When most of us think of Shakespeare we don’t immediately connect him with the saints. We might think of the play Sir Thomas More, on which he collaborated with other playwrights and which was banned during his lifetime for its volatile pro-Catholic perspective. We might connect him with the positive portrayal of Edward the Confessor in Macbeth or the less than positive portrayal of Joan of Arc in the first part of Henry VI.
In Macbeth, he shows Edward as the perfect exemplar of the Christian king in contrast to the malevolent and maniacal Macbeth, who serves as an exemplar of the Machiavellian “Prince”. In Henry VI, he adopts the contemporary English view of the French heroine as a heretic, though this is not, as many critics like to claim, an indication of the Bard’s anti-Catholicism. On the contrary, the negative view of the Maid of Orléans was held by almost all Englishmen when almost all Englishmen were Catholic; it was part of the national mythos to demonise the weird woman whom the French adored.
