‘William oure brother’: 23 April 1616

A month before the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, I’m walking along the banks of the Avon, the river running softly by my side. Behind me is the RSC playhouse, ahead – not wholly visible yet – is Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare lies buried. A thought occurs to me. Are Rudrum and Stavris, I wonder, right: Is postmodernism really waning? for, to my surprise, I haven’t so far passed a huge breeched-anddoubleted cut-out Bard, arm outstretched, with the bubble-caption ‘This way to my grave’. There is a mood too in scholarship which mirrors this ‘supplanting’ of the postmodern: I would cite, for example, Daniel Swift’s Shakespeare’s Common Prayers: The Book of Common Prayer and the Elizabethan Age (2012) and, even more persuasively, Alison Shell’s Shakespeare and Religion (2010). These works give us clues towards our continuities with the past and a more real view of the times and the man.

So much in our 300-page biographies of Shakespeare is implication, or guesswork, or added material from surrounding context, or just the matter of lands bought or properties acquired, that we might expect the church I am walking towards to be treated more significantly. On this point even Alison Shell’s scholarly tact is exaggerated: ‘During his working life, the demands of rehearsing and performing plays would have made it difficult to attend morning and evening prayer on weekdays. But the majority of English people submitted to the legal requirement to go to church on Sundays and holy days, and given the lack of evidence to the contrary, it seems likely that Shakespeare was among them.’ This is as much as to say, ‘Even though I know – tender reader – that Shakespeare’s culture was a religionsaturated culture, I want to assure you that the Bard was no fanatic’. Was Shakespeare really always so professionally busy that he never went to church on a weekday . . . even when he heard news of his only son’s death, or of the passing of his three brothers? We need to emphasize the main