The essay collection Religions in Shakespeare's Writings is decidedly not an attempt to settle the question of whether William Shakespeare was Catholic or Protestant, either in his confessional allegiance or his heart of hearts. What the collection makes clear is that there is still a great deal to say about religious matters in Shakespeare's poems and plays. The essays, well researched and carefully crafted by their fifteen authors, are collected in a special issue of the MDPI journal Religions.
David Urban, who edits the collection and contributes one of the essays, counterpoises the volume against recent skeptical scholarship that “resists the idea that a positive understanding of Christianity is somehow foundational to Shakespeare's works” (3). The essays in Religions in Shakespeare's Writings amply demonstrate and artfully develop Urban's somewhat minimalist claim that “Shakespeare's various writings demonstrate a Christian grounding, whether that Christianity is Protestant, Catholic, or ‘mere.’” (3).
In “Shakespeare and Religion,” the review essay that begins the volume proper, John D. Cox points out that scholars like David Scott Kastan, Alison Shell, and Anthony Dawson remain skeptical of claims that Shakespeare's plays and poems promote or even reflect any coherent Christian creed on their author's part. According to Kastan, “religion in the plays is a psychological and social reality that registers as form rather than a credal one that registers as belief” (12; David Scott Kastan, A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion [2016], 7). How any play registers on its audience, though, is clearly in the eye of the beholder. In early modern England, a culture saturated in religious language and ritual, religious form and belief might not be easily separated.
In “At War ‘Twixt Will and Will Not: On Shakespeare's Idea of Religious Experience in Measure for Measure,” Matthew J. Smith argues that staged depictions of differing religions have a self-censoring effect: “Through their dramatic contact with one another, Catholicism, Puritanism, Calvinism, Lucretianism, agnosticism and other ‘religious’ perspectives reveal one another's limitations” (39). The result is that despite its insistently religious content, Measure for Measure does not clearly champion any religious persuasion. As Smith points out, “nobody converts” (41). In fact, “Isabella, Claudio, Angelo, and the Duke all lose faith in their respective grounds for moral obligation” (50).
In “Hamlet the Heretic: The Prince's Albigensian Rhetoric,” Benjamin Lockerd explores the title character's kinship with the Albigensians, adherents to one of the forms of dualist theology repeatedly condemned by medieval and early modern Christian authorities. Like other dualists, Albigensians saw the spiritual world as a manifestation of the good, the physical world of the bad. The body was a trap for the soul, so marriage and procreation should be avoided. The sentiment is familiar to Hamlet in one of his guises. “Why,” he asks the frightened Ophelia, would she want to be “a breeder of sinners?” Crazed (or crafty), he declares, “We will have no mo’ marriage” (3.1.121–24; 147). For the Albigensians, suicide was not necessarily an ignoble or unholy act. Two of the world's most famous theatrical moments—Hamlet's “To be or not to be” soliloquy and his conversation with the skull of Yorick—underscore his affinity for dualist beliefs, whether favored or feigned.
In “That Suggestion: Catholic Casuistry, Complexity, and Macbeth,” John E. Curran Jr. takes issue with A. C. Bradley's observation that Macbeth has “the imagination of a poet.” Not so, says Curran: “Macbeth is a study in the dangers of moral, logical, and spiritual oversimplification, and this bent for oversimplifying is aligned by Shakespeare, here as elsewhere in his work, with the deterministic Protestantism hegemonic at this time in England” (140). Focusing on the Porter's comic portrait of the equivocator in 2.3, Curran concludes that Shakespeare “preferred the complex, the particular, and the open to the oversimplified, the generalizing, and the closed, and he found the state religion of his time too bent toward the latter” (154).
A deft navigator of scholarship on King Lear, Emily E. Stelzer is very likely the first scholar to point to a possible biblical source for Lear's enigmatic dying words (“Look there, look there!”). The meaning of these “ambiguous and suggestive” words is “both preserved and illuminated when read as an allusion to Jesus’ words in Luke 17:21” (157). In that passage some Pharisees ask Jesus when the kingdom of God will appear. He replies, “The kingdome of God cometh not with obseruacion. Nether shal men say, Lo here, or lo there: for beholde the kingdome of God is within you” (Geneva Bible). The OED supports Stelzer's reading of Jesus's words “lo there” as a plausible source for Lear's “look there”; in early modern English, lo could be synonymous with look.
In “The Tempest and Black Natural Law,” Julia Reinhard Lupton sees Shakespeare's Caliban as a participant in the natural law tradition stretching from Aristotle to Aquinas to Hooker, but with a difference: Caliban's bitter complaints make sense especially as expressions justified by “the epistemic privilege of the oppressed,” a central idea in Vincent Lloyd's seminal 2016 book Black Natural Law. Lupton's essay provides a fitting end to a highly evocative collection.
