William Shakespeare's Religion - Atheism

Atheism

The fact of Shakespeare’s Christianity is in itself not universally accepted. William Birch of Oxford University was, in 1848, probably the first to air the notion of atheism, based solely on his interpretation of sentiments expressed in the works, but the theory was dismissed as a "rare tissue of perverted ingenuity" by a contemporary, the textual editor H. H. Furness. The 1912 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia questioned not only Shakespeare's Catholicism, but whether " was not infected with the atheism, which...was rampant in the more cultured society of the Elizabethan age." Some evidence in support of Shakespeare's supposed atheism, and then only in the form of "evidence of absence", exists in the discovery by John Payne Collier, a notorious forger of historical documents, who examined the records of St Saviour's, Southwark, and found that Shakespeare, alone among his fellow Globe actors, was not shown as a churchgoer. According to Joseph Pearce, the obvious conclusion is recusancy, but modern scholars sometimes cite this as evidence of atheism. Russian Shakespeare scholar Vadim Nikolayev thinks "that Shakespeare put forward anti-church ideas and did not consider suicide to be a sin", that he "skillfully avoided conflicts with censorship".

George Orwell commented that "We do not know a great deal about Shakespeare's religious beliefs, and from the evidence of his writings it would be difficult to prove that he had any", but also considered that in some of his tragedies there is at least implicitly a non-Christian world view.