Clare Asquith, Countess of Oxford and Asquith (born Mary Clare Pollen; 2 June 1951) is an English independent scholar and author of Shadowplay: the Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare, in which she posited that Shakespeare was a covert Catholic, whose works contain coded language used by the Catholic underground, particularly England's Jesuits, but also appealed to the monarchy for toleration. Her book was the first to claim the existence of such a code as a subtext in Shakespeare.