Cartestian Elizabeth

We blame Descartes for the divided self of modernity, but perhaps we should blame Elizabeth I. In her book on the Book of Common Prayer, Ramie Targoff notes the limits of what Elizabeth demanded of her subjects: “so long as worshippers came to services on Sunday, they were free to believe whatever they chose.” Elizabeth, she notes, said she was reluctant to “make window’s in men’s souls.”

“The vision of selfhood that emerges from this narrative,” she concludes, “depends upon a deliberate dissociation of the individual’s private life from his or her public one: not only Catholic recusants and Puritan resistors, but middle-of-the-road English subjects were capable of sustaining a pretense of conformity that successfully masked their unreachable inwardness.”

Among the implications here is that the “recusant” instinct for veiling that many find in Shakespeare was much more widespread, and provides no evidence of Shakespeare’s Catholicism at all.