A video version of this podcast is available on YouTube here. Was William Shakespeare a Catholic? And what, more fundamentally, did Shakespeare actually believe about Christianity? This podcast takes a detailed look at Shakespeare’s religion and the extraordinary religious world of Elizabethan England. Rather than searching the plays for a hidden confession, we begin with the Reformation itself: Luther, Henry VIII, the Elizabethan settlement, Catholic recusancy, Puritanism, religious conformity and the wide range of positions available to an English Christian around 1600. We then put Shakespeare himself under scrutiny. Was he simply an ordinary conforming member of the Church of England? A religious conservative? A secret or “church” Catholic? A sceptic? How strong is the evidence supplied by his father John Shakespeare, his mother Mary Arden, his schoolmasters, the mysterious “lost years”, Robert Southwell, his daughter Susanna, the Blackfriars Gatehouse and the later claim that Shakespeare “died a papist”? Some famous pieces of the Catholic Shakespeare case have also been substantially weakened by recent scholarship. Others remain genuinely suggestive. The result is not a neat denominational label. The surviving evidence makes Shakespeare’s public conformity to Christianity very difficult to doubt, while leaving his private convictions much harder to recover. A culturally conservative or Catholic-sympathetic Shakespeare remains plausible; so does a measure of private scepticism. What the evidence does not securely give us is the secret recusant Shakespeare sometimes presented as established fact. Along the way we encounter Martin Luther, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, William Perkins, Margaret Clitherow, Robert Southwell, Christopher Marlowe, recusant Catholics, Puritans, church papists, separatists and the religious tensions that shaped Shakespeare’s England. If you enjoy serious explorations of literature, history, religion and the strange intellectual worlds behind familiar texts, consider subscribing. #shakespeare #history #reformation
