This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Shakespeare mentions Christmas just once, in the very first scene of Hamlet, when the royal guards are talking about the ghost of Hamlet’s father:

Some say that ever ’gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
This bird of dawning singeth all night long;
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad,
The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow’d and so gracious is that time.

As always, Shakespeare’s precise attitude is hard to discern. These words are put in the mouth of a sentry, whose Christian belief is mixed up with popular superstition and astrology. That does not necessarily mean that Shakespeare regarded religion as a set of fairy tales. Yet the play’s Christianity is ambiguous and inconsistent.

That said, Hamlet’s famous soliloquy that begins “To be, or not to be” is not the expression of doubt anti-Christian scholars want it to be. Instead of using Greek and Roman philosophy to question Christian teachings about death and the afterlife, Hamlet seems to approach things the other way round:

To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream — ay, there’s the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause — there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.

All this may seem puzzling in a non-Christian or post-Christian culture. Since the end of the Second World War, Western countries have all undergone a process of de-Christianisation to varying degrees. This has inevitably affected the study of Shakespeare, whose use of the English language is inextricable from its roots in Christianity. Yet today even educated people tend to be ignorant of the King James Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, the Nicene Creed and the basic articles of faith, knowledge once taken for granted even in those who left school at 14. But understanding Shakespeare is not merely a matter of looking up difficult words.

Some of Shakespeare’s plays are just about comprehensible without reference to a Christian background. King Lear takes place in pre-Christian Britain; Macbeth does not, technically, but might as well. To a certain kind of secular humanist, the bleakness of these tragedies seems the height of wisdom.

For them, these plays have the added attraction of no obvious Greek or Roman element: those who seek to eradicate Christianity from Western culture tend to be hostile to the classical tradition, too. But this is almost as important to Shakespeare as the Christian background. He read deeply in the Roman poet Ovid, who saturates his work to the point that you cannot think of him merely as a source of material.

In Romeo and Juliet, one of Shakespeare’s most obviously Ovidian stories, Christian elements seem purely nominal. We might recall the lovely image of an angel in one of Romeo’s speeches from the balcony scene (Act II, Scene 2):

O speak again bright angel, for thou art
As glorious to this night, being o’er my head
As is a wingèd messenger of Heaven
Unto the white-upturnèd wondering eyes
Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him
When he bestrides the lazy-puffing clouds
And sails upon the bosom of the air.

This angel seems no less superficial than the Cupids, the goddess of dawn or the chariot of the sun god that Shakespeare uses elsewhere in the play to paint pretty word-pictures. However, Romeo and Juliet are emphatically not pagans in their manner of thinking, even when overcome with desire. When they first meet (Act I, Scene 5), Romeo begins:

If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

The prelude to their first kiss is steeped in this sort of language. To treat it simply as risqué wordplay is to dilute the lovers’ passion, as becomes clear when you compare Romeo and Juliet to its secular adaptations, all of which are mawkish and insipid (West Side Story, for example).

Let it be emphasised that Shakespeare had no interest in dramatising theological controversies. Nor does he seem obviously pious. Instead, he is interested in the human soul, or what the post-Christian world describes as “consciousness” — the nexus of mind, memory, imagination, perception and will that makes us who we are. When Christians talk about “saving the soul”, it has nothing to do with some sort of impersonal “life force”: our souls are literally our personalities. This is why the idea of eternity in Hell is so terrifying.

Othello, Shakespeare’s finest attempt at inventing a Christian tragedy, is all the more impressive when you realise how narrowly it avoids degenerating into a commedia dell’ arte farce, with its jilted lovers, impotent old men and faintly comic main character — Othello, for all his bravery and martial prowess, is after all just a braggart soldier who is obsessed with being cuckolded. The play’s villain, Iago, almost fits the archetype of the “cunning slave” from Roman comedy in his resourceful trickery, except that he is too menacing for the audience to root for him. He ruins souls for the fun of it, just as the devil might.

Throughout this tragedy, talk of demons, the devil and the immortal soul does not seem like mere symbolism, especially when Othello ensures that his innocent wife Desdemona has said her prayers before he murders her (Act V, Scene 2):

I would not kill thy unpreparèd spirit;
No — Heaven forfend! — I would not kill thy soul.

Shakespeare abandoned contemporary subjects after Othello, preferring to develop his themes through narratives taking place in either the distant past or a kind of fantasy world. Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale, his next major explorations of jealousy, are romances rather than tragedies, set in the dying Roman Empire. The Winter’s Tale even includes pagan gods: the prophecies of Apollo, as spoken through the Delphic oracle. All the same, Christianity creeps in, silently shaping the story.

Much of The Winter’s Tale feels like a tragedy. King Leontes goes mad with jealousy rather as Othello does: he fixates on the delusion that his best friend, the King of Bohemia, has cuckolded him. When he realises he has been wrong, it is too late; he is told that his innocent wife Hermione has died of grief.

For the most part The Winter’s Tale is desperately sad, and yet there is a happy ending. Sixteen years after her death, Hermione is restored to life. Either her improbable resurrection is a genuine miracle, or she has simply been living secretly with Paulina all these years, and has chosen a dramatic means of returning to her husband by pretending to be a statue of herself that magically comes alive.

The Winter’s Tale is an appropriate play for Advent, if not Christmas, insofar as there is little logical reason for hope of a happy ending. When it arrives, some sadness remains because of everything that has been lost on account of the blindness that arises from sin. This serves as a grand, if unintentional metaphor for Christianity itself. Yet this attitude is implicit even in Shakespeare’s merriest comedies, which are tinged throughout with melancholy. Twelfth Night begins:

If music be the food of love, play on.
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die.

The main character, Viola, fears her twin brother Sebastian may have drowned in a shipwreck. Whilst nursing hope he might still be alive, she disguises herself as a boy. Much hilarity ensues, as they say.

The very title of Twelfth Night refers to the Feast of Epiphany; its most important theme is hope

Twelfth Night is explicitly a festive play: the very title refers to the Feast of Epiphany on 6 January, when three wise men arrived in Bethlehem to pay homage to Jesus. Its most important theme is hope, as the fool Feste reminds the audience when he provokes the beautiful Olivia, who has forsaken men after the recent deaths of her father and brother. He asks her why she is mourning. Her brother is dead, she explains. Feste says he thinks his soul is in Hell. “I know his soul is in Heaven, fool,” she snaps back. Then she must be the fool here, Feste replies, if she mourns a soul she knows to be in Heaven.

Olivia’s uncle, Sir Toby Belch, is fond of carousing with his friend Sir Andrew Aguecheek. One night their merriment earns them a scolding from Olivia’s steward, the pompous Malvolio whom they hate because “he is a kind of Puritan”: “Art any more than a steward?” Sir Toby asks him. “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?” Shakespeare, as always, sides with the drunkards.

Samuel Johnson was right to claim that Shakespeare’s disposition was essentially comic, not tragic. In this he was essentially Christian, because he recognised that the Saviour’s birth granted us all hope of eternal happiness. Dulce est desipere in loco, the Roman poet Horace once said — “sometimes it’s fun to fool around”. Horace drank wine as a distraction from the sadness of contemplating an eternal night. Shakespeare knew better; he celebrates hope itself, which three wise men came to witness on Epiphany: “For we have seen His star in the east, and are come to worship Him.” So much is plain in Twelfth Night, for all who care to see it.