Religion Around Shakespeare by Peter Iver Kaufman (review)

Peter Iver Kaufman’s Religion Around Shakespeare appears as the first installment in a series called “Religion Around,” of which Kaufman is the general editor. The series intends to “bring religious background into the foreground” for “cultural icons.” For Shakespeare, as the recent “turn to religion” in Shakespeare studies suggests, this is no small task. The difficulties, as Kaufman sees them, are first, that criticism has attended to “the religion of Shakespeare” rather than “the religion around him” (1); and second, that “the ways the plays are read (as laments for a religion that was lost or as intrigued, bemused, or cleverly critical reactions to the religion Shakespeare found around him) often determine the ways in which the contexts are patched together” (2–3). Kaufman’s remedy is to begin by ignoring the plays and reconstructing the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century religious milieu, and then by imagining what kind of religious views (and news) Shakespeare may have encountered, first in Stratford and then in London. Only after Kaufman has isolated the times’ religious character does he turn to Shakespeare’s plays, but even here Kaufman insists he is uninterested in new dramatic interpretations, but instead “docks evidence drawn from some plays alongside evidence left by preachers, churchwardens, vestrymen, polemicists, theologians, and diarists” (4–5) to recover “circumstance” (5). “Circumstance,” Kaufman assures us, “—the religion around the playwright, not his faith or the plays’ proper interpretations—is my subject” (5).

Two chapters, “Religion Around” and “Around Shakespeare,” comprise the book’s first section. “Religion Around” begins in 1558 with the establishment of a reformed church that owed “due obedience” to Queen Elizabeth and “her” bishops—a demand that challenged the consciences of Catholics and “Calvinists” alike. Kaufman attempts to avoid the “contagious logophobia” among historians of this contested Elizabethan Protestantism by adopting Charles Prior’s choice of “conformist” and “reformist”—defined by the degree of satisfaction with the English church’s state of reform—with the caveat that “puritan” is useful for “Calvinist pietists” who internalized their dissatisfaction with reform by emphasizing their co-religionists’ prodigality through excessive sermonizing and devotional literature (11). The conformist/reformist binary envisions “Jacobethan” religion as conflicted both within the church and between Protestants and Catholics. This chapter, then, considers both doctrinal differences (the efficacy of sermons versus sacraments, tensions between episcopacy and laity) and religious, or quasi-religious, political confrontations: Elizabeth’s conflict with Archbishop Grindal over “prophesying”; Pope Pius V’s excommunication of Elizabeth; Mary Queen of Scots’ Catholic claim to the succession; Alençon’s courtship of Elizabeth framed by the French wars of religion; the Jesuit mission to England; the Spanish threat, including the Dutch Revolt, the Armada, and the earl of Essex’s preemptive strikes against Spain and subsequent fall; and the continuity into James I’s reign of attitudes associated with these events, beginning with the Hampton Court Conference and culminating in the Gunpowder Plot. Kaufman skillfully weaves into his narration of these events their reception by Catholics, reformists, and conformists identifiable through sermons and printed texts. In considering such public responses, Kaufman is cautious about what Shakespeare could have known—as, for example, regarding Essex’s fall, he notes, “The importance of all this for a politically and confessionally non-aligned playwright living in London at the time is hard to gauge” (37).

The next chapter, “Around Shakespeare” begins in Stratford, where despite Shakespeare’s family’s possible fondness for the old religion, the power of local reformist notables like Robert Dudley, Thomas Lucy, and Edwin Sandys would have made outright expression of Catholic positions politically unwise. Along with lively reformist activity in and around Stratford in the 1570s and 1580s, returned Catholic expatriate priests were making their presence known. Shakespeare, says Kaufman, “could have heard about—and have been impressed by—those expatriate priests.… But Shakespeare could also have been impressed by reformers’ indictments of those very same priests” (58). Once in London’s Shoreditch neighborhood, Shakespeare would have passed churches...