Wood on page 340 of his book cannot help concluding that he 'dyed a papist,' as the Anglican cleric Richard Davies claimed in the late 1600s. Then there is the Stratford man's 1613 purchase of the notoriously Catholic hideout the Blackfriar's Gatehouse. I was a little surprised because the thrust of his book is that the Stratford man was a hard-core Catholic to at least 1585, which means until August 1588 for all intents and purposes, and Wood is strongly impressed, as he stressed in his talk, with the defiant recusancy of the favorite daughter (Susan Shakespeare) right after the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. He then suddenly remarked: 'I do not know if he was a secret Catholic'. I mentioned that we had exchanged faxes in July 1998 on the Catholic Question (the text of Wood's reply to me was posted on HLAS not long ago). When I handed a copy of my book review essay to Wood before his lecture be was a bit stunned by its detailed analysis. The point of contention is Stanley Wells' open hostility to the secret Catholic Bard theory (see his Shakespeare: For All Time, reviewed in this issue by Ramon Jimenez) and Wood's strong emphasis in his new book-and-film combination entitled, In Search of Shakespeare, which focuses on the growing biographical evidence pointing to Shakespeare's strong, enduring and secret attachment to Roman Catholicism.

On October 29, Michael Wood lectured at the Hirshhorn Museum at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC on Shakespeare's purported Catholic faith, just two days after Stanley Wells had appeared (see the report on Wells' lecture in this edition of the newsletter, page 16).

Shakespeare by michael wood