Shakespeare and religion

The recent fascination with Shakespeare's religious identity has given the opportunity to scholars who have resisted new work in the field to get back to business as usual, free of the troublesome issues that have preoccupied feminist and new historicist criticism, namely, race, gender, and sexual identity. In contrast, Callaghan argues that these categories are vital to the articulation of the issues constellating Shakespeare's religious identity. However, feminists and new historicists need not be complacent either, and Callaghan critiques as a conceptual blind spot the spiritual aridity of much otherwise intellectually expansive work on early modern writing.