Woodward: Shakespeare and Religion

My wife and I encounter at least ten reasons a day to be glad we home school our children. The most recent occasion of rejoicing for me was the text I'm using to teach Twelfth Night to our eleventh-grade daughter. It's a highly respected and widely used edition of the play, part of the Oxford School Shakespeare series, complete with copious and illuminating notes on the text, and appendices that offer suggestions for classwork, outside research projects, and -- here's where the problem presents itself -- "background" information on Shakespeare's England. I'm beginning to learn that one man's (excuse me -- one person's) "background" is another person's collection of ideological hobbyhorses.

The text's "background" information on the subject of "Religion" contains this bit of historical analysis:

Following Henry VIII's break away from the Church of Rome, all people in England were able to hear the church services in their own language. The Book of Common Prayer was used in every church, and an English translation of the Bible was read aloud in public. The Christian religion had never been so well taught before! [exclamation point in the original]

Where to begin? "The Book of Common Prayer was used in every church." True, because Roman Catholic churches had all been destroyed and outlawed. "An English translation of the Bible was read aloud in public." That "in public" is a nice rhetorical touch, suggesting that reading the Bible in public, or in English, or in public in English, had been impossible under the tyrannical "Church of Rome." In fact, English Catholics had an English New Testament 29 years before the King James Bible was published. As for the assertion that "the Christian religion had never been so well taught before," that is a matter of prudential judgment, as we Catholics say. And the prudential judgment of the Oxford School Shakespeare series on this point (in the prudential judgment of this Catholic) leaves something to be desired.

But then there is this:

Attendance at divine service was compulsory. By such means, the authorities were able to keep some check on the populace -- ensuring a minimum of orthodox instruction through the official "Homilies" which were regularly preached from the pulpits of all parish churches throughout the realm.

"A minimum of orthodox instruction" sounds about right.

There is no such thing as unbiased history. Home-schooled children, at least, know that, and they know what their teachers' biases are. Government-schooled children are allowed -- no, encouraged -- to believe that all biases have been conscientiously purged from the intellectual atmosphere in which they breathe. That is the most dangerous intellectual atmosphere of all.