Shakespeare and Religion: The Personal Conviction and Secular Identity of Shakespeare

Jonathan Bennett, Western Carolina University

William Shakespeare lived and wrote in a tumultuous religious time. Catholicism, Protestantism, and an emerging secularism intermixed together to create a unique and changing English society. In recent years a renewed emphasis on religious interpretation has engulfed Renaissance study. The literary historian and scholar, Debora Shuger, describes this new focus on religious study by succinctly stating that “religion during this period supplies the primary language of analysis.”1 Religion was inescapable during Shakespeare’s age and religious references and themes are a ubiquitous part of his plays. This literature review will argue that Shakespeare’s personal faith and religious affiliations are hidden beyond detection within his work and that this religious ambiguity leads not only to both Catholic and Protestant claims on his personal convictions but also to a more revealing and compelling secular possibility. Such a new perspective compels us to view Shakespeare as a more complex individual, which will shape the way we discuss his body of work moving forward.

Literary critics have routinely debated the religious affiliation of William Shakespeare with one camp asserting that he has clearly Catholic leanings, another promoting his Protestant views and another defining a more secular version of Shakespeare. Modern scholars have consistently agreed that unmasking Shakespeare’s personal convictions is an unfeasible task.

The mystery of faith remains even after a comprehensive analysis of both his literary writings and biographical information. Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells succinctly articulates the majority opinion of twenty-first century scholars. He states that, “Whatever his personal beliefs, (Shakespeare) is in the most important sense of the word a religious writer: not a proponent of any particular religion, but a writer who is aware, and makes his spectators aware, of the mystery of things.”2

In Religion Around Shakespeare, Peter Kaufman speaks for many modern critics when he writes, “The playwright eludes me…I cannot make the plays tell us about his religious partisanship.”3 Shakespeare’s literary genius effectively masked his own religious beliefs. His ability to create religious depth in characters without imposing his own personal faith is key to that genius. In Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion, David Bevington aptly describes this character development by writing “(Shakespeare) habitually let his characters speak for themselves, to such an extent that we must always be careful not to ascribe to the author the views thus expressed.”4 The task of assigning Shakespeare’s religious affiliation based on the words and actions of his fictional characters remains insufficient and problematic for scholars.

Alison Shell echoes both Kaufman and Bevington when she writes in her book, Shakespeare and Religion, that “there is much we do not know, and will never know, about Shakespeare’s personal religious beliefs. But we do know that he saw no contradiction between (his) writings for the theater – and this alone tells us a good deal.”5 Shell contends that if Shakespeare did have a specific religious affiliation, he saw no problem with advancing characters who were fundamentally different. She furthers her assertion by writing, “Shakespeare’s language in (his plays), and elsewhere in his work, is constantly oscillating between sacred, secular and profane, pagan, Catholic and Protestant. It tells us little about Shakespeare’s own beliefs, other than that he had no ideological objection to this kind of intermixing.”6 Shakespeare’s mature understanding of varied religious and secular beliefs allowed him to weave authentic credibility into a wide range of characters.

A few modern scholars have attempted to make claims about Shakespeare’s belief system, but these scholars have championed a more secular perspective. Brian Cummings, in Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity and Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture, alludes to a skeptical Shakespeare. He writes, “What we can see is that the playwright is fascinated with philosophical and religious controversy, among other matters, and not least of all with skeptical uncertainty about the role purportedly played by divinity in human affairs.”7 Cummings makes a definitive claim about Shakespeare’s religious mindset. He unravels a religious skepticism that mirrors a more post-modern secular mindset. In comparison, Kaufman somewhat agrees with Cummings and admits that there is room for a secular Shakespeare but suggests that the playwright wrestled with matters of faith and that this type of religious skepticism played out in his work.

In A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion, David Kastan readily admits that he is unsure about Shakespeare’s personal religious thoughts but makes an attempt nonetheless to come up with an assertion. He writes, “If I were forced to put a label on what I take to be Shakespeare’s religious commitments…I would say that he was probably something like what Christopher Haigh has termed…a ‘Parish Anglican’, a tolerant largely habitual Christian who recognized the ‘communal value of village harmony and worship and objected to the divisiveness of the godly.”8 Kastan contends that Shakespeare gave voice to a broader framework of social engagement instead of a limited religious perspective. Kastan asserts that Shakespeare sought social harmony which was consistently unattainable due to religious division. He writes, “(Shakespeare) seems to me at once too skeptical and too sympathetic to be zealously committed to any confession.”9 Like Kaufman, Kastan senses that Shakespeare brought a healthy skepticism to his writing. He claims that Shakespeare fell into a superficial belief system that allowed him to function successfully within the religious landscape of his day. A playwright that was overtly and publicly skeptical about religion either in his personal life or in his work would struggle to find professional success in the religious culture that engulfed England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

The status of Shakespeare’s religious convictions might best be summed up by the questions posed by Peter Marshall in Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion. He writes, “What, then, should we make of the absence of overt religious declarations in the life and works of William Shakespeare, of his apparent quiet determination, in an age of confessional choices, to choose to refuse to choose? Is this a pointer to the inwardness of Shakespeare’s own social and spiritual predilections, an indicator of the priorities and functions of theater in this period, or a suggestive clue that very many people may simply have wished quietly to get on with life amidst the sound and fury of the zealous doctrinarism (of the period).”10 With his questions, Marshall provides a broad scope of English society during the time of Shakespeare. He suggests that England was torn apart by religion and many people simply wanted those contentions to disappear. Maybe Shakespeare would have agreed with Marshall and instead of choosing a religious side he preferred to create imaginative art to highlight his moral themes.

The religious culture of Shakespeare’s day cannot be overlooked or understated when analyzing his plays for religious significance. English culture was inseparable from religion. Throughout the sixteenth century Catholicism and Protestantism were continually at odds as competing monarchs forced their religious brand upon their subjects. With the advent of reformed thinking the number of competing religious perspectives increased as differing sects emerged. The traditional Catholic/Protestant binary was infiltrated by numerous religious beliefs as well as the slow rise of secular thinking. Shakespeare was surrounded by the culture of religion and that culture is unmistakably present in his work.

In Shakespeare and Religious Change, Kenneth Graham quotes Jean-Christopher Mayer who, “sees in Shakespeare’s plays a ‘hybrid faith that reflects the fluid and fundamentally unstable character of religious faith’ in early modern England.”11 This description of hybridity aptly describes the tension and unstable nature of both personal and governmental religious thought. Kastan notes that Shakespeare “recognized and responded to various ways in which religion charged the world in which he lived. For some, religion was experienced with certainty and joy, for some with doubt and even despair. Sometimes it bound communities together; sometimes it tore them apart. Most often it was habitual, not therefore unimportant but important precisely for that reason.”12 Kastan asserts that religion was important because it was everywhere. It permeated throughout all of English society. For better or worse, religion was fused with culture. Kaufman agrees with Kastan and unquestionably claims that Shakespeare borrowed from the religious culture around him.13 He suggests that the vitality of Shakespeare’s plays came directly from the circumstances that surrounded him. Shakespeare was certainly familiar with both the history of English religion and the modern twists that resonated privately in the hearts and minds of those who attended his plays. Shell speaks directly to this cultural make up that Shakespeare encountered. She writes, “Shakespeare’s England was a world where Christianity was dominant, where Christianity’s doctrinal variations were a matter of fervent intellectual concern and fierce public debate, where nearly everyone thought within religious paradigms, and where religious allegiance could be a matter of life and death.”14 Shell describes a theocratic society in which Shakespeare was forced to operate, whether he was in agreement with the current religious mandates or not.

The religious culture of England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries created what many scholars see as a religious paradox in Shakespeare’s work. Shell suggests that “Shakespeare’s writing has been seen both as profoundly religious, giving everyday human life a sacramental quality, and as profoundly secular, foreshadowing the kind of humanism that sees no necessity for God.”15 The dichotomy of the secular and sacred in Shakespeare’s writings have compounded the religious mystery of the playwright’s personal convictions. Shell sees a breadth of religious interpretations that come from Shakespeare’s pen. Cummings continues his secular argument by invoking the writings of the Renaissance historian, Jacob Burkhardt. Burkhardt wrote that “all of Europe produced one Shakespeare” and that “such a mind is the rarest of Heavens’ gifts.”16 Burkhardt obviously saw the genius of Shakespeare in part because Burkhardt saw an individualism in Shakespeare that broke free from England’s religious structure.

Cummings interprets Burkhardt by writing, “For Burkhardt, it was Shakespeare’s non-religious status which explained the full range of his historic significance in the emancipation of the cultural power of what we call…’personhood’ or ‘identity’. Shakespeare could not have existed under a Spanish viceroy, or the Roman Inquisition, or even in England at the time of the religious revolution a generation later.”17

Cummings asserts that Shakespeare wrote at the right time in the right environment to display a secularism that could not be expressed in other ages. He also sees the use of literature as a defining aspect of this individual identity. He writes, “Literature was held to be a fundamentally secular form, and its emergence was explained in terms of the transition from a religious culture.”18 For Cummings, Shakespeare’s writings were a bridge from the sacred to the secular. Shakespeare was a defining cultural agent who exemplified a new secular identity.

Shell resonates with Cummings in some sense as she draws attention to the biblical references that were ubiquitous in Shakespeare’s writings. She concludes that “the biblical allusions in the work of professional playwrights like Shakespeare tend to be deployed in the service of generalized moralism, or of simple ornamentation, or as a way of fastening their own work more firmly in the minds of the auditors.”19

Shell suggests that the use of biblical stories and themes in Shakespeare’s plays were not designed to infer a specific Christianized world view but instead to inject a secular morality.

Those who viewed Shakespeare’s plays would be familiar with biblical references and he used those familiarities to connect his moral truth to his audience. David Bevington acknowledges the relationship between author and viewer. He writes: “Shakespeare speaks from the vantage point, and to audiences who share the perspective, of belong (despite internal differences that can be bitter) to a Christian culture.”20 Shakespeare knew his audience. He knew what stories and topics would resonate with them. For him to truly connect his audience to his moral themes he needed to use the familiarity of the Bible to do so.

Shell continues this secular theme by writing, “the dichotomy between godly and natural readers is one that can inform our view of Shakespeare, the writer who not only dominates the non-biblical canon, but who, more than any other, has yielded a secular scripture.”21 Shell’s reference to a “secular scripture” opens up the door for discussion about art as religion not just art reflecting religion. She writes, “Shakespeare’s writing draws upon Christianity, but does not concede to it, or to any of the other religion he uses. All are subsumed to the specific demands of the aesthetic position with God – or, as some would see it, is made into a god himself. For many unbelievers, art has been and continues to be a substitute for religion.”22 Cummings agrees with Shell by writing, “Art is taken to be religion’s antithesis, and also its usurper. Once religion is thrown off, new gods are needed and art takes on that transcendence that has been left behind.”23 Both Shell and Cummings see Shakespeare as a transition between the sacred and secular. They offer his work as an example of how art can serve as a substitute for religion.

Kaufman agrees with both Shell and Cummings but is unable to fully remove the religious significance of Shakespeare’s work. Kaufman writes that, “even if (Shakespeare) self- consciously or subliminally believed the theater was an alternative to the church, a faction-free zone, more peaceful than the clerical estate – his plays are still a source from which we learn much about religious circumstances.”24 Kaufman is unable to push the “secular scripture” perspective as far as both Shell and Cummings and still sees sixteenth and seventeenth century English theater as settings where the primacy of religious dialogue is unavoidable.

As Kaufman suggests, religion in the theater was inescapable, and whether Shakespeare believed that his theater was a substitute for the church or was instead a place where religious truth could be explored remains a highly debatable topic. However, there is no escaping the way Shakespeare specifically addresses the religious world around him. Graham brings light to the wider religious writings that encompass Shakespeare’s work. He specifically addresses the notion that Shakespeare was a playwright with Catholic leanings. He writes: Although the relationship of Shakespeare’s plays to early modern Catholicism remains the subject of vigorous investigation, the idea of a consistently Catholic Shakespeare has not met with widespread acceptance. Nor has the best of this work claimed to find such a consistency. Rather, rejecting the strong tendency in early modern religion to think in terms of binary oppositions between Catholic and Protestant, Christian and Jew, and Christian and Muslim, it has stressed the surprising permeability of religious boundaries within an admittedly contentious and polarized environment.25

Shakespeare wrote freely from multiple religious perspectives breaking the binary religious relationships that Graham references above.

As Lowenstein and Witmore mention, “Shakespeare gives dramatic expression to both Protestant and Catholic perspectives in his plays, a reminder that he lived in an age marked by tumultuous religious change and divisions brought about by the cataclysm of the Reformation that shattered western Christendom.”26 Bevington speaks to the religious dynamics that flow through Shakespeare’s writing by mentioning his suspicion of Puritanism as well as the Catholic/Protestant debate found in Shakespeare’s work. Bevington writes, “Shakespeare’s seeming wariness of Puritanism…was not doctrinal so much as it was antipathy toward any who claimed a higher moral ground from which to censor and repress forms of social recreation like theater. Can we discern his thoughts and feelings about the bitter controversy between Catholics and Protestants? The standard view has assumed that he conformed to the state religion whatever his own skeptical thoughts may have suggested to him. Conversely, the argument persists that he harbored Catholic sympathies.”27 Shakespeare, no matter his true feeling, has been unable to escape the pronouncement by critics of his Catholic faith.

Kastan contends that Shakespeare, “although his own faith seems indeterminable, unquestionably reveals an awareness of and perhaps even a sympathy for much of what resisted reform.”28 He goes on to say that “What, however,…seems to me important, and largely unremarked, about his handling of Catholic elements is how often they neither display nor hide themselves. They are just there.”29 Kastan insists that Catholicism was a comfortable setting for Shakespeare as highlighted by the amount of plays that he set in Catholic Italy. He writes, “In all the plays set in contemporary Italy, Shakespeare stages Catholicism without any of the hostility with which English Protestant polemic characteristically treated it. It is not presented as sinister or corrupt but as a religion that effectively serves the emotional and spiritual needs of the society of the play.”30 For some scholars this extremely normal and ordinary treatment of Catholicism shows the Catholic underpinnings of Shakespeare’s faith but for others it serves as yet another example that Shakespeare’s genius lies in his ability to write plays of great depth without importing his own religious views into the narrative. Kastan continues by writing that, “the very fact that religion in these plays drew no official rebuke or seemingly even scrutiny suggests, among other things, that sympathetic treatment of Catholicism was not inevitably a cultural red flag.”

Phebe Jensen continues a discussion on Catholicism and Protestantism as it relates to the festive culture of England. Festive plays took place during special religious and national holidays and historically were a part of the English Catholic tradition. In Shakespeare and Religious Change, Jensen discusses this festive play culture. She writes, “Festive play, once part of a Catholic culture that did not so rigidly oppose religion and performance as Protestantism, could be (indeed often was) secularized in early modern England. But that secularization could be resisted as well as well as embraced in a culture still sorting through the repercussions of the Reformation.”31 Jensen notes the increasing rise of secularism that originated after the Reformation and how this played out in the theatrical community at large. Anthony Dawson in his chapter entitled, “The Secular Theater”, discusses the emergence of religion as a means of study on the early modern theater. He reflects “on how the resurgence of religion in our thinking about the Elizabethan theater has enabled this kind of fancy.”32 Dawson claims that both Protestant and Catholic proponents can go overboard in their claims to Shakespeare and his religion. Dawson suggests that many scholars insist too strongly that Shakespeare had a religious tilt to his work. He writes, “As I have argued elsewhere, the Elizabethan theater acted as a ‘repository of memory, a kind of middle in which the rags and bones of culture [could] be taken up and examined.’ It picked up cultural remnants as it constructed its own separate domain; and that very separateness, I want now to argue, contributes to the process of secularization in the society as a whole.”33 Dawson falls in line with similar notions set forth by Kaufman. They both contend that the society at large was changing. Perhaps that change was due to the exhausting religious turmoil that surrounded Shakespeare’s life. It is possible that a fatigued society inundated with religion began moving in a secular direction and that Shakespeare stealthily crafted plays that led a new cultural movement. Dawson believes that this shift toward secularization began with the advent of the Reformation and “the strong sense among certain people of the inevitability of change – and the equally strong sense of resistance.”34 The Protestant Reformation started almost fifty years before Shakespeare’s birth but it is clear that both the English government and its people were still coming to grips with the changes that followed the convictions of Martin Luther. As many of the authors in this review have noted the Reformation revolutionized England and ironically opened the door for the birth of the secular individual and it is this secularism that lies hidden underneath Shakespeare’s writings.

One of Shakespeare’s most classic works is his unbelievably compelling play, Hamlet. This drama serves as a persuasive example of Shakespeare’s religious ambiguity. Numerous claims on Shakespeare’s personal convictions have stemmed from the study of Hamlet, but as this analysis will show, Shakespeare’s internal beliefs remain shrouded behind his words.

Kastan reserves the final chapter of his book for a lengthy analysis of the religious implications of Hamlet. He writes, “Religion is, of course, hardly a new topic in Hamlet criticism.” He goes on to say that, “In no other play…is there such a sustained engagement with religious issues and in which religious language is so prominent.”35 The central religious issue in Hamlet is the uncertainty about the nature of the Ghost. The haunting figure of the Ghost is a specter of Hamlet’s father. Kastan contends that “Hamlet’s reaction to the ghost…overwhelms any theological speculation, provoking thoughts about relationships rather than religion, about connectedness rather than confession.”36 Even though Kastan eludes to the religious tone of Hamlet he obviously sees a secular connotation to the spiritual representation.

In Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion, Paul Stevens writes, “a Shakespearean play like Hamlet stands at the fulcrum of the West’s turn to the secular; it allows them to construct grand narratives in which the one idealizes what the other laments.”37 Stevens agrees with Burckhardt in praising Shakespeare as a cultural agent, specifically in regards to the rejection of corporate religion and the Renaissance shift toward secular individualism.38 He does assert that Hamlet is in its essence a secular play, “especially in the way it resists the implications of its own religious allusions.”39 Stevens secular analysis of Hamlet echoes with that of Kastan. They both view the play as inherently secular in meaning despite the religious language and themes that run throughout. Analyzing Shakespeare with this secular perspective serves as a mechanism for a broader understanding and should be applied to his entire body of work.

Cummings, like both Stevens and Kastan, promotes a secular perspective on Hamlet. In the chapter entitled “Hamlet’s Luck”, he compares the idea of the randomness of chance with that of the religious determinism of providence. He asserts that “we have been driven by modern philosophical doctrines of determinism to understand earlier, theological models (both pagan and Christian) in more rigid ways than may be the case.”40 In other words, he suggests that we must look at Hamlet with a “period eye” and in a way that reflects the determinism of the era. He goes on to write that “luck emerges as part of a distinctively secularized view of life standing in stark opposition to the world of the Elizabethan godly.” The concept of chance fell beyond a predestined and predetermined Christian worldview and shifts the interpretation of Hamlet into a secular conversation. Cummings continues by saying that “Shakespeare, in creating such a complex world of chance in Hamlet, was not reacting against this theological sensitivity, he was participating in it. The Protestant obsession with providence created a rich and complex philosophical language. Shakespeare could draw on pagan and Christian narratives without feeling that there was some unbridgeable chasm between them.”41 Cummings is asserting that Shakespeare was able to effectively connect the sacredness of providence with the secular of chance in a manner that allowed them to intertwine instead of conflict.

Anthony Dawson also briefly tackles the concept of providence in Hamlet. He writes, “as a purely religious claim, and one that Protestant thinking particularly emphasized, the assertion of a special providence at this moment produces a complex effect.”42 Like Cummings, Dawson addresses the complexity that providence and chance play in Hamlet. Both authors find the complexity compelling but also plausible and workable together.

Another religious aspect in Hamlet is the concept of purgatory. Hamlet’s ghost contends that he is from purgatory which leads to obvious religious questions and interpretations. As Kastan writes, “unsurprisingly the Ghosts’ expressed Catholicism has been read by some as Shakespeare’s acknowledgment of his own father’s faith, if not of his own.”43 Kastan recognizes that since purgatory is a uniquely Catholic construct, there could be inferences of his own Catholic faith and that of his fathers as well. However, Kastan rejects this notion by writing, “Religion obviously matters in this play. It is intensely saturated with religious language, religious practices, and religious ideas, but their presence neither exhausts nor explains the play’s mysteries, and they function neither as an index of Shakespeare’s faith nor as a prompt or
challenge to our own.” Kastan maintains his contention that Shakespeare’s faith is unknowable and that the presence of a character with unique Catholic beliefs does not inherently align Shakespeare with Catholicism.

Shell advances the purgatory debate in Hamlet by indicating that the concept was still a very believable aspect of faith in Shakespeare’s time and specifically for his audience. Belief in purgatory was still relevant in the present consciousness of Renaissance England. Shell writes, “There can be few places in the history of literature where dramatic sophistication works against ideological clarity so much as it does in the characterization of the Ghost; all we can deduce is that the Ghost was conceived by someone who felt able to indulge in the luxury of theological ambivalence.”44 Shell references the religious ambiguity that flows through this play. Like both Cummings, Kastan and Stevens, she sees the play as full of religious themes and language but devoid of any concrete religious message. She jumps into the discrepancy created by purgatory for both Catholics and Protestants. She writes, “the Ghost and reactions to him combine Catholic, Protestant and pagan fields of reference: hence the level of ambiguity that critics have detected, and the impossibility of giving him any clear religious cast.”45 She continues by writing, “a ghost who describes himself as being from purgatory and then unchristianly calls his auditor to revenge is true to his mixed antecedents, but would never have passed the internal censor of someone who had a serious interest promoting Catholicism through drama.”46 Shell suggests that a playwright who had specific intent to promote a foundational Catholic belief would avoid creating such a flawed Catholic character thus serving as another example of the religious ambiguity that defined Shakespeare’s work.

The silence that comes from Shakespeare’s personal religious life has frustrated countless scholars and critics. However, it is this religious mystery that allows Shakespeare to speak to a broad audience. Catholics and Protestants alike have tried to claim Shakespeare as their own, but he eludes these attempts and in so doing avoids the imposition of a particular religious perspective on his texts. They are freed to speak for themselves and not through a prescribed religious voice. As this review has shown, Shakespeare has opened the door to interpret his work not only from a religious or moral perspective but also through the lens of a secular individualism.

1 Kenneth J.E. Graham, “Introduction: Shakespeare and Religious Change,” in Shakespeare and Religious Change, eds. Kenneth J.E. Graham and Philip D. Collington (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1.
2 David Scott Kastan, A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014), 118.
3 Peter Iver Kaufman, Religion Around Shakespeare (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 88.
4 David Bevington, “The Debate About Shakespeare and Religion,” in Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion, eds. David Loewenstein and Michael Witmore (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 23.
5 Alison Shell, Shakespeare and Religion (London: Methuen Drama, 2010), 78.
6 Shell, 65.
7 Brian Cummings, Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity and Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 36.
8 Kastan, 37.
9 Kastan, 37.
10 Peter Marshall, “Choosing Sides and Talking Religion in Shakespeare’s England,” in Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion, eds. David Loewenstein and Michael Witmore (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 55.
11 Graham, 3.
12 Kastan, 2.
13 Kaufman, 5.
14 Shell, 65.
15 Shell, 2.
16 Cummings, 9.
17 Cummings, 8.
18 Cummings, 9.
19 Shell, 7.
20 Bevington, 39.
21 Shell, 29.
22 Shell, 19.
23 Cummings, 9.
24 Kaufman, 4.
25 Graham, 2.
26 David Loewenstein and Michael Witmore, “Introduction,” in Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion, eds. David Loewenstein and Michael Witmore (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 2.
27 Bevington, 28.
28 Kastan, 49.
29 Kastan, 50.
30 Kastan, 53.
31 Phebe Jensen, “Mirth in Heaven: Religion and Festivity in As You Like It,” in Shakespeare and Religious Change, eds. Kenneth J.E. Graham and Philip D. Collington (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 170.
32 Antony Dawson, “The Secular Theater,” in Shakespeare and Religious Change, eds. Kenneth J.E. Graham and Philip D. Collington (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 239.
33 Dawson, 242.
34 Dawson, 252.
35 Kastan, 118.
36 Kastan, 120.
37 Paul Stevens, “Hamlet, Henry VIII, and the Question of Religion: A Post-secular Perspective,” in Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion, eds. David Loewenstein and Michael Witmore (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 235.
38 Stevens, 235.
39 Stevens, 238.
40 Cummings, 210.
41 Cummings, 235.
42 Dawson, 246.
43 Kastan, 126.
44 Shell, 113.
45 Shell, 115.