As the fashion of his hat

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 Believe injects 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. Since Shakespeare did not write religious poetry, religion appears in his works only as “a social reality that registers as form, rather than a creedal one that registers as belief.” Instead, Kastan offers us something altogether more useful and insightful. By looking through Shakespeare’s works, he provides a telescopic shot of the confessional firmament of early modern England.

First presented at Oxford University as the Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures, A Will to Believe places religion in Shakespeare’s works on a much more historically grounded and intellectually honest footing. First, Kastan rejects the idea that Shakespeare’s works are “allegorical . . . or even partially so,” dismissing any notion that there are hidden religious meanings and veiled imagery to be discovered. Of course, Kastan does not argue that religion is unimportant to the plays and sonnets. Quite the contrary—it “provides . . . the fundamental language of value . . . [and] the vocabulary in which characters understand themselves.” Rather than looking for hidden clues to the author’s beliefs, Kastan examines how Shakespeare “recognized and responded to the various ways in which religion charged the world.”

Addressing the many traditional elements in the plays, which have caused no end of excitement about Shakespeare’s possible Catholicism, Kastan admits that Shakespeare “unquestionably reveals an awareness of and perhaps even a sympathy for much of what resisted the reform.” For example, the figure of the Catholic friar, which is much maligned by many Protestant writers, is “neither demonic nor demonized” in plays like Much Ado about Nothing and Romeo and Juliet. While other English Protestants snidely rebuked Italian romances, Shakespeare seems to revel in them. Similarly, the heroic English kings like Henry V openly and actively practice the Catholic faith (e.g., Henry’s penitent prayer before the Battle of Agincourt). Yet this does not lead Kastan to assume, or even seriously consider, a Catholic Shakespeare. Instead, what Kastan sees as most intriguing in all of this is the fact that Shakespeare “stages Catholicism without any of the hostility with which English Protestant polemic characteristically treated it.” Rather than peg him as a closet-Catholic, Kastan sees this ambiguity as a reflection of a larger historical reality, in which “eclectic and unstable” religious categories and identities characterized Elizabethan and early Stuart England.

Similarly, Shakespeare’s treatment of other religions and races echoes the debates and anxieties of his time. In this chapter, Kastan avoids the anachronistic question of whether or not plays like <>Othello and The Merchant of Venice evince some measure of modern pluralism. He interprets Shakespeare’s treatment of the Moor and the Jew as demonstrations of the poet’s interest “in the limits and fantasies of inclusivity rather than in the primacy of the claims of the individual.” Both plays parade the typical early modern prejudices and intersections of Western Europe with its ethnic and religious neighbors, and as representations of early modern intellectual and cultural habits, they can be very enlightening. Kastan reminds us that both plays fail, however, “to imagine worlds” of inclusivity and modern views of tolerance. They, like their author, ultimately remain early modern in their conclusions about different races and religions.

Finally, the book turns to Hamlet, which in recent years has become the most theologically charged of all the plays, with the use of the University of Wittenberg as a nod to Martin Luther and the Ghost as a nod to Catholicism. While Kastan does not deny the religious overtones, he rightly questions whether we turn to religion “a bit too quickly.” Before religion is a serious issue in the play, Kastan finds in Hamlet an epistemic crisis. He explains that from the very beginning, “The problem is not that religion demands belief; the problem is that Hamlet desires certainty.” Indeed, Hamlet’s conflict with seeing his father’s ghost was not a matter of theology but one of trusting his senses. As Stuart Clark’s Vanities of the Eye points out, skepticism surrounding sensory observation was an increasingly pressing issue among both Protestants and Catholics. From Hamlet’s inability to act and his obsession with death to the drama’s bloody conclusion, the play hinges upon this crisis of certainty. While Hamlet “is intensely saturated” with religious language and ideas, religion “neither exhausts nor explains the play’s mysteries.” Instead, Hamlet revolves around this epistemic crisis, which, as Kastan points out, is a “crisis at the heart of the play and arguably in Protestantism itself.”

Some may argue that A Will to Believe hedges its bets around what can be known about the author and the period. Perhaps this is true, but it is hardly a shortcoming. One of Kastan’s many achievements here is that he reestablishes certain boundaries for literary criticism. This is something that is long overdue in Shakespearian circles, and we can only hope that others follow suit. Even though he succumbs to the very temptation he critiques, calling Shakespeare a “Parish Anglican,” Kastan succeeds in transforming the debate over religion into something worth reading.