Why Was Shakespeare Wary of
Writing About Religion?

What did Shakespeare believe? We can only guess. He left neither a diary nor a philosophical treatise. His only recorded words are devoted to business transactions and legal cases. His only surviving letters are conventional, if supremely elegantly phrased, pleas for patronage. His will is orthodox and Anglican, but that is how wills were written in his England. It does not mean that he was orthodox and Anglican.

The only poems written in his own voice were the Sonnets. The man who wrote them clearly believed that love is a powerful and complicated thing, that poetry is an effective way of exploring its many dimensions, and—if his lines are to be taken at face value—that creative art is a way of achieving a kind of immortality for the beloved and perhaps for creative artists themselves.

But his lines are not necessarily to be taken at face value. The “I” who speaks a poem, even an intimate love poem, is not synonymous with the person who writes the line. All poets rejoice in creating a persona. And if Shakespeare really believed that the purpose of writing love poetry was to immortalize the beloved, he might have taken the trouble to tell his readers the names of the addressees of his Sonnets.

As for immortalizing himself, he was lackadaisical about publishing his works. The Sonnets may well have been published without his permission, and half his plays were unpublished at the time of his death. As is often observed, had it not been for the diligence of his fellow-actors in seeing into print the First Folio of his collected comedies, tragedies, and histories in 1623, Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest, and a dozen more would have been lost.

What kind of a thinker was Shakespeare? That is a better question. The patterns of his mind may be traced in his work and from his education. Here we need not guess. We can say many things that are incontestable. He loved words and word play. He was fascinated by every variety of human character. He thought by way of dialogue and debate. He was skeptical of generalization about the ways of the world: almost every time a character in one of the plays gives voice to a piece of sententious wisdom, someone else says something that contradicts it—or a twist in the plot makes the seeming wisdom look foolish. “The gods are just,” says Edgar in King Lear, yet within minutes the old king comes on bearing the hanged body of his beloved, virtuous daughter Cordelia, most unjustly murdered.

The few moments in the plays where a sententious or philosophical discourse is vindicated rather than subverted by surrounding events tend to be those when a character says that life is like a play. Most famously, there is Jaques’s “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players” in As You Like It. As if to prove he is right, he has hardly closed his mouth when young Orlando comes on bearing the frail body of a man approaching the seventh and last age of human life. He is pointedly named Old Adam: he is Everyman. It would be hard to controvert the view that Shakespeare believed that life is a kind of theater and that theater is, as Hamlet describes it, a mirror of life. But an actor turned dramatist would believe that, wouldn’t he?

Sometimes “this great stage of fools” upon which we are born has an audience. “The gods look down,” says Coriolanus as his mother kneels to him (inverting the orthodoxy whereby children would kneel nightly to their parents and ask for blessing), “and this unnatural scene / They laugh at.” These gods are plural because this is a play set in the polytheistic world of antiquity, but Shakespeare lived in a society where everybody, with a few wildcard exceptions such as the alleged atheist Christopher Marlowe, believed that the world was looked down upon by a singular God—albeit with aspects of three-in-one and one-in-three. In some of the civically performed Biblical plays of the 15th- and early 16th-centuries, the actor representing God would physically look down upon the “human” players.

But in 1559, Queen Elizabeth published a proclamation forbidding the theatrical treatment of “matters of religion.” In 1569, the Corpus Christi plays were suppressed in York; the Coventry cycle was performed for the last time in 1579. The Elizabethan theater has many vestigial traces of this religious tradition, most famously Hamlet complaining about players who out-Herod Herod, but Shakespeare never overtly dramatized Biblical matter. There were strict laws proscribing stage blasphemy. Marlowe’s fate hung over the stage-play world like an admonitory shadow. And the relationship between the church and the theater became increasingly strained as “Puritan” polemicists voiced their disapproval of players, especially when adult male actors started kissing boys dressed as girls.

For all these reasons, Shakespeare was severely limited in his stage exploration and representation of Christian ideas, images, and doctrinal debates. He perforce handled such material cautiously, below the surface of the action; modern scholarship has unearthed rich polemical contexts and excavated subtle allusions, but it is not always clear that these would have been perceived by the original theater audiences.

In 1550, Parliament passed an Act “for the abolishing and putting away of divers books and images.” Extreme Protestantism, taking the Biblical Second Commandment literally, regarded all graven images—which is to say inventions of the human imagination—as idolatrous because they encouraged worship of the image of God as opposed to his ineffable Reality. When the Protestant revolution reached Stratford-upon-Avon, the treasurer of the town council, John Shakespeare, paid for workmen to whitewash over the image of the Last Judgment in the Guild Chapel across the road from the well-appointed house that his son William would purchase many years later.

A poet and dramatist whose business was the making of images, in words and in stage pictures, would hardly have shared the Puritan relish for this kind of iconoclasm. Killjoy Malvolio in Twelfth Night is specifically defined as a Puritan, while hypocritical Angelo in Measure for Measure is said to be “precise”—a “precisian” was another term for a Puritan. The humiliation of both characters derives from the way in which their stand against sexual desire collapses under the force of sexual desire. One thing we can say for sure about Shakespeare’s beliefs is that he was not a Puritan. His works may indeed be read as defenses of the imagination and of the theater against the strictures of Puritanism.

A tradition going back to the late 17th century affirms that he died a closet at Papist. Yet despite three centuries of investigation and argument, there is no firm evidence, either internal to his plays or external in the biographical record, to confirm his recusancy or indeed that of his immediate family. Perhaps he was a “Church-Papist,” conforming outwardly but maintaining the old faith in his heart. Or he may have been an orthodox Anglican. It seems that his denominational allegiance could have been anything—other than “hot Protestant.”

A play such as King John has at various times been used to “prove” that Shakespeare was a Papist and that he was an anti-Papist. One suspects that throughout his career he had a vestigial love for the more theatrical aspects of the old faith—dressing up, ceremony, ritual. That was above all because of their theatricality, their appeal to the imagination—aspects of the old faith despised by Puritans.

We are unlikely ever to resolve the debate about Shakespeare’s religious allegiance, or indeed the implicit religious attitudes within his plays. But there is no doubting his dependence on the pagan gods as an imaginative resource. The interest in resurrection and redemption that marks his last plays does not feel specifically Roman Catholic, or even specifically Christian: in Pericles, Thaisa expresses her gratitude for returning from the dead by becoming a priestess in the temple of Diana, while in The Winter’s Tale, Hermione is reawakened under the aegis of Apollo’s oracle and the influence of Ovid’s Pygmalion through the agency of what Leontes calls Paulina’s “magic,” something that was regarded as the antithesis of “lawful” Christian faith.

Shakespeare’s late plays, traditionally seen as his most spiritual works, take us to a number of temples, all of them ancient and pagan rather than Christian and modern: first those of Diana in Pericles and (by report) Apollo in The Winter’s Tale, then a trinity of shrines—to Venus, Mars, and Diana—in the final act of his final play, The Two Noble Kinsmen. Add in the theophany of Jupiter in Cymbeline and the impersonation of Juno, Ceres, and Iris in The Tempest, and it becomes undeniable that Shakespeare’s way of dramatizing divinity was more profoundly shaped by the humanist inheritance from ancient Rome than the modern contentions between Rome and Geneva.

Again, when it came to certain matters of ethical debate, the Shakespearean way of thinking was more akin to pagan reflection than Christian doctrine. The gravediggers in Hamlet, discussing the burial of Ophelia, remind us that suicide is a sin so mortal that Christian burial is not allowed. Hamlet himself knows this. The first thing he tells the audience once he is alone is that he wants his own life to end, in defiance of God’s will: “O, that . . . the Everlasting had not fixed / His canon gainst self-slaughter.”

But where canon law was unequivocal about suicide, Hamlet regards it as a question without a clear ethical answer: “To be or not to be” is indeed the question. To debate the case for and the case against self-slaughter places Hamlet in a long tradition of Greek and Roman thinkers going back to Plato’s dialogues on the last days of Socrates, the most famous suicide in history.

Furthermore, one of the principal ways in which such thinkers pursued the debate was by means of virtuous examples. The two most famous of these were Lucretia, who committed suicide after being raped, and Cato, who did so (in a botched and messy way) after losing the fight against Julius Caesar—he preferred to die than to live under a dictatorship. Shakespeare knew these cases well: he wrote an entire poem about The Rape of Lucrece, and he made a point of remembering Cato by introducing his son as a minor character in Julius Caesar, defining himself as an enemy of tyranny in the spirit of his father.

Brutus, whose wife, Portia, was Cato’s daughter, expresses doubt about the compatibility of Cato’s Stoic code with the act of self-slaughter, but he kills himself all the same—as did Seneca, the exemplar of Roman Stoicism. Most Stoics, notably Seneca, argued that suicide was an honorable way out when circumstances became such that the integrity of the self could no longer be sustained. Given the noble examples of Lucretia and Cato, not to mention the number of honorable characters who commit suicide in Shakespeare’s plays (one immediately thinks of Juliet, Enobarbus, Charmian, and the expressed intention of Kent in King Lear), it is clear that Shakespeare thought of the question of self-slaughter as an open, not a closed case. Canon law was firmly “fixed,” whereas Shakespeare’s imagination was always fluid.

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Excerpted from How the Classics Made Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate. Copyright © 2019 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.