brain doesn’t work that way. I punted and gave them something about the famous speech from Macbeth. This kind of stuff happens all the time in my life. To be fair, I’ve asked for it. It’s what happens when it’s what you teach. And when you’ve built a theatre company upon those words. I get it. He’s everywhere. Inescapable.
There’s a longer conversation to have sometime about how Shakespeare — particularly as practiced by theatre companies in the United States and the United Kingdom — is, in fact, a kind of humanist church. And that plays are (mostly humanist) liturgies. This makes a lot of sense and probably requires a much deeper dive. Simple thesis in the meantime: if you spend your life surrounded by liturgies — specifically Anglican ones — in a theocracy where your patron is the head of the state Church, your work is going to be liturgical.
And yet I flew across the continent and have made space in my life and theatre company for me to do some other things. Even though those things will always be informed by Shakespeare because of my background, I’ve up until now thought of those things as useful tools. Both the church and life in Shakespearean theatre are Ways with Words. Both are communally oriented. Both negotiate life among people on the social margins (and relatively wealthy patrons).
In my own work, I’ve also thought a lot about how we might, for lack of a better phrase, ordain the work of Shakespeare or theatre or making spreadsheets or doing taxes or being a lawyer or a burger flipper or a teacher or a cop or any thing into a sacred life. I think this is all true and possible.
But I was still surprised last Sunday when I walked into a church — St. Gregory’s of Nyssa, San Francisco — and looked up to see one William Shakespeare in iconographic form, halo and all.
In their booklet that accompanies the frescoes, the church says:
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) Profoundly spiritual Elizabethan playwright and poet. We celebrate him particularly for his understanding of the work of grace and the dynamics of redemption (April 23).
April 23rd is also Saint George’s Day. Saint George is the patron saint of England (and a few other things). When folks were trying to pencil in Shakespeare as the Genius Poet Boy Laureate Wunderkind of All Things England, there were some options about the exact placement of his birth and death dates, which no doubt happened around April 23rd in their respective years, but were almost certainly not both on the same calendar date. So these folks adopted Shakespeare into St. George’s (and therefore England’s birthday). Kind of a reverse ordination of the national poet.
There’s a way to look at that move cynically, almost as though Shakespeare gets caught up in English nationalist propaganda. This is not not true. But it’s also not the whole truth.
The whole truth requires a wider, softer gaze. On the ceiling of St. Gregory’s I see joined with Shakespeare Saint Patrick, Saint Paul, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Merton, Martin Luther, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Below, on the floor of the octagonal room in St. Gregory’s that holds the altar, when we get to the part of the service where we celebrate communion, all participants — even under-caffeinated and introverted seminarians who’ve just shown up — are invited to dance around the altar in procession. Our moves on the floor are mirrored by the lifted leg move of all the saints on the walls and ceiling. It is a communion of all saints, including unusual Shakespeareans.
When we’re done, everyone has a kind of halo. Not the kind in paintings, of course. Maybe the kind that feels like energy or joy or belonging.
There’s a way to think of belonging in tiny little compartments. I belong to the Shakespeare tradition. I’m an Episcopalian. I go to this place for tacos. I went to this school. I am in this department. I joined this theatre company. All around us is the impulse to compartmentalize.
But there’s also an invitation to reintegrate. To see the overlaps in the proverbial Venn diagram. To know we belong to things in multiplicity and as polyglots of a kind. And to see how things belong to each other.
O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do: they pray.