Shakespeare's religion - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Knowledge of William Shakespeare's religion is important in understanding the man and his works because of the wealth of biblical and liturgical allusions, both Protestant

Book of Common Prayer

The Book of Common Prayer is the short title of a number of related prayer books used in the Anglican Communion, as well as by the Continuing Anglican, "Anglican realignment" and other Anglican churches. The original book, published in 1549 , in the reign of Edward VI, was a product of the English...

and Catholic

Catholic liturgy

The Catholic Church is fundamentally liturgical and sacramental in its public life of worship.-Liturgical principles:As explained in greater detail in the Catechism of the Catholic Church and its shorter Compendium, the liturgy is something that "the whole Christ", Head and Body, celebrates —...

, in his writings and the hidden references to contemporary religious tensions that are claimed to be found in the plays. The topic is the subject of intense scholarly debate. There is no direct evidence of William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

's religious affiliation, however over the years there have been many speculations about the personal religious beliefs that he may have held. These speculations are based on circumstantial evidence from historical records and on analysis of his published work. Some evidence suggests that Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

's family had Catholic sympathies and that he himself was a secret Catholic; although there is disagreement over whether he in fact was so, many scholars maintain the former consensus position that he was a member of the established Anglican Church.

Due to the paucity of direct evidence, general agreement on the matter has not yet been reached. As one analysis of the subject puts it, "One cannot quite speak of a consensus among Shakespeare scholars on this point, though the reluctance of some to admit the possibility of Catholicism in Shakespeare's family is becoming harder to maintain."

Shakespeare's family

In 1559, five years before Shakespeare's birth, the Elizabethan Religious Settlement

Elizabethan Religious Settlement

The Elizabethan Religious Settlement was Elizabeth I’s response to the religious divisions created over the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary I. This response, described as "The Revolution of 1559", was set out in two Acts of the Parliament of England...

finally severed the Church of England

Church of England

The Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England and the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The church considers itself within the tradition of Western Christianity and dates its formal establishment principally to the mission to England by St...

from the Roman Catholic Church

Roman Catholic Church

The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...

. In the ensuing years, extreme pressure was placed on England's Catholics to accept the practices of the Church of England, and recusancy

Recusancy

In the history of England and Wales, the recusancy was the state of those who refused to attend Anglican services. The individuals were known as "recusants"...

laws made illegal not only the Roman Catholic Mass, but also any service not found in the Book of Common Prayer
Book of Common Prayer
The Book of Common Prayer is the short title of a number of related prayer books used in the Anglican Communion, as well as by the Continuing Anglican, "Anglican realignment" and other Anglican churches. The original book, published in 1549 , in the reign of Edward VI, was a product of the English...

. In Shakespeare's lifetime there was a substantial and widespread quiet resistance to the newly imposed reforms. Some scholars, using both historical and literary evidence, have argued that Shakespeare was one of these recusants.

Some scholars claim that there is evidence that members of Shakespeare's family were recusant Catholics. The strongest evidence is a tract professing secret Catholicism signed by John Shakespeare

John Shakespeare

John Shakespeare was the father of William Shakespeare. He was the son of Richard Shakespeare of Snitterfield, a farmer. He moved to Stratford-upon-Avon and married Mary Arden, with whom he had eight children, five of whom survived into adulthood...

, 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

Edmond Malone

Edmond Malone was an Irish Shakespearean scholar and editor of the works of William Shakespeare.Assured of an income after the death of his father in 1774, Malone was able to give up his law practice for at first political and then more congenial literary pursuits. He went to London, where he...

. Malone later changed his mind and declared that he thought the tract was a forgery. Although the tract document itself has been lost, 20th century evidence has linked Malone's reported wording of the tract definitively to a testament written by Charles Borromeo

Charles Borromeo

Charles Borromeo was the cardinal archbishop of the Catholic Archdiocese of Milan from 1564 to 1584. He was a leading figure during the Counter-Reformation and was responsible for significant reforms in the Catholic Church, including the founding of seminaries for the education of priests...

and circulated in England by Edmund Campion

Edmund Campion

Saint Edmund Campion, S.J. was an English Roman Catholic martyr and Jesuit priest. While conducting an underground ministry in officially Protestant England, Campion was arrested by priest hunters. Convicted of high treason by a kangaroo court, he was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn...

, copies of which still exist in Italian and English. John Shakespeare was also 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.

Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, was a member of a conspicuous and determinedly Catholic family in Warwickshire

Warwickshire

Warwickshire is a landlocked non-metropolitan county in the West Midlands region of England. The county town is Warwick, although the largest town is Nuneaton. The county is famous for being the birthplace of William Shakespeare...

. In 1606, his daughter Susanna

Susanna Hall

Susanna Hall , née Shakespeare, was the eldest child of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, and the older sister of Judith Quiney and Hamnet Shakespeare...

was listed as one of the residents of Stratford who failed to take Holy Communion at Easter, which may suggest Catholic sympathies. It may, however, also be a sign of Puritan

Puritan

The Puritans were a significant grouping of English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries. Puritanism in this sense was founded by some Marian exiles from the clergy shortly after the accession of Elizabeth I of England in 1558, as an activist movement within the Church of England...

sympathies; Susannah's sister Judith

Judith Quiney

Judith Quiney , née Shakespeare, was the youngest daughter of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. She married Thomas Quiney, a vintner of Stratford-upon-Avon. The circumstances of the marriage, including Quiney's misconduct, may have prompted the rewriting of Shakespeare's will...

was, according to some statements, of a Puritanical bent.

Shakespeare's schooling

Four of the six schoolmasters at the grammar school during Shakespeare's youth, King’s New School in Stratford, were Catholic sympathisers, and Simon Hunt, who was likely to have been one of Shakespeare’s teachers, later became a Jesuit

Society of Jesus

The Society of Jesus is a Catholic male religious order that follows the teachings of the Catholic Church. The members are called Jesuits, and are also known colloquially as "God's Army" and as "The Company," these being references to founder Ignatius of Loyola's military background and a...

priest. Thomas Jenkins, who succeeded Hunt as teacher in the grammar school, was a student of Edmund Campion

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

Thomas Cottam

Blessed Thomas Cottam was an English Catholic priest and martyr from Lancashire, who was executed during the reign of Elizabeth I.-Life:...

. A fellow grammar school pupil with Shakespeare, Robert Debdale

Robert Dibdale

Robert Dibdale, or Debdale, was a Catholic priest and martyr.He was born the son of John Dibdale of Shottery, in the parish of Stratford-upon-Avon and the birthplace of William Shakespeare's wife Anne Hathaway at a date unknown. He had a brother Richard and sisters Joan and Agnes. It would seem...

, travelled to the Catholic seminary

Seminary

A seminary, theological college, or divinity school is an institution of secondary or post-secondary education for educating students in theology, generally to prepare them for ordination as clergy or for other ministry...

at Douai

University of Douai

The University of Douai is a former university in Douai, France. With a Middle Ages heritage of scholar activities in Douai, the university was established in 1559 and lectures started in 1562. It closed from 1795 to 1808...

and was later executed in England for Catholic proselytising, along with Cottam.

The "lost years" (1585–1592)

John Aubrey

John Aubrey FRS, was an English antiquary, natural philosopher and writer. He is perhaps best known as the author of the collection of short biographical pieces usually referred to as Brief Lives...

, in 1693, reported that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster, a tale augmented in the 20th century with the theory that his employer might have been Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire

Lancashire

Lancashire is a non-metropolitan county of historic origin in the North West of England. It takes its name from the city of Lancaster, and is sometimes known as the County of Lancaster. Although Lancaster is still considered to be the county town, Lancashire County Council is based in Preston...

, a prominent Catholic landowner who left money in his will to a certain "William Shakeshafte", referencing theatrical costumes and paraphernalia. Shakespeare's grandfather Richard had also once used the name Shakeshafte. Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd CBE is an English biographer, novelist and critic with a particular interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot and Sir Thomas More he won the Somerset Maugham Award...

adds that study of the marginal notes in the Hoghton family copy of Edward Hall

Edward Hall

Edward Hall , English chronicler and lawyer, was born about the end of the 15th century, being a son of John Hall of Northall, Shropshire....

's Chronicles, an important source for Shakespeare's early histories, shows that they were in "probability" in Shakespeare's writing.

Possible Catholic wedding

The writer's marriage to Anne Hathaway

Anne Hathaway (Shakespeare)

Anne Hathaway was the wife of William Shakespeare. They were married in 1582. She outlived her husband by seven years...

in 1582 may have been officiated, amongst other candidates, by John Frith in the town of Temple Grafton

Temple Grafton

Temple Grafton is a village and civil parish in the Stratford district of Warwickshire, England, situated about east of Alcester and West of the county town of Warwick. The place name is misleading, the Knights Templar never having any association with the place but owing to a naming error made...

a few miles from Stratford. In 1586 the crown named Frith, who maintained the appearance of Protestantism, as a Catholic priest. Some surmise Shakespeare wed in Temple Grafton rather than the Protestant Church in Stratford in order for his wedding to be performed as a Catholic sacrament. He was thought to have rushed his marriage ceremony, as Anne was three months pregnant.

Historical sources

The historian John Speed

John Speed

John Speed was an English historian and cartographer.-Life:He was born at Farndon, Cheshire, and went into his father's tailoring business where he worked until he was about 50...

asserted Shakespeare's links with Catholicism in 1611, accusing him of satirizing the perceived Protestant martyr John Oldcastle

John Oldcastle

Sir John Oldcastle , English Lollard leader, was son of Sir Richard Oldcastle of Almeley in northwest Herefordshire and grandson of another Sir John Oldcastle....

(first portrayed by Shakespeare under his character's real name, then the alias Falstaff

Falstaff

Sir John Falstaff is a fictional character who appears in three plays by William Shakespeare. In the two Henry IV plays, he is a companion to Prince Hal, the future King Henry V. A fat, vain, boastful, and cowardly knight, Falstaff leads the apparently wayward Prince Hal into trouble, and is...

after complaints from his descendants) and linking the playwright with Jesuit Robert Persons, describing them together as "the Papist and his poet". Joseph Pearce

Joseph Pearce

Joseph Pearce is an English-born writer, and Writer in Residence and Professor of Literature at Ave Maria University in Ave Maria, Florida; previously he had a comparable position, from 2001, at Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti, Michigan. He is known for a number of literary biographies, many of...

, in The Quest for Shakespeare, characterises Speed's "astonishing attack" on Shakespeare as a manifestation of the general suspicion in which the Puritans, of whom Speed was one, held playmakers. He explains that Speed was attacking Persons and Shakespeare for demolishing the notion in Foxe's Book of Martyrs
Foxe's Book of Martyrs
The Book of Martyrs, by John Foxe, more accurately Acts and Monuments, is an account from a Protestant point of view of Christian church history and martyrology...

that Oldcastle was a Protestant hero. Speed cited Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1
Henry IV, Part 1
Henry IV, Part 1 is a history play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written no later than 1597. It is the second play in Shakespeare's tetralogy dealing with the successive reigns of Richard II, Henry IV , and Henry V...

—in early performances of which a knight named Oldcastle played a prominent part—as "falsifying… the history of England", and thus showing that Shakespeare held this view in common with the Jesuits: as Pearce says, "endeavoring to tar Shakespeare with the Jesuit brush". More simply, the facts of the story of Prince Henry and his "dear friend" Oldcastle, whom he left to his fate after failing to persuade the stubborn old knight to recant after the church had him arrested, appears in the contemporary accounts of the period and was the historical basis for Shakespeare's inclusion of the character in his play.

Archdeacon

Archdeacon

An archdeacon is a senior clergy position in Anglicanism, Syrian Malabar Nasrani, Chaldean Catholic, and some other Christian denominations, above that of most clergy and below a bishop. In the High Middle Ages it was the most senior diocesan position below a bishop in the Roman Catholic Church...

Richard Davies, a 17th century Anglican cleric, wrote of Shakespeare: "He dyed a Papyst". The Catholic Encyclopedia (1912) states that "Davies, an Anglican clergyman, could have had no conceivable motive for misrepresenting the matter in these private notes and as he lived in the neighbouring county of Gloucestershire he may be echoing a local tradition" but concludes that whilst Davies comment "is by no means incredible but it would obviously be foolish to build too much upon an unverifiable tradition of this kind".

Pearce maintains that one of the most compelling pieces of evidence is Shakespeare's purchase of Blackfriars Gatehouse, a place that had remained in Catholic hands since the time of the Reformation, was notorious for Jesuit conspiracy, passageways and priest holes to hide priests, and for covert Catholic activity in London. Shakespeare ensured that the tenant John Robinson remained in the house, and its use continued. The same year that Robinson was named as Shakespeare's tenant, Robinson's brother entered the seminary at the English College in Rome. Schoenbaum

Samuel Schoenbaum

Samuel Schoenbaum was a leading 20th century Shakespearean biographer and scholar.Born in New York, Schoenbaum taught at Northwestern University from 1953 to 1975, serving for the last four years of this period as the Frank Bliss Snyder Professor of English Literature. He later taught at the City...

, however, assigns a purely fiscal motive to the purchase: after examining the complex financial arrangements surrounding the transaction he concludes, "an investment, pure and simple".

Textual evidence

An increasing number of scholars look to evidence from Shakespeare’s work, such as the placement of young Hamlet as a student at Wittenberg

University of Halle-Wittenberg

The Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg , also referred to as MLU, is a public, research-oriented university in the cities of Halle and Wittenberg within Saxony-Anhalt, Germany...

while old Hamlet’s ghost is in purgatory

Purgatory

Purgatory is the condition or process of purification or temporary punishment in which, it is believed, the souls of those who die in a state of grace are made ready for Heaven...

, as suggestive of a Catholic worldview, but these speculations can be contradictory: the University of Wittenberg was an intellectual centre of the Protestant Reformation and the whole of Hamlet can be read as filled with "cryptic allusions to the Protestant Reformation". Other indications have been detected in the sympathetic view of religious life expressed in the phrase "thrice blessed", scholastic theology

Scholasticism

Scholasticism is a method of critical thought which dominated teaching by the academics of medieval universities in Europe from about 1100–1500, and a program of employing that method in articulating and defending orthodoxy in an increasingly pluralistic context...

in The Phoenix and the Turtle
The Phoenix and the Turtle
The Phoenix and the Turtle is an allegorical poem about the death of ideal love by William Shakespeare. It is widely considered to be one of his most obscure works and has led to many conflicting interpretations. It has also been called "the first great published metaphysical poem". The title "The...

, sympathetic allusions to English Jesuit St. Edmund Campion

Edmund Campion

that are claimed to exist in Twelfth Night
Twelfth Night, or What You Will
Twelfth Night; or, What You Will is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written around 1601–02 as a Twelfth Night's entertainment for the close of the Christmas season...

and many other matters. More recently it has been suggested that Shakespeare was simply playing upon an English Catholic tradition, rather than actually being Catholic, and was utilizing the symbolic nature of Catholic ceremony to embellish his own theatre. Schoenbaum suspects Catholic sympathies of some kind or another in Shakespeare and his family, but considers the writer himself to be a less than pious person with essentially worldly motives:"...the artist takes precedence over the votary". Literary scholar David Daniell arrives at a similar conclusion, but from the opposite direction: as a good Protestant Shakespeare used many biblical allusions and quotations in his works, but only because his audience, well versed in the Bible in English, would quickly take his meaning.

Literary scholar and Jesuit Father Peter Milward

Peter Milward

Peter Milward is a Jesuit priest and literary scholar. He is emeritus professor of English Literature at Sophia University in Tokyo and a leading figure in scholarship on English Renaissance literature. He has been chair of the Renaissance Institute at Sophia University since its inception in 1974...

and the writer Clare Asquith

Clare Asquith

Clare Asquith, the Countess of Oxford and Asquith is an independent scholar and author of Shadowplay: the Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare, which has posited that Shakespeare was a recusant Roman Catholic whose works contain code which was used by the Catholic underground,...

are among those who have claimed that Catholic sympathies are detectable in his writing. Asquith claims that Shakespeare uses terms such as "high" when referring to Catholic characters and "low" when referring to Protestants (the terms refer to their altar

Altar

An altar is any structure upon which offerings such as sacrifices are made for religious purposes. Altars are usually found at shrines, and they can be located in temples, churches and other places of worship...

s) and "light" or "fair" to refer to Catholic and "dark" to refer to Protestant, a reference to certain clerical garbs. Asquith also detects in Shakespeare's work the use of a simple 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

Tyburn, London

Tyburn was a village in the county of Middlesex close to the current location of Marble Arch in present-day London. It took its name from the Tyburn or Teo Bourne 'boundary stream', a tributary of the River Thames which is now completely covered over between its source and its outfall into the...

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 claims that Shakespeare also used this code. Asquith's particular claims, however, have met with some "damning" criticism and, according to professor Jeffrey Knapp, the work of scholars like Peter Milward, who believe that "the deepest inspiration in Shakespeare's plays is both religious and Christian", has had "little influence on recent Shakespeare scholarship". John Waterfield comments that critics who were hostile to Asquith's work "mistakenly supposed a conflict between Asquith's allegorical reading" and the "traditional literal meaning", when it is not really a matter of chosing between two alternatives as Asquith was not offering the sole "true meaning" of the plays. Cambridge

University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...

specialist in Tudor history John Guy

John Guy (historian)

John Guy is a British historian and biographer.Born in Australia, he moved to Britain with his parents in 1952. He was educated at King Edward VII School in Lytham, and Clare College, Cambridge, where he read history, taking a First. At Cambridge, Guy studied under the Tudor specialist Geoffrey...

declares that if even half her assertions are right, it makes a difference which is challenging and goes to the root of our understanding of Shakespeare.

Revision of older plays

Although Shakespeare commonly adapted existing tales, typically myths or works in another language, Joseph Pearce notes that King John, King Lear and Hamlet were all works that had been done recently and in English with an anti-Catholic bias, and that Shakespeare's versions appear to be a refutation of the source plays. Pearce believes otherwise he would not have "reinvented the wheel", revisiting recent English plays. Peter Milward is among those who hold the view that Shakespeare engaged in rebuttal of recent English "anti-Papist" works. On the other hand, Jonathan Bate

Jonathan Bate

Jonathan Bate CBE FBA FRSL is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, novelist and scholar of Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism...

describes the process of Leir
King Leir
King Leir is an anonymous Elizabethan play about the life of the ancient Celtic king Leir of Britain. It was published in 1605 but was entered into the Stationers' Register on 15 May 1594...

transformation into Lear as replacing the "external trappings of Christianity" with a pagan setting. He adds that the devils plaguing "Poor Tom" in Shakespeare's version have the same names as the evil spirits in a book by Samuel Harsnett

Samuel Harsnett

Samuel Harsnett , born Samuel Halsnoth, was an English writer on religion and Archbishop of York from 1629.- Early life :...

, later Archbishop of York, that denounces the "fake" Catholic practice of exorcism

Exorcism

Exorcism is the religious practice of evicting demons or other spiritual entities from a person or place which they are believed to have possessed...

Inscriptions at the Venerable English College

The names “Arthurus Stratfordus Wigomniensis” and “Gulielmus Clerkue Stratfordiensis” are found within ancient inscriptions at the Venerable English College, a seminary in Rome which has long trained Catholic clergy serving in Britain. Scholars have speculated that these names might be related to Shakespeare, who is alleged to have visited the city of Rome twice during his life.

Protestantism

Shakespeare editor and historian A. L. Rowse

A. L. Rowse

Alfred Leslie Rowse, CH, FBA , known professionally as A. L. Rowse and to friends and family as Leslie, was a British historian from Cornwall. He is perhaps best known for his work on Elizabethan England and his poetry about Cornwall. He was also a Shakespearean scholar and biographer...

is firm in his assertion that Shakespeare was not a Catholic: "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". He identifies anti-Catholic sentiment in Sonnet 124

Sonnet 124

Sonnet 124 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It's a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man....

, 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 1594-5. John Klause of Hofstra University

Hofstra University

Hofstra University is a private, nonsectarian institution of higher learning located in the Village of Hempstead, New York, United States, about east of New York City: less than an hour away by train or car...

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
Titus Andronicus
Titus Andronicus is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, and possibly George Peele, believed to have been written between 1588 and 1593. It is thought to be Shakespeare's first tragedy, and is often seen as his attempt to emulate the violent and bloody revenge plays of his contemporaries, which were...

. A later assessment places Klause's interpretation as "against most recent trends".

Notwithstanding Pearce's identification (above) of Shakespeare's King John as a reworking of The Troublesome Reign of King John
The Troublesome Reign of King John
The Troublesome Reign of King John is an Elizabethan history play, generally accepted by scholars as the source and model that William Shakespeare employed for his own 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. Yale

YALE

RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...

's David Kastan sees no inconsistency in a Protestant dramatist lampooning the martyr Oldcastle in 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

State religion

A state religion is a religious body or creed officially endorsed by the state...

.

Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Jay Greenblatt is a literary critic, theorist and scholar.Greenblatt is regarded by many as one of the founders of New Historicism, a set of critical practices that he often refers to as "cultural poetics"; his works have been influential since the early 1980s when he introduced the term...

acknowledges the convention that the "equivocator" arriving at the gate of hell in the Porter's speech in Macbeth
Macbeth
The Tragedy of Macbeth is a play by William Shakespeare about a regicide and its aftermath. It is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy and is believed to have been written sometime between 1603 and 1607...

is a reference to the Jesuit Father Henry Garnet

Henry Garnet

Henry Garnet , sometimes Henry Garnett, was a Jesuit priest executed for his complicity in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Born in Derbyshire, he was educated in Nottingham and later at Winchester College, before moving to London in 1571 to work for a publisher...

, who had been executed in 1606. 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

Doctrine of mental reservation

The doctrine of mental reservation, or the doctrine of mental equivocation, was a special branch of casuistry developed in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and most often associated with the Jesuits.- Secular use :...

, and not from any hidden sympathy for the man or his cause — indeed the portrait is not a sympathetic one. Literary editor Bishop Warburton

William Warburton

William Warburton was an English critic and churchman, Bishop of Gloucester from 1759.-Life:He was born at Newark, where his father, who belonged to an old Cheshire family, was town clerk. William was educated at Oakham and Newark grammar schools, and in 1714 he was articled to Mr Kirke, an...

declared that in the mind of Jacobean

Jacobean era

The Jacobean era refers to the period in English and Scottish history that coincides with the reign of King James VI of Scotland, who also inherited the crown of England in 1603 as James I...

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

Gunpowder Plot

The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in earlier centuries often called the Gunpowder Treason Plot or the Jesuit Treason, was a failed assassination attempt against King James I of England and VI of Scotland by a group of provincial English Catholics led by Robert Catesby.The plan was to blow up the House of...

". 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

William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley

William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley , KG was an English statesman, the chief advisor of Queen Elizabeth I for most of her reign, twice Secretary of State and Lord High Treasurer from 1572...

, and the 1584 Doctrine of Equivocation by the Spanish prelate Martin Azpilcueta that was disseminated across Europe and into England in the 1590s.

Perhaps Shakespeare's most direct reference in the plays to contemporary religious issues comes at the birth of Queen Elizabeth

Elizabeth I of England

Elizabeth I was queen regnant of England and Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death. Sometimes called The Virgin Queen, Gloriana, or Good Queen Bess, Elizabeth was the fifth and last monarch of the Tudor dynasty...

in Henry VIII
Henry VIII (play)
The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eight is a history play by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, based on the life of Henry VIII of England. An alternative title, All is True, is recorded in contemporary documents, the title Henry VIII not appearing until the play's publication...

, during whose reign, as the character Archbishop Cranmer

Thomas Cranmer

Thomas Cranmer was a leader of the English Reformation and Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and, for a short time, Mary I. He helped build a favourable case for Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon which resulted in the separation of the English Church from...

, architect of the reformation

English Reformation

The English Reformation was the series of events in 16th-century England by which the Church of England broke away from the authority of the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church....

, predicts: "God shall be truly known".

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 recognizing Anglicanism as a firm organization or religious identity during his lifetime. In a similar vein, Maurice Hunt, Jean-Christophe Mayer and others have written of a Shakespeare with a syncretic

Syncretism

Syncretism is the combining of different beliefs, often while melding practices of various schools of thought. The term means "combining", but see below for the origin of the word...

or hybrid faith, in some sense both Catholic and Protestant.

Atheism

The fact of Shakespeare’s Christianity is in itself not universally accepted. William Birch of Oxford University was, in 1848, probably the first to air the notion of atheism

Atheism

Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities...

, based solely on his interpretation of sentiments expressed in the works, but the theory was dismissed as a "rare tissue of perverted ingenuity" by a contemporary, the textual editor H. H. Furness. The 1912 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia
Catholic Encyclopedia
The Catholic Encyclopedia, also referred to as the Old Catholic Encyclopedia and the Original Catholic Encyclopedia, is an English-language encyclopedia published in the United States. The first volume appeared in March 1907 and the last three volumes appeared in 1912, followed by a master index...

questioned not only Shakespeare's Catholicism, but whether "[he] was not infected with the atheism, which...was rampant in the more cultured society of the Elizabethan age." Some evidence in support of Shakespeare's supposed atheism, and then only in the form of "evidence of absence", exists in the discovery by John Payne Collier

John Payne Collier

John Payne Collier , English Shakespearian critic and forger, was born in London.-Reporter and solicitor:...

, a notorious forger of historical documents, who examined the records of St Saviour's, Southwark

Southwark Cathedral

Southwark Cathedral or The Cathedral and Collegiate Church of St Saviour and St Mary Overie, Southwark, London, lies on the south bank of the River Thames close to London Bridge....

, and found that Shakespeare, alone among his fellow Globe

Globe Theatre

The Globe Theatre was a theatre in London associated with William Shakespeare. It was built in 1599 by Shakespeare's playing company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and was destroyed by fire on 29 June 1613...

actors, was not shown as a churchgoer. According to Joseph Pearce, the obvious conclusion is recusancy

Recusancy

In the history of England and Wales, the recusancy was the state of those who refused to attend Anglican services. The individuals were known as "recusants"...

, but modern scholars sometimes cite this as evidence of atheism.

Shakespeare's family

Shakespeare's schooling

The "lost years" (1585–1592)

Possible Catholic wedding

Historical sources

Textual evidence

Revision of older plays

Inscriptions at the Venerable English College

Protestantism

Atheism

See also