Shakespeare wrote in such a way that all men may find beauty and understanding in his words. For this reason, he is called our most universal poet; we can all respond in some measure to what he says. The reading man will make this response through studying Shakespeare in print, but even the illiterate respond with excitement and pleasure if they see a good stage production of one of his plays. He wrote works and words in which we feel the essence of beauty and yet find that beauty closely united to truth about man and society. We can gain enjoyment from him and learn from him as from no other secular writer.

What are we to say about Shakespeare in relation to Christianity? First of all, we must say that he was writing objective drama in which he gave expression to virtually every opinion that men anywhere have ever held. His characters cover the full range of the human spectrum, representing every shade of vice and virtue, every degree of piety and impiety. But Shakespeare has left us no account of his own innermost convictions. Of mankind he has told us much, but of himself very little. We simply cannot tell precisely what his own most intimate religious beliefs were. We can say, however, that he appears to have been a lifelong conforming member of the Church of England. Let us first look at this evidence from his life and then turn to the relation between his plays and Christian teaching.

Shakespeare was born into a solid middle-class family of Stratford-upon-Avon, the kind of family that history shows to be most productive of genius: neither very poor and debased nor very rich and prominent. Considered from the social point of view, it was a family much like that of Calvin in France. The precise date of William Shakespeare’s birth is unknown, as it is unknown for most of his famous contemporaries, but the records of baptism were considered important enough to preserve; thus we know that on April 26, 1564, William Shakespeare was baptized in Holy Trinity Church of his native town. Fifty-two years later he died and was buried in the same church.

Throughout his life all the records concerning his religious associations connect him with the post-Reformation Church of England, and most connect him with this particular parish church. His marriage was approved by the authority of Bishop John Whitgift of the diocese of Worcester, in which Stratford lay. (Whitgift later became one of the most famous of the Archbishops of Canterbury and was always a stickler for close conformity to church law.) Shakespeare’s three children were baptized in Holy Trinity, and most of his family was buried there. Every particle of positive evidence connects Shakespeare with the reformed Church of England, and certain important negative evidence points in the same direction: in Shakespeare’s age, attendance at the established church was required by law, and careful lists were kept of those who did not attend. The name of William Shakespeare nowhere appears on any such list, either in Stratford or in London or anywhere else, and so we can assume that he was at the least sufficiently regular in his attendance to satisfy the requirements.

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His father, John Shakespeare, was once fined for not going to the established church, and this fact has sometimes been used to “prove” that the elder Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic; but the use of this argument demonstrates at best only the ignorance of those who use it. The record of the case clearly states that the father stayed away from church for fear of being served with papers prosecuting him for debt, and the records also show that he was having financial troubles at this time. Other “evidence” has been cited by those who are intent upon claiming Shakespeare for Rome, but all of it is historically unconvincing. Few if any responsible Roman Catholic scholars make such a claim.

There is one positive piece of evidence bearing on William Shakespeare’s relation with Rome, and this is a copy of the second folio edition of his plays that was censored by authority of the Inquisition. The censorship consisted of the blacking out of “offensive” passages in many of the plays and the complete elimination of Measure for Measure, in which a layman poses as a friar and hears confession. Other deletions from Shakespeare’s King John and King Henry VIII eliminated passages that seemed offensively Protestant to the official censor, an English Jesuit named William Sankey. This censorship was carried out within about thirty years of Shakespeare’s death and represents, of course, an official act of the Roman church. (The censored folio is in the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library, and a detailed report on it is to be found in the appendix to my Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine.)

The Bard And The Bible

The evidence of Shakespeare’s plays demonstrates that he was intimately familiar with the Book of Common Prayer and with the Bible. His study of the Bible appears to have continued throughout his life, and the plays give evidence that he knew it primarily through the Geneva Version, which was the most popular version of his time, and the Bishops’, which was the version approved by the Convocation of Canterbury. His citation in Henry V of specific Roman Catholic usage of the Scriptures is in error at an obvious point, whereas his knowledge of “catholic” doctrine and worship as preserved in the Church of England is accurate and familiar. For readers interested in Shakespeare’s use of Scripture and liturgy, there is Richmond Noble’s authoritative study entitled Shakespeare’s Biblical Knowledge and Use of the Book of Common Prayer.

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Shakespeare is important to us today, however, not because of his personal life and ecclesiastical affiliations but because of his writings. If we are to understand Shakespeare’s use of Christian doctrine in his drama, we must keep at least two things in mind: the doctrine of vocation as it was understood in his age, and the attitude of that age toward literature. The doctrine of vocation that the Reformation embraced and taught should be familiar to us all: it held that God called some men to secular vocations just as surely as he called others into the clergy, and it ennobled all life by this emphasis on the nobility of secular efforts. One of Shakespeare’s associates in the Globe Theatre, an actor and dramatist named Nathan Field, wrote a magnificent letter to a preacher who had unfairly attacked the stage (as preachers have sometimes done). Field’s letter is a minor theological masterpiece, defending honest dramatists and actors as carrying out the calling of God in their own secular sphere. In this instance, the man of the theater was far closer to the position of the great Reformers than was the man of the cloth.

But we must also recognize the attitude toward literature that characterized the century of the Reformation in which Shakespeare lived. The literature that Elizabethan Englishmen primarily knew was the literature of Rome and Greece, rather than the specifically Christian writings of Donne and Herbert, Milton and Bunyan, which came later. Literature was regarded as a secular field—not in any pejorative sense, but acknowledging that it concerned natural law and natural theology rather than revealed theology.

This was the attitude taught by great Reformers such as Luther, Calvin, and Hooker, as can be conclusively proved by page after page of evidence. The poet’s vocation primarily concerned the secular sphere—this world, the here and now—and his contributions were to be judged in these terms. Luther declared that genuine theology could not endure if it ignored the insights of literature so conceived, and Calvin wrote that to show disrespect for such literature was to show disrespect for the operations of the Holy Spirit in the secular realm.

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It was in these terms that Shakespeare wrote, and it is in these terms that he can best be understood. Unlike John Milton, his great successor and chief rival among English poets, Shakespeare was not attempting to transmit Christian revelation and saving grace through the medium of his writings. Yet the literature he produced was just the kind called for by the great leaders of the first century of the Reformation.

Doctrines In Drama

When we approach Shakespeare’s plays within this frame of reference, we can profit from them as men living within the secular order and as Christians who strive to live our lives under the jurisdiction and in the anticipation of the City of God. When Shakespeare’s dramatic needs require it, he can and does write with mature and even brilliant understanding of many central Christian doctrines. What he says of original sin and its offshoots in myriads of particular sins, of repentance and of forgiveness, of justice and of mercy, and of scores of other Christian doctrines is always appropriate to his poetic situation and is dramatically revealing to us as Christians. So, too, is what he says of non-Christian men who struggle to follow the best they can know in pre-Christian times, as is also his treatment of those men in all ages who perversely choose to dedicate themselves to serving the demonic powers of darkness. All this is present in Shakespeare, just as it all is present in life.

The most accurate description of Shakespeare’s literary concerns may be found in the words of Hamlet when he declares that the purpose of drama is and always has been to hold “the mirror up to nature.” Now in Shakespeare’s time the Bible was repeatedly described as a mirror held up to reflect grace and divine revelation. That was not the mirror Shakespeare was striving to create; what he took as his task was the creation of another mirror. But if this was not a mirror of divine grace, it was nonetheless a mirror that reflected the moral law; for as Hamlet went on to say, the purpose of drama was “to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” So fully did Shakespeare discharge this poetic vocation in the secular order that succeeding centuries have regarded him as not of one age, but for all time.

Roland Mushat Frye is research professor, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. A graduate of Princeton University (A.B. and Ph.D.), he has been professor of English at Emory University. He is a Presbyterian elder and has studied at Princeton Theological Seminary. His latest book is “Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine.”

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