ABSTRACT
"A long and distinguished tradition, beginning perhaps with Wordsworth and still very much alive, insists that Shakespeare was not a religious thinker, but a secular one," wrote John D. Cox, in 2004. Since then, however, interest in religious debates in early modern England, and their significance for Shakespeare's plays, has increased considerably. In fact, a revived interest in the religious dimension of Shakespeare's texts has arguably been one of the most striking developments in Shakespeare criticism of the last two decades. What at first glance appears to be a blatant simplification of Elizabethan religious culture can nevertheless serve as a useful starting point to sketch the complex relation between history and religion in early modern England. Elizabethan England was, of course, not "a Protestant country" in any unproblematic way. In order to take account of both the continuity and the rupture of the Reformation moment, it is necessary, then, to revise Dean's temptingly simple phrasing.
