SOURCE: “The Reformation and Shakespeare: Focus on Henry VIII,” in Shakespeare and the Christian Tradition, edited by E. Beatrice Batson, Edwin Mellen Press, 1994, pp. 83-101.

In the essay that follows, Noll looks to Shakespeare's Henry VIII for help in understanding the nature of the English Reformation, as well as how the history of the English Reformation informs Henry VIII.

William Shakespeare was born the year after John Foxe published the first English edition of his famous Acts and Monuments, a work that demonstrated how the testimony of martyrs—from the earliest centuries to the England of Mary Tudor only five years earlier—had been used by God “in preserving his church, in overthrowing tyrants, in confounding pride, [and] in altering states and kingdoms.”¹ Shakespeare's marriage took place at a time when the Archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Grindal, was suspended from his duties for allowing Puritans to hold preaching...