The fire that mounts the liquor till 't o'erflow
In seeming to augment it wastes it;
when Friar Laurence tells us that:—
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,
And vice sometime 's by action dignified;
and Portia that
There is no good without respect,
we have not only the keys to his ethics but the texts for sermons which find living illustrations in the fall of Angelo, of Coriolanus, of Timon, and of many others of his protagonists. Thus do his ethics temper and readjust for the sphere of working life, those of the Divine Enthusiast who legislated, in some respects, too exclusively perhaps, for a kingdom which is not of this world.
And so, his 'religion' being, to borrow an expression of his own, "as broad and general as the casing air," it has come to pass, that Shakespeare has been claimed as an orthodox Protestant by Knight, Bishop Wordsworth, and Trench; as an orthodox Roman Catholic by M. Rio, Mr. Simpson, and Father Bowden; and as a simple agnostic by Gervinus, Kreysig, and Professor Caird.
"He hath," says Sir Thomas Browne speaking of himself, "one common and authentic philosophy which he learnt in the schools, whereby he reasons and satisfies the reason of other men: another more reserved and drawn from experience whereby he satisfies his own." It may be, it may quite well be, for he has left nothing to justify conclusion to the contrary, that the words of Shakespeare's Will—mere formula though they be—are the expression of what he "reserved" to satisfy himself, and that he accepted the Christian Revelation. It may be, that what we are certainly warranted in concluding about him, represents all that can be concluded, namely, that:—