Shakespeare’s Recusancy

I have read Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets and about three-quarters of his plays - had to.

Joseph Pearce (1961-) gave textual evidence in his documentary on Shakespeare’s recusancy (2009):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quest_for_Shakespeare.

Clare Asquith (1951-) wrote about it. The Countess of Oxford and Asquith is an English independent scholar and author of Shadowplay: the Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare, (2005). It was the first book to claim that a subtext contains coded language used by the Catholic underground.

I find this plausible because Shakespeare’s mother remained a recusant in the face of grave danger and, facing the same risks, he would have maintained a cover to publish.

From Wikipedia –

“Asquith also detects in Shakespeare’s work a code used by the Jesuit underground in England which took the form of a mercantile terminology wherein priests were ‘merchants’ and souls were ‘jewels’, those pursuing them were ‘creditors’, and the Tyburn gallows, where the members of the underground died, was called ‘the place of much trading’. The Jesuit underground used this code so their correspondences looked like innocuous commercial letters, and Asquith believed that Shakespeare also used this code….”

More from Wikipedia –

“John Finnis and Patrick Martin have argued more recently that Catholic martyr Anne Line is the eponymous phoenix of The Phoenix and the Turtle and her husband Roger is the eponymous turtle. They believe, with Asquith, that the poem’s ‘bird of loudest lay’ represents the composer William Byrd and that the crow is the Jesuit Henry Garnet.”
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Lady Oxford is the eldest of five children of the architect Francis Pollen (1926–1987) and Marie Therese Sheridan (later Viscountess Sidmouth, wife of the 7th peer). She lives in Somerset with her husband, former diplomat Raymond Asquith, 3rd Earl of Oxford and Asquith.

Sorry, William. To this day, I would rather read other poetry.