Religious views of William Shakespeare
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.
[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.
[16] 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.
John Aubrey, in 1693, reported that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster,[21] a tale augmented in the 20th century with the theory that his employer might have been Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire,[22] a prominent Catholic landowner who left money in his will to a certain "William Shakeshafte", referencing theatrical costumes and paraphernalia.
[27][28][29] A direct explanation, however, comes from the facts of the story in the contemporary accounts of the period; Prince Henry had left his dear friend Oldcastle to his fate after he had failed to persuade the stubborn old knight to recant when he was imprisoned for lollardry.
[42] 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.
[43] However, David Beauregard points out that the plays echo both Protestant and Catholic translations of the Bible, with some forty verbal correspondences to the 1582 Rheims New Testament, and they also conflict with the Elizabethan Homilies on at least ten theological topics, such as purgatory, prayers for the dead, indulgences, pilgrimages, merit, auricular confession and satisfaction.
[44] 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".
[45] Literary scholar and Jesuit Father Peter Milward and the writer Clare Asquith are among those who have written that Catholic sympathies are detectable in Shakespeare's works.
[54] On the other hand, Jonathan Bate describes the process of Leir's transformation into Lear as replacing the "external trappings of Christianity" with a pagan setting.
[55] 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.
[56] 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.
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."
[68] 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.
[69] 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".
[71] 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".
[74] 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.
[81] Beilby Watson (1843) as well as John Donnan Countermine (1906) argued that Shakespeare's religious beliefs could be studied taking into account his will,[82] which states: In the name of God, Amen.
That is to say, first, 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, and my body to the earth whereof it is made.In the opinion of David Kastan, "this is as close as we can get to an expression of [Shakespeare's] own belief, and might well be taken as conclusive evidence".
[85] Kastan discusses how some might see the phrase "through thonlie merittes of Jesus Christe" as a reference to the doctrine of solus Christus, but at the same time he argues that the expression "might have become merely conventional by 1616, and have little or any theological import".
[89][90] 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.
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.
"[97] According to Matthew Dimmock, Shakespeare's depiction of Islam and Muslims "denied either scriptural congruence or religious coherence, embodied in the martially aggressive male.
