You’d think that by now, four hundred years later, everything that could be written about William Shakespeare has been written. Not so. A 2005 book by Shakespeare revisionist scholar Clare Asquith called Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare, gives us a whole new take on the bard, one that is chilling and that resonates disquietingly with events today.

Shakespeare’s plays have forever been regarded as unconnected to anything going on in the tumultuous politics of the England of his day. His plays were always set in some other place and some other time, and the characters seemed never directly drawn from the real world around him. Where other writers were exiled or executed for political commentary, Shakespeare never suffered even censure. That’s because, so the popular notion goes, he just wasn’t interested in his own contemporary politics, and his contemporary politics likewise left him alone.

Shakespeare the activist

But it is Asquith’s conclusion that in fact Shakespeare was deeply involved in the politics of his own day as a relentless activist, and that his plays are riddled with stinging condemnations of the Elizabethan regime, denunciations of Elizabethan policies, and even instructions and advice to dissidents plotting rebellions and assassinations. It’s all there, she shows, once you unlock the code by which he encrypted his messages to throw off the authorities. So well did he encrypt dissent in his plays, no one noticed till now.

Today’s directors often omit parts of some plays from their productions because they seem too ornamental, or seem to be unrelated tangents that only bore today’s mystified audiences. These are usually the parts, Asquith points out, that contain the juiciest commentary. It is no surprise that audiences not tuned in to the violent and dangerous politics swirling around England in the 1590s wouldn’t understand it. These parts were purposefully written that way to also bore and turn off the Elizabethan intelligence agents who also wouldn’t be privy to the codes implanted in the script and the references to the underground Catholic rebellion that Shakespeare was helping to foment.

Her book is entirely convincing, but one would need a newly annotated script to read along during a production to get all the references and to see what Shakespeare is actually suggesting. (Usually, Asquith is pointing out, he is advising the underground Catholic rebellion to hold tight and await a Spanish invasion before rising up to behead the Protestant regime of Elizabeth, and not to move too soon for fear of acting with no foreign back-up and only engendering a more brutal repression as a result.) For example, one would need to know in advance that any minor character described as short and dark represented Protestantism, while any minor character described as tall and fair represented Catholicism.

Shakespeare’s hidden history

Shakespeare had a second purpose as well, Asquith ably reveals. He feared that the true history of what happened to England in the late 16th century would forever be lost to memory, once the Protestant repression was fully established. His second aim in his plays was to conceal and thus transmit into the future his version of history, the one that usually doesn’t make it into official records since it’s the victors whose history is recorded, never the vanquished, and he worried, correctly as it turns out, that Catholic England was being slowly vanquished. In Shakespeare’s version of history, as Asquith teases out of his plays once she has deciphered his code, the Reformation is a disaster for England. The establishment of a Protestant regime under Elizabeth destroyed the essential Catholic soul of the nation, and years into Elizabeth’s brutal rule, still a majority of the English were secretly Catholic and longed for the return of a Catholic monarch—even if it was brought by a Spanish military invasion and a Vatican-orchestrated regime-change.

Until a few years ago, none of this would have been understandable or appreciated by us today. Code to conceal hidden histories? Dissent disguised as a play? Popular culture deployed as a secret vehicle for dissemination of counter-culture ideas? But certainly in our post-9/11 world, it’s all becoming familiar again. Inside the City of London, Shakespeare couldn’t stage his most daring plays, but after buying and moving the Globe Theatre to a spot just outside the legal jurisdiction of London authorities, he was much freer to stage plays that, to tuned-in contemporary audiences, would have been obvious critiques of a sensitive and defensive government across the Thames.

Don’t cross the Thames

Similarly, we find today we can openly criticize the ruling regime on the internet and in meetings on the issues regarding the causes of terrorism, war, and 9/11, but take one step toward the House of Parliament or the White House, and firestorms of official condemnation flare up. Ron Paul, previously a very much-unknown Republican congressman from Texas, but now a presidential candidate, spoke up at party debates about the role of historic American foreign policy in creating conditions that would lead to resentment toward America abroad, particularly in the Middle East, where, he pointed out, America has long meddled.

The result was widespread condemnation in the media and a movement within the party to bar Paul from appearing at any future Republican presidential debates. This is despite the fact that Fox News polling showed viewers thought Paul had, hands down, won the debate. The reaction of the mainstream media to Paul’s assertions echoed the reaction I incurred when I emerged as a candidate in the Canadian federal election. In both cases, as in Shakespeare’s time, Paul and I had been saying or writing all manner of dissent from the official line with no notice, but it was only when we moved toward official power—only when we moved across the Thames—did we, like Shakespeare when he staged his plays for official audiences in the City of London itself, incur a ferocious wrath to back us off that path.

Democratic institutions and civil rights were well-developed in Shakespeare’s England, and the regime was not able to bluntly kill dissenters. The game very much became one of appealing to popular opinion—to fight over the hearts and minds of the English. The instruments of battle were not so much the sword and fire, but were already in his time the sound-bite, the metaphor, and the analogy. Yet the stakes were extremely high: the officials surrounding Elizabeth and the elite in English society who supported them faced revolt, loss of property, and potentially loss of life if the public was not won over fast enough to the new history, the new religion, and the new regime.

Though the dissent and rebellion-plotting parts of Asquith’s examination of Shakespeare’s work is thrilling to tune into, the most compelling part is her revelations of Shakespeare’s attempts to record a different contemporary history than the one being officially recorded, and his attempts to conceal his history so that it survives for re-emergence in another, safer, era.

Our own looming hidden history

The concept of competing histories has been a foreign one to us for a long time. But it is newly returned. Look at how 9/11 and the wars it has spawned is going down into our own history books, and look at how officials react to any popular attempts to record what for many is the more accurate history of our own times. We are getting closer to Shakespeare’s problems everyday: already attempts to speak and write about a different history are being met with accusations of treason and aiding and abetting an enemy, official crimes that carry the same penalties Shakespeare risked.

For now it seems safe to write and publish on the Internet almost anything one wishes to, so long as one does not propose to run for political office. But the hearts and minds of the public are slowly being lost a little more every day to the official, and wrong, history.

We may be drawing near to a new era where the real history may have to be concealed in code in order to reach the ears of the public at all, and to ensure that future generations may be able to uncover it, if they can ever decipher the code in a more open and safer age—which may take 400 years, as it did for Shakespeare.