Penn State University Press | Amazon
2013 – For years scholars and others have been trying to out Shakespeare as an ardent Calvinist, a crypto-Catholic, a Puritan-baiter, a secularist, or a devotee of some hybrid faith. In Religion Around Shakespeare, Peter Kaufman sets aside such speculation in favor of considering the historical and religious context surrounding his work. Employing extensive archival research, he aims to assist literary historians who probe the religious discourses, characters, and events that seem to have found places in Shakespeare’s plays and to aid general readers or playgoers developing an interest in the plays’ and playwright’s religious contexts: Catholic, conformist, and reformist. Kaufman argues that sermons preached around Shakespeare and conflicts that left their marks on literature, law, municipal chronicles, and vestry minutes enlivened the world in which (and with which) he worked and can enrich our understanding of the playwright and his plays.
Kristen Poole, University of Delaware: Kaufman’s Religion Around Shakespeare is thus an urgently needed book. It is one of those rare studies written by an expert who presents a comprehensive overview and detailed analysis through nimble prose and dry humor. Kaufman lays out, as clearly as anyone could, the multifaceted religious context of Shakespeare’s England. For the graduate student, this book is a must-read; it informs the reader on the period’s complex religious landscape and the interrelated political events. For the established scholar, this book is a pleasure to read; it takes the complicated parts and pieces them together as a comprehensive picture. . . . Kaufman announces from the start that “what follows is not another interpretation of several of Shakespeare’s plays,” but that is part of what makes this book so unique and valuable. The book makes good on its promise to teach about the religion around Shakespeare, making it the book to adopt for graduate seminars on the subject.
Cyndia Susan Clegg: “Kaufman’s meticulous archival research into church records, sermons, and early printed devotional works (Catholic, conformist, and reformed) provides a lively—and useful—picture of the religious “circumstance” in which Shakespeare and his dramatic contemporaries worked.”
Fred Folmer and David Bevington: “In order to develop his arguments, Kaufman seeks to enable the reader to understand fully the religious background of the English realm. As he writes, the challenge is to “see how well we can see what Shakespeare saw when he looked out” at the religious situation in England. And thanks to Kaufman, we can see quite a bit. Through his rich and detailed descriptions of religious arguments, power plays, and anxieties during Elizabethan and Jacobean times, Kaufman helps the reader to understand the subtleties of the wide range of positions staked out by various religious speakers, and to see the ways in which religious practices were entangled with questions of political power, law, and the very integrity of the realm.”
Peter Iver Kaufman 