Shakespeare and Religion

My main objective is to complete a book or approximately 90,000 words, entitled Shakespeare and Religion for the Arden Critical Companions series. Every volume in this series is intended to give a scholarly and wide-ranging account of Shakespeare's work, structured round a key Shakespearian theme advancing original arguments, but presented in an accessible style suitable for undergraduates and general readers.Part 1 will describe how religious milieux in Stratford, London, the English regions (as well as Scotland, Ireland and Wales, where appropriate) and English outposts on the Continent looked at the time of Shakespeare's birth, and altered over the course or his life . Attention will be paid to the clashes and negotiations between Catholics, members of the Church of England and separatist Protestants; and to non-Christian religions (ranging from .Judaism and Islam to the semi-pagan elements in folk religion) and sceptical and atheistical trends in contemporary thought. Part 2 will engage with biographical questions about Shakespeare's religion see below. Part 3 will fall into two sections. The first will assess how Shakespeare's dramatic treatment or fate and providence evolved over the course of his working life, paying particular attention to how his plays can be seen as responding to theological debates about predestination; I see the final tragicomedies, written around the time that a stress on free will started to re-enter English Protestant thought, as marking: a watershed in his treatment of the topic. The second will address Shakespeare's use of popular moralism, drawing on contemporary devotional and moralistic texts, as well as recent scholarship on the popular press. I shall be arguing that the academy tends to stress Shakespeare's departures from the conventional moralisms of his time, while neglecting his imaginative affirmations of didactic religious c:commonplaces -though the latter help to explain why his work has had an unique place on the educational curriculum for so long, and why his proverbial afterlife has been .so rich. Many past discussions of Shakespeare and religion have been marred by a literal-minded concentration on priests, friars, nuns and puritans, or a distorting reliance on particular scenes and passages. These topics and cruxes will, of course, figure to some extent in my own work, but my broader intention is to attempt a conspectus or Shakespeare's work which focuses on topics undeniably central both to religions discourse and secular drama. There is an element of synthesis about Part 1 of the project, at a level that I hope will be helpful to specialists and non-specialists alike. But it would not be in the spirit of the Critical Companions series to provide merely a rehash of current scholarship. Parts 2 and 3 will, as I explain above and below, be methodologically innovative; besides, many or the primary sources I use have not been deployed in Shakespeare studies before.This brings me to my most important secondary objective. One aspect of this work has become conspicuously timely even since the date the project was commissioned namely, the relationship between Elizabethan and Jacobean Catholicism and Shakespeare's life and works. This is one or the most charged debates within the present-day academy, as well as being one of the rare literary-critical topics to generate mainstream media interest- often of a badly documented and sensationalist kind. In Part 2 of" this book, l shall he drawing on substantial original research to recover what literary contemporaries of Shakespeare's: with more obviously religious priorities-- including many Catholics - actually said about his writing. L hope this will counterbalance some of" the wilder current theories about Shakespeare and Catholicism - whose proponents have often read Shakespeare in a vacuum and ignored the background of Catholic literary culture from which they claim his works emanate·- and inaugurate a helpful reinterpretation of Shakespeare's career.