‘The Eye of the Typhoon’: Shakespeare and the Religious Controversies of his Time

Extract

In between those two great humanist lawyers and lord chancellors, Sir Thomas More and Sir Francis Bacon, it may be maintained without undue exaggeration that there is a wide gap, even a yawning chasm, in the understanding of all too many scholars concerning the intellectual history of what has come to be known as ‘Early Modern England’. When we ask whose were the main intellectual and spiritual influences on the minds of Englishmen during the period, the names commonly offered for consideration are mostly those of foreigners such as Machiavelli and Montaigne, Erasmus and Rabelais, Luther and Calvin—if in English translation. Closer to home may be added the names of More himself, his adversary William Tyndale, John Foxe with his Book of Martyrs, and Richard Hooker with his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.