Uncorking a Fierce Nerd Battle

Was the esteemed William a Papist? A new book says he was. Link. Excerpt:

Clare Asquith - or Viscountess Asquith, to give her the proper title - has done something that has dropped an almighty stone into the tranquil waters of academia and created ripples that will spread far and wide. She's been labelled a "conspiracy theorist" by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian and accused of "floating above the facts" by Professor Stanley Wells on the Today programme. For Asquith has written a book which, play by play, sets out to prove that Shakespeare was a papist. . . .

The book has taken her five years to write, but Asquith dates her inspiration to a moment in Russia in the 1970s where she quite candidly admits that her husband, Raymond, the great-grandson of the prime minister Herbert Asquith, was a spy.

"That moment, when we first arrived in Russia, I have vivid memories of my husband being taken aside by a member of the British embassy, who had been there for ages, and having explained to him real secrets, things other people simply didn't know - who were genuinely dissidents and who weren't. This sudden immersion in the covert world was a deep experience; we had people following us down the street, decoys and counter-decoys. It was a terribly complicated shadow world."

With her husband, she used to go to the theatre and watch dissident drama, disguised to seem favourable to the state or just irrelevant to contemporary politics. It suddenly dawned on Asquith that if Soviet artists could dissent without it being obvious to censors, the same would almost certainly have happened through history - including during the repression of Catholics in reformation England.

Thanks, NC Register.