Hamlet and "A Matter Tender and Dangerous"

Mark Matheson, University of Utah

I offer this essay as a contribution to a discernible movement in Shakespeare studies which is once again raising the question of the relation of the plays to early modern religious discourse. For a long time this relationship was addressed in the context of biographical criticism, with the texts being read as cryptic testimonials to Shakespeare's Catholicism, his royalist Anglicanism, his agnosticism, his hostility to Puritanism, and so on. In the new assessment of Shakespeare's work and religion, biographical concerns have been displaced by a focus on the texts as part of a broad cultural order and on the great variety of contemporary discourses that nourish the plays and the dramatic conflicts they represent. The interpretive process is complicated by the issue of censorship, a force difficult to assess but undeniable, and, in the case of Hamlet, by...

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