Shakespeare's Religious Allusiveness complicates debates about whether Shakespeare's plays are fundamentally Protestant or Catholic in sympathy, challenging analyses that either find Protestant elements consistently undercutting Catholic motifs or, less often, discover evidence of the playwright's endorsement of Catholic doctrine and customs. Rather, Maurice Hunt argues that Shakespeare's syncretistic method of incorporating both Protestant and Catholic elements into his plays was singular among early modern English playwrights at a time when governmental and social tolerance of Protestantism in the theatre was high and criticism of stereotyped Catholicism was correspondingly rampant in drama. In-depth discussions of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Second Henriad, All's Well That Ends Well, Twelfth Night, and Othello reveal how Shakespeare allusively integrates Reformation Protestant and Roman Catholic motifs and systems of thought. This book sheds new light on the playwright's knowledge of and interest in Elizabethan and Jacobean religious debates over the nature of spiritual reformation, the efficacy of merit for redemption, and the operation of Providence. It will appeal not only to Shakespeare scholars but to those interested in the cultural history of the Reformation.

Offering a wide range of scholarly perspectives, Religions in Shakespeare’s Writings explores Shakespeare’s depictions, throughout his canon, of various religions and matters related to them. This collection’s fifteen essays explore matters pertaining to Catholic, Anglican, and Puritan Christianity, the Albigensian heresy of the high middle ages, Islam, Judaism, Roman religion, different manifestations of religious paganism, and even the “religion of Shakespeare” practiced by Shakespeare’s nineteenth-century admirers. These essays analyze how Shakespeare depicts both tensions between religions and the syntheses of different religious expressions on topics as diverse as Shakespeare’s varied portrayals of the afterlife, religious experience in Measure for Measure, and Black natural law and The Tempest. This collection also explores the political ramifications of religion within Shakespeare’s works, as well as Shakespeare’s multifaceted uses of the Bible. Additionally, while this collection does not present a Shakespeare whose particular religious beliefs can definitely be known or are displayed uniformly throughout his canon, various essays consider to what extent Shakespeare’s individual works demonstrate a Christian foundation. Contributors include John D. Cox, Cyndia Susan Clegg, Grace Tiffany, Matthew J. Smith, Bethany C. Besteman, Sarah Skwire, Feisal Mohamed, Benedict J. Whalen, Benjamin Lockerd, Bryan Adams Hampton, Debra Johanyak, John E. Curran, Emily E. Stelzer, David V. Urban, and Julia Reinhard Lupton.

THIS slight volume is addressed not to Shakespearean special ists, but rather to the general public. My chief purpose has been to view Shakespeare's manipulation of his clergy. The last three chapters deal with ancillary problems. Two articles in this collection have already been published - "Shakespeare's Cardinals and Bishops" in The Crozer Quarterry, April, 1950; "Shakespeare's Interest in Harsnet's Declaration" in Publications of the Modern Language Association, September, 1952. I appreciate the Editors' permission to reprint these essays in the present volume. I also thank Professors Gerald Eades Bentley and Lily Bess Campbell for encourage ment and advice during the writing of the first, fifth, and last pieces in this collection. Neither is however to be held re sponsible for any errors discovered by reviewers. All of the essays in this volume except the first were written either at The Folger Shakespeare Library in 1950 or at The Huntington Library in 1952. I thank the directors and staffs of both libraries for their many exceptional kindnesses. Miss Mary Neighbour of Oxford has placed me further in her debt by typing the completed collection.

A daring look into the art and technique of one of history’s most celebrated literary scholars, Shakespeare, Religion and Beyond is a detailed documentation on that attempt to shed light on a missing piece in a cryptic puzzle. As described by Robin L. Inboden, Ph.D. (Wittenberg University), “Fleissners’s book summarized, interrogates, and extends both long-held assumptions about Shakespeare’s work and newer claims alike. His speculative web of connections among plays, the life, the religion, and the literary inspirations of Shakespeare links the unexpected and thus suggests potentially fruitful avenues for further study.”

A Will to Believe is a revised version of Kastan's 2008 Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures, providing a provocative account of the ways in which religion animates Shakespeare's plays.

For years scholars and others have been trying to out Shakespeare as an ardent Calvinist, a crypto-Catholic, a Puritan-baiter, a secularist, or a devotee of some hybrid faith. In Religion Around Shakespeare, Peter Kaufman sets aside such speculation in favor of considering the historical and religious context surrounding his work. Employing extensive archival research, he aims to assist literary historians who probe the religious discourses, characters, and events that seem to have found places in Shakespeare’s plays and to aid general readers or playgoers developing an interest in the plays’ and playwright’s religious contexts: Catholic, conformist, and reformist. Kaufman argues that sermons preached around Shakespeare and conflicts that left their marks on literature, law, municipal chronicles, and vestry minutes enlivened the world in which (and with which) he worked and can enrich our understanding of the playwright and his plays.

Seeming Knowledge revisits the question of Shakespeare and religion by focusing on the conjunction of faith and skepticism in his writing. Cox argues that the relationship between faith and skepticism is not an invented conjunction. The recognition of the history of faith and skepticism in the sixteenth century illuminates a tradition that Shakespeare inherited and represented more subtly and effectively than any other writer of his generation.

Explores Shakespeare's engagement with the religious culture of his time. Through readings of a number of plays - "Romeo and Juliet", "King John", "1 Henry IV", "Henry V", and "Measure for Measure", this work explains allusions to the Bible, the Church's liturgy, and to the mystery plays performed in England in Shakespeare's boyhood.