Was He or Wasn't He?

When, years ago, I majored in English at college, the thought that Shakespeare was a Catholic was ventured by no one. The claim that Shakespeare was mixed up with the Catholic underground would have seemed as implausible to me as the idea that he was under Communist Party discipline.

In those days, Shakespeare was either identified with the despairing Gloucester, or he was the supreme agnostic postulated by Matthew Arnold’s poem “...

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