Combining scholarship with grace, the author shows in this study that Shakespeare's works are pervasively secular, that he was concerned with the dramatization of universally human situations within a temporal and this-worldly arena, and that he was familiar with and used theological materials as only one of many natural and available sources. Originally published in 1963. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A Will to Believe is a revised version of Kastan's 2008 Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures, providing a provocative account of the ways in which religion animates Shakespeare's plays.

Shakespeare’s plays are filled with religious references and spiritual concerns. His characters—like Hamlet in this book’s title—speak the language of belief. Theology can enable the modern reader to see more clearly the ways in which Shakespeare draws on the Bible, doctrine, and the religious controversies of the long English Reformation. But as Oxford don Paul Fiddes shows in his intertextual approach, the theological thought of our own time can in turn be shaped by the reading of Shakespeare’s texts and the viewing of his plays. In More Things in Heaven and Earth, Fiddes argues that Hamlet’s famous phrase not only underscores the blurred boundaries between the warring Protestantism and Catholicism of Shakespeare’s time; it is also an appeal for basic spirituality, free from any particular doctrinal scheme. This spirituality is characterized by the belief in prioritizing loving relations over institutions and social organization. And while it also implies a constant awareness of mortality, it seeks a transcendence in which love outlasts even death. In such a spiritual vision, forgiveness is essential, human justice is always imperfect, communal values overcome political supremacy, and one is on a quest to find the story of one’s own life. It is in this context that Fiddes considers not only the texts behind Shakespeare’s plays but also what can be the impact of his plays on the writing of doctrinal texts by theologians today. Fiddes ultimately shows how this more expansive conception of Shakespeare is grounded in the trinitarian relations of God in which all the texts of the world are held and shaped.

Scholars have already demonstrated that Shakespeare 's language abounds in Biblical allusions and references, but Mr. Bryant now undertakes to show us how such details may bear on the full meaning of the plays. Seeking to interpret Shakespeare's plays as Christian poetry, Mr. Bryant has developed in this significant work a new critical approach which may have far-reaching consequences for future Shakespearean scholarship. In an introductory essay the author shows that the typological view of Scripture was a familiar one to the Christians of Shakespeare 's time; he suggests that for Shakespeare, as for many of his contemporaries, the Bible had only one subject—Christ—to which everything in both Testaments in some way referred. This interpretation of Scripture, Mr. Bryant believes, had an appreciable effect on Shakespeare's handling of many of the traditional stories on which he based his plays. The author then demonstrates, in twelve essays, how typological patterns may be traced in the plays and how Biblical allusions suggest and strengthen these analogies. In both Richard II and Hamlet, Mr. Bryant finds references to the story of Cain and Abel which give a new focus to his reading of these plays. Passages from the Gospels bear upon his interpretations of Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure, and the epistles of St. Paul upon his readings of The Merchant of Venice and the two parts of Henry IV. Mr. Bryant then attacks the popular idea that tragedy is incompatible with Christian doctrine; his essay defining Christian tragedy is illustrated in chapters on Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Othello. The concluding essays deal with Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale as tragicomedies given depth by their Christian materials. Mr. Bryant's fresh and challenging interpretations of these representative tragedies, histories, and comedies will not meet with universal assent, but they are certain to provoke the interest of both scholarly and lay readers. The increasing number of students who wish to trace the relationships between secular literature and Christian thought will find in this pioneer work a new insight into the nature of Christian poetry.

Explores and reexamines Shakespeare's theology from the standpoint of revisionist history of the English Reformation.