What Was the Religion of Shakespeare?

by M. M. Mangasarian

Never was forsworn;

Scarcely have coveted what was mine own;

At no time broke my faith; would not betray

The devil to his fellow; and delight

No less in truth, than life.

The concluding line—and delight no less in truth than life—we have no hesitation in pronouncing as the most beautiful sentiment in Shakespeare. Malcolm says not a word about his Christian beliefs, without which "no one can be saved." Once more we call attention to the fact that there are in Shakespeare, as there are in Voltaire, nearly all the terms of church and creed, but the underlying philosophy of the poet is, if we may depend upon the above extracts and examples, unequivocally rationalistic. Shakespeare was a freethinker, in that he interrogates the popular faith about God, and the hereafter, and suggests an order of the universe which is the very negation of the supernatural. His indifference to the fundamentals of the Christian faith, then, is not due to the fact that he is not a preacher, as Gervinius suggests, nor because he preferred "nothing" to Christianity, as Santayana concludes, or because of his "tender and delicate reserve about holy things," as Charles Knight, one of the most enthusiastic admirers of Shakespeare suggests, but to his utter want of intellectual sympathy with the religious thought of his day, and to the fact that he had worked out a religion of his own, based on the natural virtues—an ethical religion of Humanity, with its commandments written, not on parchments, but in the blood of the race.

There is undoubtedly a religious atmosphere in Shakespeare, but it is the religion of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful; without dogma and without miracle, and as comprehensive, as true to nature, and as closely in harmony with the rationalistic interpretation of the universe as his own drama. Has not Goethe, in defining his own religion, defined also that of Shakespeare? "Man is born," writes Goethe, "not to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out where the problem begins, and then to restrain himself within the limits of the comprehensible." This is precisely what the great Englishman, whom Goethe so sincerely admired, did. He "restrained himself within the limits of the comprehensible," which is a beautiful way of saying that he was practical and not speculative, scientific in spirit and method, and not theological. He abstained from the unprofitable pursuit of the gods, whom the Bible says in one place, "no man can find out by searching," and devoted himself to the study of man and his world. This is the religion of sense. There is everything in Shakespeare about man, and every bit of it is serious; but there is nothing of any consequence in Shakespeare about God or gods. It is a matter of regret to the theologian that the great poet should have permitted the secular interests of life to engage his exclusive thought, but we rejoice in the fact that Shakespeare could not be tempted into the dusty and winding paths of theology which lead nowhere.

As truthfully as the great Voltaire, the glorious Shakespeare, poet, philosopher, historian, could say of the founders of isms, and the inventor and maker of gods, "they have troubled the earth, and I have consoled it."