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The idea that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic was first developed by Richard Simpson in the second half of the 19th century, but it remained a marginal notion until the eminent Shakespearean, E. A. J. Honigmann, defended a particular documentary argument for it in 1985. The idea thus entered the mainstream, which has since been swollen by a flood of books on the topic. They have also been encouraged by the work of serious Tudor historians, especially Eamon Duffy and Christopher Haigh, who have documented the vitality of pre-Reformation religion in England and seriously challenged the previously received view that the "old faith" was happily thrown off by a people in bondage to oppressive superstition and ignorance. Duffy has himself endorsed the argument for Shakespeare's Catholicism, and the prospect of capturing the period's greatest writer for "traditional religion" (as Duffy calls pre-Reformation faith) has proved irresistible to Catholic writers in particular.
Joseph Pearce joins their number with The Quest for Shakespeare, the first of two books he proposes on the subject. The present one, he tells us, is historical, and the next will interpret Shakespeare's plays and poems. He sets himself a high standard for the historical investigation. Setting out "to show objectively who Shakespeare was, and what his deepest beliefs were," Pearce asks that his suppositions "be judged from the perspective of the facts presented"; if any disjunction between fact and supposition occurs, "I will hold myself to blame for a failure of scholarship." Such an explicit statement of his own expectation seems to invite the reader to ask if the book measures up to it.
Unlike Honigmann, Duffy, and Haigh, Pearce is a newcomer to early modern English history and literature, and his lack of familiarity with the context shows in several ways. He has previously published on writers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where his expertise seems to lie. His consistent use of the terms "Catholic" and "Anglican" to describe the conflicting religious parties of late 16th- and early 17th-century England is a Victorian anachronism that Duffy explicitly avoids by using "traditional religion" and "reformation religion." At one point Pearce compounds the anachronism by misleadlingly importing the distinction between "low" and "high" church from several centuries later as parallel terms to "protestant" and "Catholic." Identifying the "secularist state" as the source of evil in King Lear is problematic; historians have pointed out that the idea of the state postdates Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Beyond terminology, Pearce shows his lack of familiarity with the subject he addresses when he refers to Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde, the source of As You Like It, as a "play … published in 1590 but performed earlier." A quick look at Geoffrey's Bullough's Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (never referred to by Pearce) would have confirmed that Rosalynde is a prose romance, not a play. If the facts matter, then reporting them accurately and using appropriate terminology are important. In Pearce's own words, "If we insist on studying history through the prejudices and presumptions of our own day we will succeed only in misinterpreting the motives and purpose of historical actions."
Pearce raises further questions about his scholarship by relying almost entirely on two or three secondary sources that have already interpreted the evidence to support his supposition. Large portions of the book borrow heavily from Mutschmann and Wentersdorf's Shakespeare and Catholicism (1952) and Michael Wood's Shakespeare (2003), with considerable reliance on Richard Wilson's Secret Shakespeare (2004). Pearce gives no indication of knowing T. W. Baldwin's study of Elizabethan grammar school education, William Shakespere's Small Latine and Less Greeke (1944), but turns instead to "the historian Michael Wood" for information about Shakespeare's education, though Wood is a documentary filmmaker for television who himself relies largely on the primary research of others. Pearce appropriately cites Honigmann on the theory that William Shakeshafte of Lancashire may have been the young William Shakespeare of Warwickshire, but he omits the exhaustive collection of primary information, Records of Early Drama: Lancashire (1991), in which David George points out that Shakeshafte the "player" could as easily have been a musician as an actor. To his credit, Pearce acknowledges the rebuttal to Honigmann by the Warwickshire archivist, Robert Bearman, in Shakespeare Quarterly (2002), but he dismisses Bearman on the questionable basis of Michael Wood's authority. At the same time, Pearce omits mention of Bearman's recent articles questioning other documentary support for Shakespeare's putative Catholicism—one on the "spiritual testament" of John Shakespeare, the poet's father (Shakespeare Survey, 2003), and the other on John Shakespeare's business dealings (Shakespeare Quarterly, 2005). Either Pearce does not know these contrary arguments, or the authorities he relies on have not answered them.
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