For several hundred years, Shakespeare was read as a Protestant poet of a providentially Protestant nation—what John of Gaunt in Richard II called, “This other Eden, demi-paradise,/ . . . This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, however, scholars began toying with possible alternatives for the poet’s religious creed. At one extreme in 1848, William John Birch’s An Inquiry into the Philosophy and Religion of Shakespeare suggested that Shakespeare was an atheist, which, shockingly, became a common reading of his plays. Since then, more voices have sounded off with opinions spanning the entire religious spectrum. Some, like Eamon Duffy, see a particularly Catholic flare in the “bare-ruined choirs” of Sonnet 73, and others point to the recusancy of Shakespeare’s father as evidence of William’s traditional beliefs. Then again, fans of a more reformed bard have heard his Protestantism in passages like The Winter’s Tale’s “It is required/ You do awake your faith,” as well as in his reliance upon the Calvinist Geneva Bible.
Shakespeare’s religion only barely has avoided the sort of wistful daydreams and speculative pseudo-scholarship that plague his authorship. Fortunately, David Scott Kastan’s A Will to Believeinjects a dose of much-needed realism into this debate by completely refashioning the question. While Kastan is sympathetic to the droves of scholars engaged in pinning down Shakespeare’s beliefs (“We want to understand the mystery of his genius”), he argues that the entire endeavor is an exercise in futility.
