Religious views of William Shakespeare

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  William Shakespeare was baptised, married, and buried in the Church of England, yet for more than a hundred and fifty years scholars have argued over what he actually believed. His father helped whitewash Catholic images from a Stratford guild chapel in the 1560s or 1570s. His schoolmasters included men with direct ties to the Jesuit underground. A scrap of paper found in the rafters of a house once belonging to his family has fuelled one of literary history's most persistent arguments. Was Shakespeare a secret Catholic in a Protestant kingdom? Was he a sincere Protestant? Or was he, as one Russian scholar argued at an international conference in 2008, a man who put forward anti-church ideas altogether? The answers, it turns out, depend almost entirely on which evidence you choose to trust.

• 2. A Family Under Pressure

  ›

  In 1559, five years before Shakespeare was born, the Elizabethan Religious Settlement finally cut the Church of England from Rome. Recusancy laws then made it illegal to attend any service outside the Book of Common Prayer, including the Catholic Mass. John Shakespeare, the poet's father, was elected alderman and eventually bailiff of Stratford, offices that required church membership in good standing. He was also the man who oversaw the whitewashing of Catholic images in the Chapel of the Guild of the Holy Cross.

  Yet John was later listed among those who failed to attend church services. The commissioners noted it was "for feare of processe for Debtte", not recusancy. More provocative was a handwritten tract professing secret Catholicism, discovered in the eighteenth century tucked into the rafters of the house that had been John Shakespeare's. The scholar Edmond Malone saw it and described it. Later, Malone reversed himself, declaring the tract a forgery. The document has since been lost.

  Anthony Holden observes that Malone's reported wording of the tract aligns with a testament written by Cardinal Charles Borromeo and circulated in England by the Jesuit Edmund Campion. Copies in Italian and English survive. As of 2024, new research has attributed the Stratford tract to Shakespeare's sister Joan, who lived from 1569 to 1646, which would make it a plausible genuine copy of the Borromeo document rather than a fabrication. Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, came from a family in Warwickshire known for its Catholic loyalties. In 1606, his daughter Susanna was listed among Stratford residents who failed to take Anglican Holy Communion at Easter, though some scholars read that as a sign of Puritan sympathies rather than Catholic ones.

• 3. The Schoolroom and the Jesuit Network

  ›

  Four of the six schoolmasters at King's New School in Stratford during Shakespeare's youth were Catholic sympathisers. Simon Hunt, who may have been among his teachers, later became a Jesuit priest. Thomas Jenkins, who replaced Hunt, had been a student of Edmund Campion at St John's College, Oxford. Jenkins's own successor in 1579 was John Cottam, whose brother Thomas was a Jesuit priest.

  The web extends beyond the classroom. John Aubrey reported in 1693 that Shakespeare had worked for a time as a country schoolmaster. A theory developed in the twentieth century proposed that his employer may have been Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire, a prominent Catholic landowner who left money in his will to a certain "William Shakeshafte", specifically mentioning theatrical costumes and equipment. The Lancashire family of schoolmaster Cottam had connections to the Hoghton family. Shakespeare's grandfather Richard had also used the name Shakeshafte at one point. Peter Ackroyd notes that marginal annotations in the Hoghton family copy of Edward Hall's Chronicles "indicate the probability that Shakespeare and the annotator were the same man, but do not by any means prove it."

• 4. Suspicious Purchases and Hidden Codes

  ›

  Shakespeare's marriage to Anne Hathaway in 1582 may have taken place at Temple Grafton, a few miles from Stratford, with a priest named John Frith officiating. In 1586 the crown identified Frith, who had kept up the appearance of Protestantism, as a Catholic priest. Some scholars argue the choice of Temple Grafton was deliberate: a way to have the ceremony performed as a Catholic sacrament rather than an Anglican one. Anne was three months pregnant at the time, suggesting the ceremony was conducted in some haste.

  Later in life, Shakespeare purchased the Blackfriars Gatehouse in London. Following the arguments of E. K. Chambers and Ian Wilson, Joseph Pearce considers this one of the most compelling pieces of evidence of Catholic sympathy. The property had remained in Catholic hands since the Reformation and was known as a location for Jesuit activity, priest holes, and covert Catholic networks in the city. The year Shakespeare named John Robinson as his tenant there, Robinson's brother Edward entered the seminary at the English College in Rome. Shakespeare arranged for Robinson to remain. His daughter Susanna, who inherited the house, continued the tenancy until 1639. Samuel Schoenbaum, however, examined the financial arrangements around the purchase and concluded it was "an investment, pure and simple".

  The literary scholar Clare Asquith went further, arguing that Shakespeare used a simple code employed by the Jesuit underground in which priests were called "merchants", souls were "jewels", those pursuing them were "creditors", and the Tyburn gallows was referred to as "the place of much trading". Asquith also detected a colour scheme in which Shakespeare used the words "high", "light", and "fair" for Catholic characters and "low" and "dark" for Protestants. Professor Jeffrey Knapp notes that this kind of scholarship has had "little influence on recent Shakespeare scholarship", and the evidence of a hidden code has been called "dubious".

• 5. The Protestant Case

  ›

  As early as 1843, Sir Frederick Beilby Watson and Frederic Dan Huntington published a collection of religious passages from Shakespeare's works, titled the Religious and Moral Sentences Culled from the Works of Shakespeare, Compared with Sacred Passages Drawn from Holy Writ. Watson stated explicitly that he aimed at "proving from Shakespeare's own writings, that he lived and died as a true protestant." A century later, historian A. L. Rowse wrote a biography asserting that Shakespeare was "an orthodox, confirming member of the Church into which he had been baptised, was brought up and married."

  Rowse also identified anti-Catholic feeling in Sonnet 124, reading the closing lines "To this I witness call the fools of time, which die for goodness who have lived for crime" as a reference to Jesuits executed for treason in the years 1594-95. John Klause of Hofstra University accepts that the "fools of time" refers to executed Jesuits but argues the sonnet sympathises with them, pointing to the influence of the Jesuit Robert Southwell's Epistle of Comfort.

  Yale's David Kastan sees no contradiction in a Protestant dramatist mocking the martyr John Oldcastle, a figure first portrayed under his real name in Henry IV before being renamed Falstaff after complaints from Oldcastle's descendants. Kastan argues that Elizabethan audiences would have read the satirical portrait as evidence of Shakespeare's Protestant credentials, because Oldcastle's Lollardy was by then associated with Puritanism, which had itself become a threat to the established church. And in Henry VIII, the character Archbishop Cranmer, architect of the Reformation, delivers a prophecy at the birth of Queen Elizabeth that "God shall be truly known", though the playwright John Fletcher collaborated on that work and may have written that speech.

• 6. What the Plays Argue

  ›

  David Beauregard identified some forty verbal correspondences between Shakespeare's plays and the 1582 Rheims New Testament, a Catholic translation. The plays also diverge from the Elizabethan Homilies on at least ten theological topics, among them purgatory, prayers for the dead, indulgences, pilgrimages, merit, auricular confession, and satisfaction. Some scholars take the placement of young Hamlet as a student at Wittenberg, the intellectual centre of the Protestant Reformation, as a deliberate contrast with old Hamlet's ghost lingering in purgatory, a Catholic concept the Reformation rejected.

  In Measure for Measure, Shakespeare significantly altered his Italian source. Where the original featured a secular heroine who is seduced and then married, Shakespeare's version gives the counterpart character Isabella the status of a Poor Clare novice who keeps her virginity and does not marry. David Beauregard reads this as a Catholic revision of a secular source. Jonathan Bate, examining the transformation of the old play Leir into King Lear, takes the opposite view: Shakespeare replaced the "external trappings of Christianity" with a pagan setting. He also notes that the evil spirits plaguing "Poor Tom" in Shakespeare's version carry the same names as those in a book by Samuel Harsnett, later Archbishop of York, which attacked what Harsnett called fake Catholic exorcism.

  John Finnis and Patrick Martin have proposed that the Catholic martyr Anne Line is the eponymous phoenix in The Phoenix and the Turtle, and that her husband Roger is the turtle. They also argue, with Asquith, that the "bird of loudest lay" in the same poem represents the composer William Byrd, and the crow stands for the Jesuit Henry Garnet. Anthony Nuttall argues that Shakespeare's work simply defies religious identification: in Measure for Measure he finds evidence of experimentation with Gnostic theology, a heresy distinct from both Catholicism and Protestantism.

• 7. A Will and an Open Question

  ›

  Shakespeare's will begins: "In the name of God, Amen. I, William Shakespeare... in perfect health and memory, God be praised, do make and ordain this my last will and testament... I commend my soul into the hands of God my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Saviour, to be made partaker of life everlasting." Both Beilby Watson in 1843 and John Donnan Countermine in 1906 pointed to this preamble as evidence of his faith.

  A. L. Rowse read it as proof of Protestant conformity. David Kastan is less certain. He notes that the phrase "through thonlie merittes of Jesus Christe" could be read as a reference to the Protestant doctrine of solus Christus, but adds that such language "might have become merely conventional by 1616, and have little or any theological import." The preamble, he concludes, was formulaic for the period and cannot serve as ultimate evidence.

  Archdeacon Richard Davies, an eighteenth-century Anglican cleric, left a private note stating that Shakespeare "dyed a Papyst". The Catholic Encyclopedia in 1912 observed that Davies, as an Anglican, had no obvious motive to misrepresent the matter and lived in the neighbouring county of Gloucestershire, where local tradition might have preserved reliable memories, but judged the note "by no means incredible" while warning against building too much on "an unverifiable tradition of this kind." Shakespeare had also become godfather to William Walker in the Church of England, and he remembered his godson in his will with twenty shillings. The scholar Samuel Schoenbaum, surveying the totality of the evidence, suspected Catholic sympathies somewhere in Shakespeare and his family, but ultimately described the writer himself as someone with worldly rather than pious motives: "the artist takes precedence over the votary."