So Shakespeare's audience didn't go to see his plays for the thrill of a suspenseful plot. Instead, the drive of Shakespeare's plays comes from the intensity of the characters he created. Shakespeare had a gift of perception, able to observe and comprehend human emotions and behaviour with keen insight. And he had a talent for expressing these observations with exquisite verbal precision.
One aspect of human experience that clearly fascinated Shakespeare was religion. It would be easy to say that Shakespeare is a religious writer because he lived in a religious age. To a degree that is difficult for those of us in the secularised West to fully appreciate, sixteenth and seventeenth century English culture was saturated in religion....