The Reverend Edward Casaubon, in Middlemarch, working himself to death in pursuit of the Key to All Mythologies, is an awful warning to scholars who seek to reduce untidy and complex ideas to a system, with inevitably skewed results. Clare Asquith’s Shakespeare and the Resistance, the successor to her Shadowplay (2005), is in the line of descent from Ted Hughes’s maverick Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (1992), which proposed, with a mixture of insight and obfuscation, that Shakespeare’s narrative poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) engaged with mythical archetypes and occult Neoplatonism to dramatize the enmity between the Catholic and Puritan wings of the Elizabethan church.¹ Hughes stopped short of identifying Shakespeare with either party, but Asquith, who comes from a distinguished Catholic family, has no doubts. For her, the narrative poems must be understood as covert expressions of support for the earls of Southampton and Essex in their power struggle, at the late-Elizabethan court, with the faction led by William Cecil, Lord Burghley—Elizabeth’s chief minister and spymaster—and his son Robert. Southampton’s family was staunchly Catholic, and Essex attracted a following among Catholics; the Cecils were hard-line Protestants.

When Asquith wrote Shadowplay, she had just become aware of the powerful revisionist reading of English Reformation history, notably espoused by Eamon Duffy, as a shift of religious allegiance imposed by an autocratic regime upon a largely unwilling populace, rather than as the response of government to public outcry