Blackwell Reference Online

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When William Shakespeare was born in 1564, his country's religious identity was unsettled and uncertain. About thirty years earlier, Henry VIII had launched a reformation that eventually transformed England, in the words of Patrick Collinson, from one of Europe's “most Catholic countries to one of its least” ( Collinson 1988 : 75). Nevertheless, as Christopher Haigh explains, this momentous change proceeded slowly and erratically, “by spasmodic fits, uncertain starts, and threats of reversal” ( Haigh 1993 : 169), since none of the “reformations” undertaken by English rulers was either inevitable or entirely successful. Henry broke with Rome because he needed a divorce, but he remained a staunch theological conservative. Even after he declared himself Supreme Head of the Church he continued to affirm many bedrock Catholic beliefs, making denial of transubstantiation a capital crime, persecuting more zealous reformers, and providing generously in his will for prayers and masses to speed his soul through purgatory. Ironically, the young son he so ardently desired as a successor dismantled these final intercessory arrangements and opened the door to more radical reforms. Shortly after Edward VI succeeded his father in 1547, the Chantries Act put an end to “phantsying opinions of purgatory and masses satisfactory, to be done for them which be departed” ( Dickens 1964 : 230). A vernacular ... log in or subscribe to read full text