SHAKESPEARE AND RELIGION

Shakespeare was a product of the English Reformation. England’s break with the Roman Catholic Church started under Henry VIII, and was well established by the time Shakespeare started writing. Yet in Shakespeare’s late and coauthored play , he barely mentions the break with Rome, even though his audience would have been keenly interested in the topic. As this suggests, such issues were controversial enough to attract censorship in a country that was still religiously divided, meaning that playwrights in Shakespeare’s age had to engage with them indirectly – if