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"Written by an international team of literary scholars and historians, this collaborative volume illuminates the diversity of early modern religious beliefs and practices in Shakespeare's England, and considers how religious culture is imaginatively reanimated in Shakespeare's plays. Fourteen new essays explore the creative ways Shakespeare engaged with the multi-faceted dimensions of Protestantism, Catholicism, non-Christian religions including Judaism and Islam, and secular perspectives, considering plays such as Hamlet, Julius Caesar, King John, King Lear, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Winter's Tale. The collection is of great interest to readers of Shakespeare studies, early modern literature, religious studies, and early modern history"-- "Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion contains contributions from both literary scholars and historians of religion; as such, it is a cross-disciplinary volume that illuminates Shakespeare's plays and the early modern religious beliefs that circulated in Shakespeare's England. Most notably, this volume explores Shakespeare's creative engagement with early modern religious culture, but it does so without assuming that Shakespeare can himself be aligned with any specific doctrinal beliefs, religious group, or confession. The essays in this book thus eschew firm or reductive assertions about Shakespeare's personal religious convictions. Instead, contributors focus on his imaginative recasting of different currents of early modern religious culture and beliefs in their great variety, an array of perspectives that was at once contradictory, competing, and deeply contested"--
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