Religious views of William Shakespeare

The religious views of William Shakespeare are the subject of an ongoing scholarly debate dating back more than 150 years. The general assumption about William Shakespeare's religious affiliation is that he was a conforming member of the established Church of England. However, many scholars have speculated about his personal religious beliefs, based on analysis of the historical record and of his published work, with claims that Shakespeare's family may have had Catholic sympathies and that he himself was a secret Catholic.

Shakespeare and his immediate family were conforming members of the established Church of England. When Shakespeare was young, his father, John Shakespeare, was elected to several municipal offices, serving as an alderman and culminating in a term as bailiff, the chief magistrate of the town council, all of which required being a church member in good standing, and he participated in whitewashing over the Catholic images in the Chapel of the Guild of the Holy Cross and taking down the rood screen some time in the 1560s or 1570s.

Shakespeare's baptism and those of his siblings were entered into the parish church register, as were the births of his three children and the burials of family members. His brother Edmund, who followed him to London as an actor and died there, was buried in St Saviour's in Southwark "with a forenoone knell of the great bell", most likely paid for by the poet. As leaser of the parish tithes in Stratford, he was a lay rector of the church. He and his wife were buried in the church chancel, and a monument that included a half-figure bust of the poet was set into the north wall of the chancel.

Shakespeare failed twice to pay his taxes for St Helen's parish, Bishopsgate, London, where he is listed by name for the year 1596/7, and he is not among those "in any of the annual lists of residents of the Clink parish (St Saviour's) compiled by the officers who made the rounds to collect tokens purchased by churchgoers for Easter Communion, which was compulsory." An explanation is offered by historian Walter Godfrey, who suggests that the playwright's default at Bishopsgate was simply because he had moved to the Clink parish at the end of that year, where taxes were collected by the landowner (the bishop of Winchester) and not parish officials. The bishop then remitted the outstanding sum to Shakespeare's former parish "as a matter of convenience".

In 1559, five years before Shakespeare's birth, the Elizabethan Religious Settlement finally severed the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church. In the ensuing years, extreme pressure was placed on England's Catholics to accept the practices of the Church of England, and recusancy laws made illegal any service not found in the Book of Common Prayer, including the Roman Catholic Mass. In Shakespeare's lifetime there was a substantial and widespread quiet resistance to the newly imposed reforms. Some scholars, using both historical and literary evidence, have argued that Shakespeare was one of these recusants. Rowan Williams, former archbishop of Canterbury, thinks that Shakespeare had a "recusant Catholic background."

Some scholars also believe there is evidence that several members of Shakespeare's family were recusant Catholics. The strongest evidence is a tract professing secret Catholicism signed by John Shakespeare, father of the poet. The tract was found in the 18th century in the rafters of a house which had once been John Shakespeare's, and was seen and described by the reputable scholar Edmond Malone. Malone later changed his mind and declared that he thought the tract was a forgery. Although the document has since been lost, Anthony Holden writes that Malone's reported wording of the tract is linked to a testament written by Charles Borromeo and circulated in England by Edmund Campion, copies of which still exist in Italian and English. Other research, however, suggests that the Borromeo testament is a 17th-century artefact (at the earliest dated from 1638), was not printed for missionary work, and could never have been in the possession of John Shakespeare. As of 2024, new research has attributed the tract to William's sister Joan (1569 – 1646), which could make it a genuine copy of Borromeo's document. John Shakespeare was listed as one who did not attend church services, but this was "for feare of processe for Debtte", according to the commissioners, not because he was a recusant.

Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, was a member of a conspicuous and determinedly Catholic family in Warwickshire. In 1606, his daughter Susanna was listed as one of the residents of Stratford who failed to take (Anglican) Holy Communion at Easter, which may suggest Catholic sympathies. It may, however, also be a sign of Puritan sympathies; Susanna was, according to some statements, of a Puritanical bent.

Four of the six schoolmasters at the grammar school of Shakespeare's youth, King's New School in Stratford, were Catholic sympathisers, and Simon Hunt, who may have been one of Shakespeare's teachers, later became a Jesuit priest. Thomas Jenkins, who succeeded Hunt as teacher in the grammar school, was a student of Edmund Campion at St John's College, Oxford. Jenkins's successor at the grammar school in 1579, John Cottam, was the brother of Jesuit priest Thomas Cottam.