As Jane Austen would say, it is a truth universally acknowledged, even among Shakespeare scholars, that Shakespeare is the great enigma in English literature. To some extent this truth was partially covered up during the long period of Shakespeare scholarship when any discussion of Shakespeare's religion was considered taboo. But in the past couple of decades this taboo has been lifted to the extent that the theme proposed for the biennial Shakespeare Conference at Stratford in the year 2000 was ‘Shakespeare and Religions’. On the other hand, so far from resolving the Shakespearian enigma, the recent weakening of the taboo has only served to bring it more prominently into the foreground of scholarly attention and discussion. And of all the plays that may be said to centre on this enigma, it hardly needs to be said that Hamlet is not only one among many but the one play that may be called uniquely so—as being the most problematic of all Shakespeare's so-called ‘problem plays’.

(John Macky, 1707)

(John Macky, 1725)

John Henry Newman's poem ‘On Oxford’ published within a section called ‘Champions of the Truth’ in the verse collection, Lyra Apostolica, which he edited in 1836, encapsulates Newman's vision of Oxford and its colleges. Oxford was portrayed in the poem as an embattled but triumphant ‘city on a hill’ (in spite of its valley location surrounded by hills); a bulwark against contemporary forces, religious, and political, which for Newman, seemed to threaten it in the 1830s. The poem reminds us that the Oxford Movement, the great movement of religious revival within the Church of England commonly dated from 1833, the movement which Newman famously led and inspired, was rooted in Newman's keen and abiding sense of place (genius loci, as he put it), of memory, tradition, ethos, and association.

When Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914 few could have foreseen that it would last four years or predicted the slaughter it would bring. The parishioners of the Catholic parish of St. Peter Seel St., in the docklands of south Liverpool, along with Catholics throughout the country, on the first Sunday of the war were exhorted to pray for peace. The assumption seemed to be that the war would be a short one. The lessons of Britain's last major conflict, the South African Wars at the turn of the nineteenth-century, seemed not to have impinged on popular imagination. it would, however, be only a relatively short space of time before the news of local young men ‘killed in action’ began to appear in the notice books of St. Peter's and other Catholic parishes, bringing a growing realisation that this war was ‘different’. Perhaps it would not end quickly and certainly as the horror of events in Belgium and France began to appear in the press, national, local and ‘confessional’, the conviction grew that indeed this was no ‘ordinary’ war. How did the leaders of the Catholic community respond? What guidance and comfort were offered to the community, which was largely working class, whose sons found themselves in the front line?