Graham Holderness - The Faith of William Shakespeare

All quotations from Shakespeare, including act, scene, and line references, are from The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition , edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997). Quotations from the Bible, with book, chapter and verse, are from the Geneva Bible, first published 155760 but first published in England as a complete Bible in 1576. Quotations from The Book of Common Prayer are taken from the 1559 edition, and the quotations from the Thirty-nine Articles from the 1662 edition of The Book of Common Prayer . Quotations from John Calvins Institutes of the Christian Religion are taken from the translation by Henry Beveridge (1845).

William Shakespeare was a Christian. He was baptized, married, and buried in the Church of England. In his dramatic works he drew extensively on the English Bible and on The Book of Common Prayer . The world views that emerge from his plays lie firmly within the Christian universe of sixteenth-century Europe, except when he was reconstructing pre-Christian societies such as those of Ancient Greece or Rome. Notwithstanding the familiar claims that his work is universally valuable and of permanent significance (claims which continue to be made by proponents of the present as a secular, post-Christian age), it remains firmly located within the Christian culture of his time.

For over a century following Shakespeares death, while his reputation as one of the greatest British writers grew exponentially, no one thought to comment on his religious beliefs, or lack of them. His Anglican Christianity was simply taken for granted. In the 1780s, scholars editing and interpreting Shakespeares texts began to make observations on his use of religious language and his references to religious doctrines, but they did so without registering any sense of difficulty or awareness of doctrinal conflict. Whether it was Protestant Dr Johnson or Roman Catholic Alexander Pope, Shakespeares early editors and critics saw nothing controversial about his religious opinions. When we consider that the intervening period, between 1616 and the 1780s, had seen religious divisions in Britain deepen to the point of civil war, the abolition of a Catholic-leaning monarchy and the execution of a king, the establishment of a Protestant republic, the restoration of the Stuarts, the deposition of James II for his Catholic sympathies, and the importation of a foreign Protestant monarchy this assumption of an untroubled continuity of religious belief is perhaps remarkable. Eighteenth-century intellectuals seem to have found Shakespeares religious beliefs both congenial and uncontroversial.

Around the middle of the nineteenth century, about the time Christianity began to come under attack from new scientific discoveries and theories such as evolution, scholars began to assert that Shakespeares religious beliefs were of an orthodox Protestant complexion, and that he was a representative product of a Protestant Golden Age of culture and political stability governed by Queen Elizabeth I. Simultaneously, other scholars began to claim that Shakespeare grew up in a still largely Roman Catholic context that had not really been supplanted by the Reformation. At the same time the more enduring and influential hypothesis that Shakespeare was agnostic in matters of religion began to emerge. It was argued that he had the wisdom and prescience to understand that many of the doctrinal and liturgical controversies of his time were historically relative, and of no fundamental importance. In 1866 the Edinburgh Review characterized Shakespeare as a man who avoided the bitter struggles of the Reformation the repeated lurching between Rome and Geneva that he became impatient with the harbour to which he was moored by the accidents of birth, and set sail for the wider ocean of humanity. Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle concurred in his Goethe essay: Shakespeare is no sectarian. Here Shakespeare has been reinvented as a typical free-thinking, non-sectarian, and humanist Victorian intellectual.