Shakespeare's religion

“...But it’s striking that Shakespeare uses Catholic content rather differently from his contemporary dramatists, often embracing the contradictory connotations of, say, a friar [Romeo and Juliet], exploiting the figure’s nostalgic and threatening associations at the same time. This exploration of ambiguity seems to have been one way in which he thought through not only religious controversies, but also the very act of making fiction itself....”
By Gillian Woods, January 23, 2016
https://blog.oup.com/2016/01/what-was-shakespeares-religion/#:~:text=Like%20other%20English%20subjects%20who,least%2C%20he%20was%20a%20Protestant.

​As a middle child, I can live with ambiguity, but I learned as much or more from reading the stoics as reading Shakespeare, requiring too many annotations. The Douay-Rheims (Shakespeare time) has fewer annotations than other Bibles, and the 1962 Missal has virtually none.
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Stoics confirmed my suspicions:

• Joining in on group activities that are lay-led is perilous.
• Better to be alone than in groups where conspirators lurk.
• Group think suffocates independence, nonconformity, and recusancy.​ Example - Tolkien (d. 1973): "The Lord be with you." "Et cum spiritu tuo."
• Diary of a Country [single] Priest (Jan 1, 1951) is more instructive.

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