William Shakespeare's religion

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 and Catholic, 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's religious affiliation; however, over the years there have been many speculations about the personal religious beliefs that he may have held, if any. These speculations are based on circumstantial evidence from historical records and on analysis of his published work. Some evidence suggests that 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 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 not only the Roman Catholic Mass, but also any service not found in the Book of Common Prayer. 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, 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. 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 and circulated in England by Edmund Campion, 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. In 1606, his daughter Susanna 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 sympathies; Susannah's sister Judith 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 priest. 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. A fellow grammar school pupil with Shakespeare, Robert Debdale, travelled to the Catholic seminary at Douai and was later executed in England for Catholic proselytising, along with Cottam.

The "lost years" (1585–1592)
John Aubrey, 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, 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 adds that study of the marginal notes in the Hoghton family copy of Edward Hall'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 in 1582 may have been officiated, amongst other candidates, by John Frith in the town of Temple Grafton 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 asserted Shakespeare's links with Catholicism in 1611, accusing him of satirizing the perceived Protestant martyr John Oldcastle (first portrayed by Shakespeare under his character's real name, then the alias Falstaff after complaints from his descendants) and linking the playwright with Jesuit Robert Persons, describing them together as "the Papist and his poet". Joseph Pearce, 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 that Oldcastle was a Protestant hero. Speed cited Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1—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 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 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, 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 while old Hamlet’s ghost is in purgatory, 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 in The Phoenix and the Turtle, sympathetic allusions to English Jesuit St. Edmund Campion that are claimed to exist in Twelfth Night 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 and the writer Clare Asquith 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 altars) 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 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 specialist in Tudor history John Guy 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 describes the process of Leir 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, later Archbishop of York, that denounces the "fake" Catholic practice of exorcism.

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 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, 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 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. 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, 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'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.

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. 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". 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.

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".

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 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, 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 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, a notorious forger of historical documents, 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. According to Joseph Pearce, the obvious conclusion is recusancy, but modern scholars sometimes cite this as evidence of atheism.