Shakespeare and Religion

Edited by Lee Oser, College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts

Select Bibliography

Battenhouse, Roy. Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1969.

———, ed. Shakespeare’s Christian Dimension: An Anthology of Commentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Bernthal, Craig. The Trial of Man: Christianity and Judgment in the World of Shakespeare. Wilmington: ISI Books, 2003.

Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998.

Brownlow, F. W. Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils of Denham. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993.

Cox, John D. “Afterword.” Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation in England, edited by James D. Mardock and Kathryn R. McPherson, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2014, pp. 263-75.

———. The Devil and the Sacred in English Drama, 1350-1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.  

———. Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeare and Skeptical Faith. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007.

———. “Shakespeare and Religion.” Religions 9 (November 2018): pp. 1-11.

———. “Was Shakespeare a Christian, and If So, What Kind of a Christian Was He?” Christianity and Literature 55 (September 2006): pp. 539-66.

Cummings, Brian. The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 

———. Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity & Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Cunningham, J. V. “‘Essence’ and the Phoenix and Turtle.” English Literary History 19 (December 1952): pp. 265-76.

Daniell, David. “Shakespeare and the Protestant Mind.” Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001): pp. 1-12.

Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400-c.1580. 2^nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

Elton, William R. King Lear and the Gods. San Marino: Huntington Library, 1968. 

Frye, Roland. Shakespeare and the Christian Doctrine. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 

———. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: Norton, 2004.

Groves, Beatrice. “England’s Jerusalem in Shakespeare’s Henriad.” The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England, edited by Thomas Fulton and Kristen Poole, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 87-102.

———. Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare 1592-1604. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Hadfield, Andrew. “Shakespeare: Biography and Belief.” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion, edited by Hannibal Hamlin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 18-33.

Hassel, Chris R., Jr. Faith and Folly in Shakespeare’s Romantic Comedies. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980.

———. “Hamlet’s ‘Too, Too Solid Flesh.’” Sixteenth Century Journal 25 (Autumn 1994): pp. 609-22. 

———. Shakespeare’s Religious Language: A Dictionary. New York: Continuum, 2005. 

Holderness, Graham. The Faith of William Shakespeare. Oxford: Lion Books, 2016.

Hunter, Robert G. Shakespeare and the Mystery of God’s Judgments. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007.

Jensen, Phebe. Religion and Revelry in Shakespeare’s Festive World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Joseph, Miriam, C. S. C. Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2005.

Kantorowicz, Ernst H. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.

Kastan, David Scott. A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Kernodle, G. R. “The Open Stage: Elizabethan or Existentialist?” Shakespeare Survey 12 (1959): pp. 1-7.

Knapp, Jeffrey. Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Knight, G. Wilson. Shakespeare and Religion: Essays of Forty Years. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967. 

———. The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy. 1930. London, Routledge, 2001.

Kronenfeld, Judy. King Lear and the Naked Truth: Rethinking the Language of Religion and Resistance. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.

Lake, Peter. “Religious Identities in Shakespeare’s England.” A Companion to Shakespeare, edited by David Scott Kastan, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, pp. 57-84.

Lewalski, Barbara K. “Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice.” Shakespeare Quarterly 13 (1962): pp. 327-43.

Marx, Steven. Shakespeare and the Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

McCoy, Richard C. Faith in Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 

Monta, Susannah Brietz. “‘It is requir’d you do awake your faith’: Belief in Shakespeare’s Theater.” Religion and Drama in Early Modern England: The Performance of Religion on the Renaissance Stage, edited by Jane Hwang Degenhardt and Elizabeth Williamson, Farnham: Ashgate, 2011, pp. 115-37.

Morris, Harry. Last Things in Shakespeare. Tallahassee: University of Florida Press, 1985. 

Mowat, Barbara. “Shakespeare Reads the Geneva Bible.” Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Form of the Book: Contested Scriptures, edited by Travis DeCook and Alan Galey, New York: Routledge, 2012, pp. 25-39.

Noble, Richmond. Shakespeare’s Biblical Language. New York: Macmillan, 1935.

Oser, Lee. Christian Humanism in Shakespeare: A Study in Religion and Literature. Catholic University of America Press, 2022.

Poole, Kristen. Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Righter, Anne. Shakespeare and the Idea of a Play. Baltimore: Penguin, 1967.

Sanders, Wilbur. The Dramatist and the Received Idea: Studies in the Plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. 

Schreyer, Kurt A. Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft: Remnants of the Mysteries on the London Stage. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014.

Sellin, Paul R. “The Hidden God.” The Darker Vision of the Renaissance: Beyond the Fields of Reason, edited by Robert S. Kinsman, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974, pp. 147-96.

Shaheen, Naseeb. Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011.

Shell, Alison. Shakespeare and Religion. London: Methuen, 2010.

Shuger, Debora Kuller. Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.  

———. “Subversive Fathers and Suffering Subjects: Shakespeare and Christianity.” Religion, Literature, and Politics in Post-Reformation England, 1540-1688, edited by Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 46-69.

Slights, William W. E. “The Reformed Conscience.” Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England, edited by James D. Murdock and Kathryn R. McPherson, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2014, pp. 21-39.

Soellner, Rolf. Shakespeare’s Patterns of Self-Knowledge. Columbus:Ohio State University Press, 1972.

Spivak, Bernard. Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958.

Streete, Adrian. Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Swain, Barbara. Fools and Folly during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1932.

Taylor, Dennis. “Bearish on the Will: John Shakespeare in the Rafters.” Shakespeare Newsletter 54 (Spring 2004): pp. 11,16, 24, 28.

Taylor, Dennis. Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Reformation: Literary Negotiation of Religious Difference. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024.

Tillyard, E. M. W. Shakespeare’s History Plays. New York: Collier Books, 1962.

Waddington, Raymond B. “Lutheran Hamlet.” English Language Notes 27 (1989): pp. 27-42.

Walsh, Brian. Unsettled Toleration: Religious Differences on the Shakespearean Stage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Wells, Robin Headlam. Shakespeare’s Humanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 

Welsford, Enid. The Fool: His Social and Literary History. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1961.

Wittreich, Joseph. “Image of that Horror”: History, Prophecy, and Apocalypse in King Lear. San Marino: Huntington Library, 1984.

Additional Reading  

Beauregard, David. Catholic Theology in Shakespeare’s Plays. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008.

Coonradt, Nicole M. “Shakespeare’s Grand Deception: The Merchant of Venice–Anti-Semitism as ‘Uncanny Causality’ and the Catholic-Protestant Problem.” Religion and the Arts 11 (2007): pp. 74-97. 

Dawson, Anthony B. and Paul Yachnin. The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England: A Collaborative Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Dutton, Richard, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson, ed. Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004.

Evett, David. “Types of King David in Shakespeare’s Lancastrian Tetralogy.” Shakespeare Studies 14 (1981): pp. 139-61.

Fernie, Ewan, ed. Spiritual Shakespeares. London: Routledge, 2005.

Ferry, Anne. The “Inward” Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Fortin, René E. “Hermeneutical Circularity and Christian Interpretations of King Lear.” Shakespeare Studies 12 (1979): pp. 113-25.

———. “Launcelot and the Uses of Allegory in The Merchant of Venice.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 14 (Spring 1974): pp. 259-70.

Fripp, Edgar I.  Shakespeare: Man and Artist. 2 vols. London: Oxford University Press, 1938.

Fulton, Thomas, and Kristen Poole, ed. The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Gerlier, Valentin. Shakespeare and the Grace of Words. New York: Routledge, 2022.

Gray, Patrick and John D. Cox, ed. Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Greenfield, Thelma N. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Praise of Folly.” Comparative Literature 20 (1968): pp. 236-44.

Hamlin, Hannibal. The Bible in Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

———, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Hillier, Russell M. “Hamlet the Rough-Hewer: Moral Agency and the Consolations of Reformation Thought.” Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics, edited by Patrick Gray and John D. Cox, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 159-85.

Holland, Peter, ed. Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001). “Shakespeare and Religions.”

Hunt, Maurice. “Christian Numerology in Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Richard the Second.” Christianity and Literature 60 (Winter 2011): pp. 227-45.

Jackson, Ken, and Arthur F. Marotti. “Introduction.” Shakespeare and Religion: Early Modern and Postmodern Perspectives, edited by Ken Jackson and Arthur F. Marotti, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011, pp. 1-21. 

Jones, Emrys. “Othello, Lepanto, and the Cyprus Wars.” Shakespeare Survey 21 (1968): pp. 47–52.

Kastan, David Scott. A Will to Believe. Oxford University Press, 2014.

Kaufman, Peter Iver. Religion Around Shakespeare. Penn State University Press, 2013.

Leo, Russ. Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Lim, Walter S.H. Shakespeare and the Theater of Religious Conviction in Early Modern England. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.

Lynch, Stephen J. “Sin, Suffering, and Redemption in Leir and Lear.” Shakespeare Studies 18 (1986): pp. 161-74.

Mayer, Jean-Christophe. “Providence and Divine Right.” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion, edited by Hannibal Hamlin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 151-67.

———. Shakespeare’s Hybrid Faith: History, Religion and the Stage. Palgrave: New York, 2006.

McAlindon, Tom. Shakespeare’s Tudor History: A Study of Henry IV Parts 1 and 2. London: Routledge, 2018.

Millman, Noah. “Whence Comes Legitimacy?” The American Conservative (March 16, 2017): https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/whence-comes-legitimacy/

Milward, Peter, S. J. Biblical Influences in Shakespeare’s Great Tragedies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

———. “Religion in Arden.” Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001): pp. 115-21.

———. Shakespeare’s Religious Background. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1973.

———. Shakespearian Echoes: The Comedies. Tokyo: The Renaissance Institute, 2010.

———. Shakespearian Echoes: The Tragedies. Tokyo: The Renaissance Institute, 2010.

Morris, Ivor. Shakespeare’s God. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972.

Mutschmann, H. and K. Wentersdorf. Shakespeare and Catholicism. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1952.

Pauls, Peter. “The True Chronicle History of King Leir and Shakespeare’s King Lear: A Reconsideration.” Upstart Crow 5 (1984): pp. 93-107.

Pearce, Joseph. The Quest for Shakespeare: The Bard of Avon and the Church of Rome. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008.

Semper, I. J. Hamlet Without Tears. Dubuque, Iowa: Loras College Press, 1946. 

Stockton, Will, editor. The Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion. New York: Routledge, 2025.

Taylor, Dennis and David Beauregard, ed. Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003.

Weimann, Robert and Douglas Bruster. Shakespeare and the Power of Performance: Stage and Page in the Elizabethan Theatre. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Woods, Gillian. Shakespeare’s Unreformed Fictions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.