ABSTRACT
Over the last centuries, the Shakespearean text has often been imagined in ways that exhibit parallels with an important construction of the Bible that arose during the Protestant Reformation, a construction that paradoxically exemplifies a logic which contributes to secular modernity. Secularity is defined by belief in a realm or realms fully separable from the divine; it follows that even religious discourse exemplifies secularity if it concedes a sphere that can be understood independently of God. As we shall see, when the Bible was accorded a newly autonomous status in the Reformation, it coincided with crucial intellectual shifts at the heart of what Charles Taylor calls secularity’s “great disembedding.” 1 This new framing of the Bible provides an example of how many aspects of secularity initially emerge from changes within religion itself, thereby undercutting the notion that the secular represents the subtraction of religion from neutral, universal rationality. 2
