What Was the Religion of Shakespeare?

by M. M. Mangasarian

And love and justice came and dwelt therein:

—or to contend that Goethe was profane and irreligious because the verse in which he sums up his philosophy omits all reference to the essentials of revealed religion?

In the Entire, the Good, the Beautiful resolve to live—

Wouldst fashion for thyself a seemly life.

Then fret not over what is past and gone;

And spite of all thou may'st have lost behind,

Yet act as if thy life were just begun.

The religion of not a few of the best minds has been of the above type; and surely, to a reasonable man the Catholic who denies that the Protestant is a Christian, or the Trinitarian who excommunicates the Unitarian is not more sectarian than the philosopher who denies that Goethe, Tennyson, Voltaire, or Shakespeare, had any religion at all because they did not have his religion.

The German critic, Gervinius, on the other hand, expresses the opinion that Shakespeare was silent on religion "because his platform was not a pulpit." But it was a very narrow view to take of religion, to intimate that outside the pulpit religion is an intruder. If religion is one's philosophy of life, it is at home everywhere, but if it is only one's beliefs concerning dogmas and rites, then the pulpit is its exclusive sphere. Shakespeare was silent on religion of the kind Gervinius has in mind, not because "his platform was not a pulpit," but because he had no such religion to express. A man's religion is his philosophy of life, in accordance with which he shapes his conduct and interprets human destiny, and surely Shakespeare was not without such a working-religion.

The position of W. J. Birch, the English parliamentarian who writes from the Christian standpoint, appears to us more consistent. He believes that Shakespeare was not at all silent on religion, in the Christian or supernatural sense of the word, but demonstrably antagonistic to it. He then produces passage after passage to show Shakespeare's positive dislike for such fundamental tenets of revealed religion, as the doctrines of providence, the Fall of Man, the Holy Sacrament, the Word of God, Salvation, the Church, the Priesthood, etc. Birch denounces Shakespeare because he was not a Christian; because "not only the details, but the essentials, also, of Christianity are the themes of his flippancy." He infers further, from the companions of Shakespeare—Marlowe, Green, Raleigh, Beaumont and Fletcher; and from the books he read—Lucretius, Plutarch, Lucian, Montaigne and Bruno—that he could not have been a Christian, as no follower of Jesus Christ could take any interest in such profane writers.