Richard Davies fills Fulman’s blank Shakespeare entry: “He dyed a papist.”

Malone prints the Spiritual Testament, “perfectly satisfied”; six years later he writes that documents prove it “could not have been the composition of any one of our poet’s family”. The documents were never produced.

Richard Simpson, an Anglican vicar turned Catholic, publishes the first serious article in The Rambler, already complaining that Malone, “a Protestant critic”, had rejected the testament.

Henry Sebastian Bowden packages Simpson’s materials as The Religion of Shakespeare.

De Groot’s The Shakespeares and “The Old Faith”; Mutschmann and Wentersdorf’s Shakespeare and Catholicism.

Peter Milward SJ makes the thesis a life’s work from Sophia University, Tokyo. Knapp: his work has had “little influence on recent Shakespeare scholarship”. Milward himself: “the academic world is not disposed to accept it”.

Gary Taylor’s “Forms of Opposition” argues outright for a recusant Shakespeare: the high-water mark of academic confidence, later unrepeated rather than refuted.

Richard Wilson’s TLS essay “Shakespeare and the Jesuits”; the Lancaster and Hoghton Tower conference, with two Manchester volumes in 2003 and plans for an 800-seat theatre never built.

Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory and Will in the World put “Catholic Shakespeare” before more readers than any academic book, while the author declines to make him one.

Bearman’s archival work: Shakeshafte (2002), the Testament (2003), “A Papist or Just Penniless?” (2005) and Stratford’s Reformation (2007). In 2007 he wrote that the Lancashire, Testament and Cottom claims “rest on evidence which does not bear scrutiny”. In June 2008 he led a Birthplace Trust study day to test them.

Michael Wood’s BBC series In Search of Shakespeare makes the Catholic family the spine of a biography and treats the Testament as Campion-linked key evidence. SHAKSPER posters call that handling “a disgrace”; Gary Taylor writes a hostile Guardian review.

Clare Asquith’s Shadowplay: “high” and “low” mean Catholic and Protestant altars, priests are “merchants”. Anne Barton: clever but “far-fetched”. Shapiro: “specious” and unfalsifiable.

Joseph Pearce’s The Quest for Shakespeare and his thirteen-part EWTN series. Miola, a Catholic scholar: “a patchwork of other people’s work”. John Cox: “the argument fails to persuade”.

Alison Shell’s Shakespeare and Religion: religion yields to the needs of the play, yet the external evidence points to a Catholic.

The Portsmouth Institute symposium “The Catholic Shakespeare?” gathers the advocates with the in-house critic Cox. Rowan Williams at Hay: Shakespeare’s background was probably Catholic.

Kastan’s A Will to Believe: “I don’t know what he believed and I am convinced we can’t know.” Pressed to guess, he picks a conforming parishioner.

Lena Cowen Orlin’s The Private Life of William Shakespeare rereads the 1592 list and John’s collapse as a business story.

Torevell, Schneeberger and Luke Taylor SJ’s Exploring Catholic Faith in Shakespearean Drama brackets whether Shakespeare was Catholic and argues the plays explore Catholic understandings “dramatically rather than didactically”. Ben Faber notes one of 69 seminars at the 2025 Shakespeare Association of America addressed religion.