Leland Ryken rejoices to find Christian allusions galore in Shakespeare’s writing. “[S]cholars who are attuned to the Christian element in Shakespeare’s plays correctly observe that there is sometimes a gratuitous element in Shakespeare’s Christian allusions, meaning that Shakespeare incorporates Christian references beyond what seem to be strictly required by the context.”

Does that mean the great bard was a genuine believer? No, but he had a fairly Christian mind in his writing.

“The world that Shakespeare creates in As You Like It is approximately the same as the religiously-saturated world of the farms around Pella, Iowa, on which I was raised. While a writer can create a Christian world only to mock it, Shakespeare adopts a sympathetic stance to what he portrays in As You Like It.”