It is one of the perennial questions in Shakespearean scholarship: what was the Bard’s religious faith? A consistent amount of evidence in his works, but also within the scant biographical material we have outside his plays, suggests he was himself a Catholic. The evidence, to be sure, has been questioned back and forth between scholars; to me, his early work on the play about St Thomas More (which is usually neglected and not put into collected editions of his work, because he was not its only author) says enough to show where his loyalties lay.
Now there is a new book out which looks quite interesting and might provide even more clues to bring a proper answer to the question: Catholic Theology in Shakespeare’s Plays by Rev. David Beauregard . But, as this article by Rich Barlow points out, not everyone finds Beauregard’s arguments to be conclusive:
They don’t convince Stephen Greenblatt, professor of Renaissance literature at Harvard, a Shakespeare scholar, and an author of several books on the Bard. In an e-mail, Greenblatt notes Shakespeare’s family and its Catholic ties, but said: “I think throughout his life, he drew upon this experience of the outlawed faith. He was, in this and in other ways, a specialist at recycling damaged or discarded institutional goods. But I do not myself believe that the adult Shakespeare was a pious Catholic or Protestant.”
Whatever the truth of the matter turns out to be, one thing is sure: Shakespeare was able to receive praises from Catholics and Protestants alike in the harsh, anti-Catholic climate of Elizabethan England. That alone suggests he was an ecumenist, no matter what his personal faith actually was.
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