On Religion and Memory

11. Of Shakespeare and Pastness

The subject of Shakespeare's past and of his future has been opened up in novel ways in the last few years by the previously unspoken question of Shakespeare's religion. We cannot finally know what Shakespeare, himself, believed. We are confronted here by the impossibility of Shakespeare's own past. We are also confronted by Shakespeare's sense of the past and its recoverability. For his religion can only be constructed by reference to a constant regression: the religion of Shakespeare is bound up with the religion of his father, and more generally, with the religion of England's past. Shakespeare's religion is therefore to be imagined as the recuperation of a lost religious identity. The irreducible fact of religion in Shakespeare's time is that it is constantly on the point of oblivion. As one confessional identity replaces another it buries a host of former practices. Shakespeare's religion is thus residual and memorial: it is a religion of the past. Investigating these questions opens out into a new set of possibilities for thinking about how Shakespeare imagined the past, about how we imagine Shakespeare's past, and how we reconstruct the past through religion, in a series of powerful paradoxes.