‘The more Elizabethan literature one reads,’ he has written, ‘the more striking is Shakespeare’s paucity of religious reference.’ The British authority Stanley Wells, however, contends that Shakespeare’s plays ‘are riddled with biblical allusions’.- P60
Tensions between Protestants and Catholics came to a head in 1586 when Mary, Queen of Scots, was implicated in a plot to overthrow the Queen and Elizabeth agreed. She was executed in February 1587. Killing a fellow monarch, however threatening, was a grave act, and it provoked a response. In the spring of the following year, Spain dispatched a mighty navy to capture the English throne and replace Elizabeth.- P61
Once England fell, and with the English fleet in Spanish hands, the very real prospect arose of the whole of Protestant Europe being toppled.- P62
The defeat of the Spanish Armada changed the course of history. It induced a rush of patriotism in England that Shakespeare exploited in his history plays (nearly all written in the following decade), and it gave England the confidence and power to command the seas and build a global empire, beginning almost immediately with North America. Above all it secured Protestantism for England.- P63
Had the Armada prevailed it would have brought with it the Spanish Inquisition, with goodness knows what consequences for Elizabethan England – and the young man from Warwickshire who was just about to transform its theatre.- P63
