SOURCE: “New Light on Shakespeare's Catholicism: Prospero's Epilogue in The Tempest,” in Renascence, Vol. 40, No. 3, Spring, 1997, pp. 158-74.

In the essay below, Beauregard charges that Prospero's epilogue provides convincing evidence that Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic.

Shakespeare's religious affiliation has never been convincingly determined. It has long been known, of course, that Shakespeare's family background was heavily Catholic. His mother Mary was from the Catholic Arden family. His father John concealed in the roof of his house a signed Spiritual Testament in the popular Roman Catholic form devised by Charles Borromeo, in the recent judgment of Patrick Collinson “very nearly conclusive” evidence that he was a Catholic (38). Similarly, we have long been aware that, during Shakespeare's youth in the 1570s, two out of three of the teachers at Stratford's grammar school were Roman Catholics (Schoenbaum 66).

Over the last twenty-five years, some interesting evidence has surfaced and suggested even...