What do you think about Shakespeare's religion?

Question

Was he Catholic, Protestant or what?

I'm not sure is this good section for this question, but I think this is the only section where I can get good answer,lol!!!!

-:-vInTaGe-:-PaS- where did you heard that?lol

-johnslat- Great answer

Answer 1

"What was Shakespeare's religion?
Since we do not know much about the personal life of William Shakespeare, we cannot say for sure what religion he practiced in private. We do know that he was born under the rule of Elizabeth I, who was Protestant and outlawed Catholicism. Thus, Shakespeare's public faith would have been Protestant. Shakespeare's parents, however, were very likely covert Catholics and Shakespeare's father, John, was close friends with William Catesby, the father of the head conspirator in the gunpowder plot to blow the Protestant monarchy to smithereens."

"A document, supposed to have been found about 1750 under the tiles of a house in Stratford which had once been John Shakespeare's, professes to be the spiritual testament of the said John Shakespeare, and assuming it to be authentic it would clearly prove him to have been a Catholic. The document, which was at first unhesitatingly accepted as genuine by Malone, is considered by most modern Shakespeare scholars to be a fabrication of J. Jordan who sent it to Malone (Lee, Life of William Shakespeare, London, 1908, p. 302). It is certainly not entirely a forgery (see The Month, Nov., 1911), and it produces in part a form of spiritual testament attributed to St. Charles Borromeo. Moreover, there is good evidence that a paper of this kind was really found. Such testaments were undoubtedly common among Catholics in the sixteenth century. Jordan had no particular motive for forging a very long, dreary, and tedious profession of Catholicism, only remotely connected with the poet; and although it has been said that John Shakespeare could not write (Lee, J.W. Gray, and C.C. Stopes maintain the contrary), it is quite conceivable that a priest or some other Catholic friend drafted the document for him, a copy of which was meant to be laid with him in his grave. All this goes to show that the dramatist in his youth must have been brought up in a very Catholic atmosphere, and indeed the history of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators (the Catesbys lived at Bushwood Park in Stratford parish) shows that the neighbourhood was regarded as quite a hotbed of recusancy.

On the other hand many serious difficulties stand in the way of believing that William Shakespeare could have been in any sense a staunch adherent of the old religion. To begin with, his own daughters were not only baptized in the parish church as their father had been, but were undoubtedly brought up as Protestants, the elder, Mrs. Hall, being apparently rather Puritan in her sympathies. Again Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of the parish church, though it is admitted that no argument can be deduced from this as to the creed he professed (Lee, op. cit., p. 220). More significant are such facts as that in 1608 he stood godfather to a child of Henry Walker, as shown by the parish register, that in 1614 he entertained a preacher at his house "the New Place", the expense being apparently borne by the municipality, that he was very familiar with the Bible in a Protestant version, that the various legatees and executors of his will cannot in any way be identified as Catholics, and also that he seems to have remained on terms of undiminished intimacy with Ben Johnson, despite the latter's exceptionally disgraceful apostasy from the Catholic Faith which he had for a time embraced. To these considerations must now be added the fact recently brought to light by the researches of Dr. Wallace of Nebraska, that Shakespeare during his residence in London lived for at least six years (1598-1604) at the house of Christopher Mountjoy, a refugee French Huguenot, who maintained close relations with the French Protestant Church in London (Harper's Magazine, March, 1910, pp. 489-510). Taking these facts in connection with the loose morality of the Sonnets, of Venus and Adonis, etc. and of passages in the play, not to speak of sundry vague hints preserved by tradition of the poet's rather dissolute morals, the conclusion seems certain that, even if Shakespeare's sympathies were with the Catholics, he made little or no attempt to live up to his convictions. For such a man it is intrinsically possible and even likely that, finding himself face to face with death, he may have profited by the happy incident of the presence of some priest in Stratford to be reconciled with the Church before the end came. Thus Archdeacon Davies's statement that "he dyed a Papyst" is by no means incredible, but it would obviously be foolish to build too much upon an unverifiable tradition of this kind. The point must remain forever uncertain."

Please see links 2, 3 and 4 for more speculation - and speculation is all that the evidence of history allows us to indulge in - at least for now.

Anti-Semitic?

" I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction. (The Merchant of Venice: 3.1.54-69)"

I doubt it.

Answer 2

Shakespeare's Life and Times

http://ise.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/intro/introsubj.html

SHAKESPEARE LINKS AND GENERAL STUDY SITES:
** THE BEST **

http://www.chsbs.cmich.edu/Kristen_McDermott/ssacmu/ssacmu_links.html


http://www.field-of-themes.com/shakespeare/

http://www.william-shakespeare.info/site-map.htm

http://www.folger.edu/template.cfm?cid=863

http://webtech.kennesaw.edu/jcheek3/shakespeare.htm

(Great Hyperlink)

http://shakespeare.palomar.edu/

http://www.bardweb.net/

http://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/

Answer 3

During Shakespeare's life, almost everyone had to belong to the Church of England. There were quite a few secret Catholics, and it's been suggested that Shakespeare might have been among these. But everything we know about him suggests that religion did not play a large role in his life. If he'd lived a little later, he might have called himself a "freethinker."

Answer 4

In reading his plays, which have to do with God's Avenging wrong, the afterlife full of restless ghosts waiting for vindication, I'd say he was a protestant. Although to this, whether it is a fact or not, I could not tell you. "Vengeance is mine, saitheth the Lord" is something I seem to read in his plays, with the (invisible between the lines, addition of : "and sometimes with the help of the awareness of my creation : human beings, to actually do the deed for me.
Also he was a favourite playwright to Gloriana; Queen Elizabeth the First . . so he must have been a Protestant . . yet from the way he wrote to understand things so well, up and beyond their outcome, I'd say he was a Buddhist, who let Karma make its inevitable mark!

Answer 5

Um, I would say probably Christian like most of the people of the time. And I don't believe he "hated Jews more than that Hitler".

Answer 6

He was a Catholic but did not speak it publicly. Good for him seeing how Catholics are the only true religion.

Answer 7

he was a humanist or a pagan. It does not matter what he may have called himself, his writtings are very clear about what he believed.

Answer 8

It doesnt matter. He was a jew hater. People say that he hated Jews more that Hitler. Nasty person.