Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion

"Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion contains contributions from both literary scholars and historians of religion; as such, it is a cross-disciplinary volume that illuminates Shakespeare's plays and the early modern religious beliefs that circulated in Shakespeare's England. Most notably, this volume explores Shakespeare's creative engagement with early modern religious culture, but it does so without assuming that Shakespeare can himself be aligned with any specific doctrinal beliefs, religious group, or confession. The essays in this book thus eschew firm or reductive assertions about Shakespeare's personal religious convictions. Instead, contributors focus on his imaginative recasting of different currents of early modern religious culture and beliefs in their great variety, an array of perspectives that was at once contradictory, competing, and deeply contested"--