The contrasting social backdrop to these ultimately mandarin movements in Shakespeare criticism is the extraordinary phenomenon of worldwide attendance at performances of Shakespeare's plays. For theory, reliant as it was on a constructivist account of human nature and hostile to any idea of essence, the fact of Shakespeare's popularity was easily explained away as a simple consequence of the massive "Shakespeare Establishment". No doubt the entrenched position of Shakespeare in the school curriculum and the existence of so culturally potent an entity as the Royal Shakespeare Company both exert an influence, at least in Great Britain. But enthusiasm for Shakespeare is not confined to the West, and indeed flourishes in cultures where no "Shakespeare Establishment" exists. The recent critical preoccupations of the academy-historical explication, theatrical antiquarianism, and authorship studies — may of course yield important findings. But they will always be "second-order" findings. These critical modes cannot in their own terms find a way of addressing — let alone of explaining — the vast, primary fact of the enduring human appetite for Shakespeare's drama. However, the ultimate tendencies of both the books under review favour a reconnection of the discussion of Shakespeare's drama to the abiding concerns of curious, intelligent, but otherwise ordinary men and women.

For many years the question of Shakespeare and religion was a non-question, because Shakespeare was almost defined by his Olympian detachment from parochial confessional loyalties. "Shakespeare is no sectarian," Thomas Carlyle would pronounce in 1827 in his essay on Goethe: "To all he deals with equity and mercy, because he knows all and his heart is wide enough for all." Rumours that Shakespeare died a Papist sprang up quite early. Like all of his generation, Shakespeare's parents and grandparents had been at least partly raised in the traditional religion. So a familiarity with Roman Catholicism, and maybe even a sentimental attachment on Shakespeare's part to the aesthetic, ritual, and social formations associated with Roman Catholicism — all of this is very easy to accept. More recently, however, the question has been raised in a more strident form. Shakespeare, we have been asked to believe, was a recusant, a covert adherent of the old religion, and his plays contain encrypted evidence of his confessional identity.

This is not the place once more to enter the lists on that topic — beyond perhaps pointing out at a formal level the nullity of an argument in which both supposed positive evidence for the contention, and also the absence of such evidence, is offered as confirmatory proof. David Scott Kastan's own, eminently sensible, position on this vexed issue is that Shakespeare's "own faith cannot be teased out of his handling of the controversies". What Kastan does in this brief, elegant book is to examine "how religion is presented in the plays and how the subject gets shaped by Shakespeare's imaginative engagement", all the while bearing in mind that "Shakespeare's religious belief is not the master narrative that either motivates or explains the plays." Religion here means not just Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, but also Judaism and Islam. What emerges is a playwright whose imagination indeed engaged with religious topics and language, but never as a polemicist — indeed, one thinks at times, even barely as a protagonist. As Kastan shrewdly notes, "In all the plays set in contemporary Italy, Shakespeare stages Catholicism without any of the hostility with which English Protestant polemic characteristically treated it." Shakespeare was saturated in the life of his time, but somehow not entirely captured by it.