Hiding from darkness

"......for here have been 
Some six or seven, who did hide their faces 
Even from darkness."

                                   Julius Caesar       (II, i)

Caesar's assassins gather in the night, and Shakespeare's fertile imagination has Brutus' wife Portia expressing her bewilderment over the meaning of all this. She reminds Brutus that in the moment of their marriage she and he became one, and that he is obstinate in denying her any explanation for such ominous behavior. She's scared. Who can blame her?

The cloak of night frequently provided Shakespeare with the threatening imagery that many of his scenes (or in the case of Macbeth, almost an entire play) demanded. Shakespeare knew that once the darkness robbed a man of his sight, the demons of his own mind emerged to dance around him.

Direful images of things hidden were also useful to the playwright, and for good reason: Shakespeare lived in an age rife with religious tumult. Over much of Europe, Protestants and Catholics were at each others' throats over matters of faith and liturgy.

England's Queen Elizabeth and her successor King James I were both targets of sanguinary-minded conspiracies. It isn't surprising that Shakespeare made "Rumour, painted full of tongues" a character at the induction of one of his plays; he certainly must have become familiar with the type simply by keeping his ears open on the streets of London.

With Protestantism ascendant in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, Jesuit priests had surreptitiously entered the country with the intention of returning English hearts and minds to the Catholic fold. Pope Pius V had excommunicated Elizabeth in 1570, which turned out to be a bad move: it all the more endeared her to her people, while the persecution of Catholics escalated to a level not seen in the earliest years of Elizabeth's reign.

Pictured above, in the collection of Agecroft Hall, is an English silver communion chalice and paten that Ian Pickford, an expert on early English silver, dated to about 1560, with a provenance in Coventry in the Midlands that Shakespeare knew. Pickford visited Agecroft back in 2001, and examined this and a number of other pieces in the collection.

Jesuit priests had to go underground or face death in Shakespeare's England. They often carried their own small kits for celebrating Mass with the Catholic faithful scattered across the country. The kits would frequently include a chalice smaller than Agecroft's, with a paten for holding the eucharistic bread, along with oil for anointing, priestly vestments, and related liturgical items, all designed to be easily hidden.

A clandestine network of Catholic safehouses across England provided the Jesuits with tiny, cramped hiding places referred to as "priest holes." Many were made by Nicholas Owen, a carpenter who always worked alone and at night, making an untold number of extraordinarily well-designed hiding places that saved many priests from capture. Baddesley Clinton, a large house in Shakespeare's Warwickshire, has several such priest holes made by Owen, with possibly more still undiscovered. Centuries later, Owen would be canonized as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church.

There is a remarkable account involving a priest hole located under an upstairs fireplace in one of these Catholic safehouses in Essex. A search party was literally dismantling portions of the house in their efforts to apprehend anyone in hiding. The searchers became fatigued and, to stay warm, lit a fire in the fireplace, sending embers down on the hidden Jesuit. The priest could probably well imagine the horrible torture and death he would face at the hands of his captors, and he managed to keep quiet and remain hidden. Nicholas Owen himself died a martyr to his faith in the Tower of London in 1606.

Agecroft Hall has its own priest hole, a hiding place made just a few years ago to help serve as a reminder of an age when religious convictions could be matters of life and death.