This book is about the real historical conditions of Shakespeare's art. Its argument is that Shakespeare's plays were written out of a profound engagement with the Europe of the Counter-Reformation, but that, if the dramatist can be aligned with any party, what he called 'our fashion' was the politique one of those moderate Catholics who reacted against the suicidal violence of the fanatics with a project of freedom of conscience and mutual toleration. The book is about what Shakespeare did not write. In view of the number of books published on what he did, this might seem perverse, but for the fact that Shakespeare's silence has become, in one respect, a focus of current interpretations of his life and work. The theme of the book is that the question which in fact resonates through Shakespeare's plays, of whether 'To be or not to be' was prompted by the existential crisis of this moment, when it would have been impossible for him not to share Hamlet's predicament. Critics are edging towards the implications of the revelation that, as Stephen Greenblatt concludes in his book Hamlet in Purgatory, Shakespeare 'was probably brought up in a Roman Catholic household in a time of official suspicion and persecution of recusancy', and are teasing out the textual traces that reveal how much he was 'haunted by the spirit of his Catholic father'.