Always amazed and appalled when I think about what Elizabethans were willing to suffer (and inflict) in the name of their religion. Grisly torture, grislier and torturous deaths, disembowelment, hanging, beheading, drawing and quartering, immolation. Catholics took the worst of it during the time Shakespeare was learning and plying the playwright’s trade; Protestants, a generation before. Catholics and Protestants both went to their deaths or sent others to their deaths, all over how much God had invested in a piece of magic bread.
Still reading Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare and I’m having no trouble imagining living in Shakespeare’s day, except for that. It’s not that I can’t imagine people doing all that to each other. I can’t imagine caring enough to do it. Of course, much of it was really about power not God. It was political more than it was religious, whatever the martyrs and martyr-makers told themselves. But it just seems to me that it would have been easy for anyone of either sect to pretend to be practicing whatever was in favor at the moment.
“Are you Protestant or Catholic?”
“Yes.”
Probably that’s what most people did.
It’s what I’d have done.
But then I’m imagining that if I’d grown up in the late 16th Century I’d have somehow grown up into a 21st Century American.
But it’s a big mistake, an act of self-delusion and self-flattery to imagine that if you’d lived "back then", you’d have known better. You’re imagining that you’d have been you, that is, the you you know. Think you know. The you who from birth to wherever you are in life’s passage has lived in a world lit bright as midday in the middle of the night by electric light, in which medicine works, where news travels instantly around the world, and not in a time when most people couldn’t read, when they were helpless against the regular outbreaks of plague, when friends and relatives in the next county over where farther away and harder to get word to or from than people an ocean apart are today, when executions were state and Church sanctioned atrocities, grisly, grotesque, intentionally cruel, appallingly frequent, and a form of public entertainment.
No wonder people back then believed Heaven and Hell were as real as London. They lived in not just a demon-haunted world but an angel-infested and God-bothered one. They believed the borders between this world and either of the next were permeable and devils and angels were roaming back and forth between here and whichever place they called home and taking living human beings with them as they went. Essentially this meant they believed that this world wasn’t quite real, and you can hardly blame them for that.
I half hope so myself sometimes, 21st Century American that I am.
Comments