Campion
In his biography of William Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt compares martyr St. Edmund Campion with the Bard:
[Campion] was a fanatic or, more accurately, a saint. And saints, Shakespeare understood all his life, were dangerous people.
Or perhaps, rather, it would be better to say that Shakespeare did not entirely understand saints, and that what he did understand, he did not entirely like. In the huge panoply of characters in his plays, there are strikingly few who would remotely qualify.
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There are many forms of heroism in Shakespeare, but ideological heroism - the fierce, self-immolating embrace of an idea or an institution - is not one of them.
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The only sainthood in which Shakespeare seems passionately to have believed throughout his life derives precisely from the subject matter and emotions that Campion wished his students at all costs to avoid: erotic sainthood.
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