Religious views of William Shakespeare

Shakespeare and his immediate family were conforming members of the established Church of England. When Shakespeare was young, his father, John Shakespeare, was elected to several municipal offices, serving as an alderman and culminating in a term as bailiff, the chief magistrate of the town council, all of which required being a church member in good standing, and he participated in whitewashing over the Catholic images in the Chapel of the Guild of the Holy Cross and taking down the rood screen some time in the 1560s or 1570s.[1][2]

Shakespeare's baptism and those of his siblings were entered into the parish church register, as were the births of his three children and the burials of family members. His brother Edmund, who followed him to London as an actor and died there, was buried in St Saviour's in Southwark "with a forenoone knell of the great bell", most likely paid for by the poet. As leaser of the parish tithes in Stratford, he was a lay rector of the church. He and his wife were buried in the church chancel, and a monument that included a half-figure bust of the poet was set into the north wall of the chancel.

Shakespeare failed twice to pay his taxes for St Helen's parish, Bishopsgate, London, where he is listed by name for the year 1596/7, and he is not among those “in any of the annual lists of residents of the Clink parish (St Saviour's) compiled by the officers who made the rounds to collect tokens purchased by churchgoers for Easter Communion, which was compulsory.”[3] An explanation is offered by historian Walter Godfrey, who suggests that the playwright's default at Bishopsgate was simply because he had moved to the Clink parish at the end of that year, where taxes were collected by the landowner (the bishop of Winchester) and not parish officials. The bishop then remitted the outstanding sum to Shakespeare's former parish "as a matter of convenience".[4]

In 1559, five years before Shakespeare's birth, the Elizabethan Religious Settlement finally severed the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church. In the ensuing years, extreme pressure was placed on England's Catholics to accept the practices of the Church of England, and recusancy laws made illegal any service not found in the Book of Common Prayer, including the Roman Catholic Mass.[5] In Shakespeare's lifetime there was a substantial and widespread quiet resistance to the newly imposed reforms.[6] Some scholars, using both historical and literary evidence, have argued that Shakespeare was one of these recusants.[7] Rowan Williams, former archbishop of Canterbury, thinks that Shakespeare had a "recusant Catholic background."[8][9]

Some scholars also believe there is evidence that several members of Shakespeare's family were recusant Catholics. The strongest evidence is a tract professing secret Catholicism signed by John Shakespeare, father of the poet. The tract was found in the 18th century in the rafters of a house which had once been John Shakespeare's, and was seen and described by the reputable scholar Edmond Malone. Malone later changed his mind and declared that he thought the tract was a forgery.[10] Although the document has since been lost, Anthony Holden writes that Malone's reported wording of the tract is linked to a testament written by Charles Borromeo and circulated in England by Edmund Campion, copies of which still exist in Italian and English.[11] Other research, however, suggests that the Borromeo testament is a 17th-century artefact (at the earliest dated from 1638), was not printed for missionary work, and could never have been in the possession of John Shakespeare.[12] John Shakespeare was listed as one who did not attend church services, but this was "for feare of processe for Debtte", according to the commissioners, not because he was a recusant.[13]

Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, was a member of a conspicuous and determinedly Catholic family in Warwickshire.[14] In 1606, his daughter Susanna was listed as one of the residents of Stratford who failed to take (Anglican) Holy Communion at Easter, which may suggest Catholic sympathies.[15] It may, however, also be a sign of Puritan sympathies; Susanna was, according to some statements, of a Puritanical bent.[16]

Four of the six schoolmasters at the grammar school of Shakespeare's youth, King's New School in Stratford, were Catholic sympathisers,[17] and Simon Hunt, who may have been one of Shakespeare's teachers, later became a Jesuit priest.[18] Thomas Jenkins, who succeeded Hunt as teacher in the grammar school, was a student of Edmund Campion at St John's College, Oxford. Jenkins's successor at the grammar school in 1579, John Cottam, was the brother of Jesuit priest Thomas Cottam.

John Aubrey, in 1693, reported that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster,[19] a tale augmented in the 20th century with the theory that his employer might have been Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire,[20] a prominent Catholic landowner who left money in his will to a certain "William Shakeshafte", referencing theatrical costumes and paraphernalia.[21] Shakespeare's grandfather Richard had also once used the name Shakeshafte. Peter Ackroyd adds that examinations of the marginal notes in the Hoghton family copy of Edward Hall's Chronicles, an important source for Shakespeare's early histories, "indicate the probability that Shakespeare and the annotator were the same man, but do not by any means prove it."[22]

In 1843, a presentation of Shakesperean religious extracts was published by Sir Frederick Beilby Watson and Frederic Dan Huntington as the Religious and Moral Sentences Culled from the Works of Shakespeare, Compared with Sacred Passages Drawn from Holy Writ.[59] This was an early work that, in contrast to Catholic-directed studies, sought for Protestant and biblical allusions in the works of the writer. In Watson's words, this was carried out "by proving from Shakespeare's own writings, that he lived and died as a true protestant," collecting "presumptive evidence that the tenets of the religion which he professed were not of the Roman Catholic persuasion."

A century later, Shakespeare editor and historian A. L. Rowse wrote a biography of Shakespeare where, similarly, he firmly asserted that the writer was not a secret Catholic, but a Protestant: "He was an orthodox, confirming member of the Church into which he had been baptised, was brought up and married, in which his children were reared and in whose arms he at length was buried".[60] Shakespeare had also become the godfather of William Walker in the Church of England, and he remembered his godson in his will with twenty shillings.[61]

Rowse identifies anti-Catholic sentiment in Sonnet 124, taking "the fools of time" in the last lines of this sonnet, "To this I witness call the fools of time, which die for goodness who have lived for crime", to refer to the many Jesuits who were executed for treason in the years 1594–95.[62] In regard to this, John Klause of Hofstra University accepts that Shakespeare intended "the fools of time" in the sonnet to represent executed Jesuits, but contends that the poet, by alluding to executed Jesuit Robert Southwell's Epistle of Comfort and its glorification of martyrdom, sympathises with them. Klause maintains that Southwell's influence is also identifiable in Titus Andronicus.[63] A later assessment places Klause's interpretation as "against most recent trends".[64]

Notwithstanding Pearce's identification (above) of Shakespeare's King John as a reworking of The Troublesome Reign of King John, made to refute its anti-Catholic bias, strong examples of Protestant sympathies, such as the denouncement of the Pope as an "unworthy and ridiculous ... Italian priest" with "usurped authority", remain in the text.[65]

Yale's David Kastan sees no inconsistency in a Protestant dramatist lampooning the martyr Oldcastle in the play Henry IV (above): a contemporary audience would have identified Shakespeare's unsympathetic portrayal as a proof of his Protestantism because the knight's Lollardry was in the author's time identified with Puritanism, by then abhorred for undermining the established church.[66]

Stephen Greenblatt acknowledges the convention that the "equivocator" arriving at the gate of hell in the Porter's speech in Macbeth is a reference to the Jesuit Father Henry Garnet, who had been executed in 1606.[67] He argues that Shakespeare probably included the allusion for the sake of topicality, trusting that his audience would have heard of Garnet's pamphlet on equivocation, and not from any hidden sympathy for the man or his cause – indeed the portrait is not a sympathetic one. Literary editor Bishop Warburton declared that in the mind of Jacobean playgoers the policy of equivocation, adopted as an official doctrine of the Jesuits, would have been a direct reminder of Catholic treason in the "Gunpowder plot".[68] Shakespeare may have also been aware of the "equivocation" concept which appeared as the subject of a 1583 tract by Queen Elizabeth's chief councillor Lord Burghley, and the 1584 Doctrine of Equivocation by the Spanish prelate Martin Azpilcueta that was disseminated across Europe and into England in the 1590s.[69]

Perhaps Shakespeare's most direct reference in the plays to contemporary religious issues comes at the birth of Queen Elizabeth in Henry VIII, during whose reign, as the character Archbishop Cranmer, architect of the reformation, predicts: "God shall be truly known".[70] The words in question, however, are generally attributed to Fletcher, and not directly attributable to Shakespeare.[71]

One perspective is that to deduce from the evidence a definite Anglican Shakespeare is to misapprehend the religious circumstances of the time, the word "Anglican" not existing until nearly two decades after the writer's death and contemporary historians not recognising Anglicanism as a firm organisation or religious identity during his lifetime.[72] In a similar vein, Maurice Hunt, Jean-Christophe Mayer and others have written of a Shakespeare with a syncretic or hybrid faith, in some sense both Catholic and Protestant. Anthony Nuttall argues Shakespeare's work defies identification of precise religious influences because Shakespeare's ranging and restless mind played with many ideas, alternately promoting and challenging assumptions throughout the plays; in Measure for Measure, Nuttall finds evidence of experimentation with heretical Gnostic theology.[73] However, Eamon Duffy points out that although the majority of Tudor people were muddled and uncertain, accepting of compromise and accommodation, "Religious diversity was not a notion to conjure with in Tudor England. …Ritual and doctrinal diversity were evils, aspects of social and religious disunity."[74][75]

Other scholars who have searched for Protestant rhetoric in Shakespeare's writings include Maurice Hunt (Baylor University),[76] E. Beatrice Batson (Wheaton College),[77] and Joseph William Sterrett (Aarhus University),[78] the last of which insists that Shakespeare promoted religious tolerance in his writings. Shakespeare scholars such as Eric Sams and Robert Miola disagree with the traditional position that Shakespeare was a member of the established Anglican Church.[79]

Shakespeare's Christianity is not universally accepted. William John Birch in 1848 suggested that Shakespeare could have been an atheist, based on his interpretation of sentiments expressed in the works. His theory was not accepted by other scholars, however, and his contemporary H. H. Furness dismissed it as a "rare tissue of perverted ingenuity".[87][88] Some evidence used to support this thesis was suggested by a notorious forger of historical documents, John Payne Collier, who examined the records of St Saviour's, Southwark, and found that Shakespeare, alone among his fellow Globe actors, was not shown as a churchgoer.[89] Joseph Pearce again offers the explanation of recusancy, rather than evidence of atheism.[90] Herbert Thurston, writing in the 1912 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia, questioned not only Shakespeare's Catholicism, but pondered "whether Shakespeare was not infected with the atheism, which, as we know from the testimony of writers as opposite in spirit as Thomas Nashe and [Robert] Persons, was rampant in the more cultured society of the Elizabethan age."[16]

In a 1947 essay, George Orwell wrote that

The morality of Shakespeare's later tragedies is not religious in the ordinary sense, and certainly is not Christian. Only two of them, Hamlet and Othello, are supposedly occurring inside the Christian era, and even in those, apart from the antics of the ghost in Hamlet, there is no indication of a ‘next world’ where everything is to be put right. ...We do not know a great deal about Shakespeare's religious beliefs, and from the evidence of his writings it would be difficult to prove that he had any.[91]

Russian Shakespeare scholar Vadim Nikolayev has stated "that Shakespeare put forward anti-church ideas and did not consider suicide to be a sin", that he "skillfully avoided conflicts with censorship".[92] Nikolayev presented these theories in 2008, at an international conference; it caused intense discussion, though the majority of participants disagreed.[93]

As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods. They kill us for their sport.
—The Earl of Gloucester in King Lear, Act 4 Scene 1

Shakespeare's very frequent references to Paganistic gods and concepts, such as Hymen bringing about the resolution of As You Like It, are not a reflection of his own belief but a necessary device to present deity on stage, where Christian figures were, in contrast to the presentation of the mystery plays of earlier times, prohibited. Some commonplace Christian allusions, involving no physical manifestation of religion, in Quarto editions of the history cycle, were replaced with harmless references to pagan gods when the First Folio appeared.[94]

Shakespeare's views on Islam have been described by The Economist as "complex" and "multifaceted", and he "was ahead of his time in his sensitivity to the Islamic world and its inhabitants."[95] According to the conclusion of Prof Matthew Dimmock, Shakespeare's depiction of Islam and Muslims "denied either scriptural congruence or religious coherence, embodied in the martially aggressive male."[96] Shakespeare's works included several Muslim characters, including Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus (although the play is set in ancient Rome centuries before Islam was founded by Muhammad), the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice and Othello in the eponymous play. Shakespeare also makes one explicit reference to Muhammad, in Henry VI.[97]

• The Quest for Shakespeare, television series from Eternal World Television Network, about the evidence of Shakespeare's Catholicism.
• Beauregard, David (2008). Catholic Theology in Shakespeare's Plays. Newark: U Delaware P. ISBN 978-0-87413-002-7.
• Hamlin, Hannibal (2013). The Bible in Shakespeare. Oxford University Press. 29 Aug. ISBN 978-0199677610. (A full study of the Bible in Shakespeare's plays.)
• Freinkel, Lisa (2013). Reading Shakespeare's Will: The Theology of Figure from Augustine to the Sonnets. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0231504867

• Harper, S. B. A. "Was Shakespeare a Catholic?," The American Catholic Quarterly Review, Vol. IV, 1879.
• Taylor, Dennis (Boston College): Shakespeare and Religion Chronology.