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

David Scott Kastan’s Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion is based on the inaugural set of lectures he delivered at Oxford in honor of Stanley Wells, another preeminent Shakespeare scholar. Kastan begins this cogent, witty, and intelligent book by citing a resonant speech given by John Croke, Speaker of the House of Commons in 1601: “If a question should be asked, What is the first and chief thing in a Commonwealth to be regarded? I should say, religion. If, What is the second? I should say, religion. If, What the third? I should still say, religion” (3). Religion’s paramount importance in early modern England was clearly indisputable: the stakes were huge because eternal salvation depended on one’s religious beliefs, and the social order was deemed providential. But of course the Reformation made everyone’s confessional affiliation intensely fraught and controversial. John Donne’s Satire 3 urges his readers to “Seek true religion … before age, death’s twilight, / Thy soul rest,” but asks “where,” leaving Truth’s “huge hill” as hard to locate as Utopia. As Kastan notes, John Florio’s translation of Montaigne declares religion “the most important subject, that possibly can be,” but Montaigne’s essay adds that, in England, the religious establishment has “been changed and rechanged three or foure times”; Kastan concludes that, “if religion bound the English faithful to God, it didn’t always seem to bind the English to one another” (3).

These changes in religious settlement had a dramatic impact on many English subjects, resulting in persecution and martyrdom for some. The majority seems to have been content to conform to the prevailing regimen, and Shakespeare may have been one of these adaptable conformists. Kastan doubts that Shakespeare was a recusant Catholic (35). He thinks it more likely that the playwright was a “Parish Anglican,” Christopher Haigh’s term for what Kastan describes as “a tolerant, largely habitual Christian” committed to “an inclusive and theologically minimalist Christianity that resisted religious rigor and valued social accord” (37). Even these conjectures remain tentative, since, as Kastan concedes, Shakespeare kept his religious beliefs and inner convictions to himself. Kastan notes that, by definition, “‘inward thoughts’ are inaccessible to others, a fact that the Elizabethan Settlement depended upon” in its determination not to make “windows into men’s hearts” (36).

Kastan’s own definition of religion remains somewhat indeterminate. He explains that even amid the proclaimed “turn to religion” in Shakespeare studies, “‘religion’ as a category usually remains oddly undefined” and suggests that this vagueness may be a good thing since religion is “one of those words, much like ‘art’ or ‘politics’ or ‘society,’ for which any definition will either include or exclude too much and inevitably clarify too little” (82). He invokes what Mircea Eliade calls “the experience of the sacred” (82), but finds that idea both too narrow and too broad. Kastan is more comfortable with the approach taken by William James in that writer’s famous essay on religious belief, and he acknowledges its influence by adapting it as his book’s title. Like James, he too is more interested in the individual psychological and emotional aspects of religious experience rather than in its theological or doctrinal or institutional allegiances. At several points, he emphasizes these aspects as the primary focus of Shakespeare’s plays. In general, he asserts, “Crises of belief in the plays are more likely to be provoked psychologically than doctrinally” (10). Measure for Measure “depends on recognizing and rehabilitating our compromised commitments, not to the doctrines of any Church but to one another” (71). And the Ghost’s hold over Hamlet may derive less from “the theological credibility of the purgatorial experience … than the psychological credibility of the bad parenting” (131).

Shakespeare’s focus on the psychological and personal aspects of religion affords his work a greater degree of artistic autonomy, emancipating them from an otherwise inescapable religious agenda (6). His play’s...