SOURCE: Battenhouse, Roy. “Introduction: An Overview of Christian Interpretation.” In Shakespeare's Christian Dimension, pp. 1-14. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Battenhouse surveys 150 years of commentary on the Christian aspects of Shakespeare's art.

Many ordinary readers have felt instinctively that Shakespeare and the Bible belong together. Yet inevitably there have been others who claim for the poet their own reductive beliefs, despite his burial in a church and a Last Will that names Christ his savior. At the turn of the present century, for instance, we find Shakespeare described by Churton Collins as a “theistical agnostic,” and A. C. Bradley saying that he painted the world “without regard to anyone's beliefs.” John Robertson (a celebrated Disintegrator) declared that Shakespeare was groping his way toward the “sanity” of Auguste Comte. And England's poet laureate John Masefield, when writing on Shakespeare and the Spiritual Life (1924), was confident that...