The Project “Shakespeare’s Religious Afterlives: Text, Reception and Performance” (PID2021-123341NB-I00), supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and led by Marta Cerezo (UNED), aims to participate in the “turn to religion” experienced by Shakespearean scholarship in the last few decades by delving into an undeveloped field of research within the area of Shakespeare studies: the author’s religious afterlives. By focusing on specific case studies, and by implementing, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the critical tools of reception theory and cultural studies, we propose to analyse how the author and his work have been critically perceived and variously recreated in religious terms and in different contexts; used to illustrate, dismantle or support theological concepts; translated or edited considering the implications of biblical intertextuality and also religious diversity; and performed in churches.

We intend to reveal the scholarly relevance of the area of Shakespeare’s religious afterlives in Shakespeare’s reception history and generate new lines of thought and debate among Shakespeare scholars to strengthen the area of study of Shakespeare and religion.

The general objectives of this project are:

• To propose the analysis of “Shakespeare’s Religious Afterlives” as a coherent and compact new line of research within the critical turn to religion experienced by the area of Shakespeare studies in the 21^st century.
• To explore the impact of religious discourses on Shakespeare’s reception and critical analysis since the 17th century.
• To show the literary, religious, ideological, cultural, and even pedagogical implications involved in the dialogue between the Shakespearean text and religious discourses, practices, and beliefs since the 17th century.