It is impossible to determine with any certainty where Shakespeare’s innermost sympathies lay. But he cannot have been neutral or indifferent. Both of his parents had been born into a Catholic world, and for them, as for most of their contemporaries, the links to that world survived the Reformation. There was every reason for wariness and circumspection, and not merely because of the harsh punishments meted out by the Protestant authorities. The menace in England attributed to militant Catholicism was by no means entirely imaginary.
