A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion by David Scott Kastan

Reviewed by: A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion by David Scott Kastan Rajiv Thind Kastan, David Scott, A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014; hardback; pp. 176; R.R.P. £25.00; ISBN 9780199572892. This slender but significant book grew out of a series of lectures David Scott Kastan delivered on the subject of Shakespeare and religion. In the last twenty-odd years, the field of Shakespeare and religion has become exceedingly active. Richard McCoy justifiably calls this academic overabundance ‘a bit of a stampede’ (Faith in Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2013), p. ix). Amid such noise and confusion, Kastan’s book has arrived as a concise and prudent addition. Kastan eschews religious partisanship, which has often plagued the field of Shakespeare and religion. The short introductory section of this book rules out making exclusive claims about Shakespeare’s personal religious beliefs. Kastan deftly illuminates the pitfalls and futility of such an approach. Any religious sectarianism in Shakespeare studies with its subjective agenda and conjectural readings of the plays inevitably turns into pulp fiction. But to say that Shakespeare was not a Catholic rebel or recusant is not to argue that Shakespeare’s works exclusively fly the ‘Protestant’ banner. Even though religious allusions are pervasive in Shakespeare’s works, they do not ‘display the same kind of religious concern or commitment as Spenser’s or Milton’s verse’ (p. 4). During Shakespeare’s lifetime, the boundaries between ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ often overlapped. Shakespeare’s plays refuse to settle for doctrinal rigidity in their representation of Christianity. [End Page 250] The second section addresses in detail the claims of a ‘Catholic’ Shakespeare that have recently proliferated in Shakespeare studies. Kastan notes that before England adopted the Reformation in the 1530s, all English subjects had been Catholics, which included Shakespeare’s parents. The newly reformed England carried many residues of the older, traditional faith. Kastan underlines the tendency of the ‘Catholic’ Shakespeare proponents to rely too heavily on slim evidence. Much has been made about the reported discovery of a Catholic ‘Spiritual Testament’ in 1757 in a house owned by Shakespeare’s father. Kastan argues that even if we believe in the document’s authenticity it does not prove John Shakespeare’s actual beliefs (p. 23). Furthermore, the claims of John’s impassioned recusancy are undermined by the fact that seven of his children were baptised in the reformed rites, and that as the Chamberlain of Stratford he was complicit in the iconoclastic defacing and destruction of the material reminders of Catholicism (p. 25). Still, even if we indulge the claim that John was an active (albeit secret) Catholic, it cannot serve as a proof that William Shakespeare practised ‘Catholic’ activism through his plays to undermine the ‘Protestant’ establishment. In the third section, Kastan assesses the Catholic content of Shakespeare’s plays. It should not surprise us if the plays set in pre-Reformation England or Italy feature priests and friars: these plays evoke ‘romance details’ rather than ‘Romanist’ theology (p. 50). The plays’ various Catholic characters and dense Catholic allusions did not alarm the Protestant authorities. Catholicism might have been vilified in Protestant polemics, ‘but for most English Protestants Catholicism was native and familiar’ (p. 56). In other words, it was a culture saturated with residual Catholicism. Kastan also reminds us that the likable Catholic friars in Shakespeare’s plays are ‘mendicant priests’ and not ‘high clergy’ who would likely have appeared threatening to Shakespeare’s Protestant audience or the authorities. On the other hand, Shakespeare often used anti-Catholic polemic that would appeal to his audience like ‘much English patriotic writing in the 1590s’ (p. 60). Even so, Kastan argues that Shakespeare’s fictional depictions cannot be used to ascertain his own personal religious beliefs. The fourth section, ‘Conversion and Cosmopolitanism’, which focuses primarily on Jewish Shylock and Moorish Othello, deals with Shakespeare’s depiction of non-Christian religions, along with racial and ethnic identities considered foreign in early modern England. Kastan draws on various Shakespeare plays to conclude that, generally, the depictions of foreign race and ethnicity are commensurate with the deep prejudices extant at the time: Shakespeare the playwright played to the...