"Always intriguing, usually provocative and occasionally infuriating, Godless Shakespeare is a brilliant meditation on Shakespeare's ways with his characters and the systems of moral values in which we place them. Mallin's Shakespeare is never constricted by conventional parameters of religion and belief but instead is a thoroughly original creator, demanding our engaged moral response to his creations. In Mallin's excitingly heterodox cosmology, Cleopatra and Aaron, Pericles and Isabella find themselves with unexpected companions in the new heaven, hell and purgatory in which Mallin arranges them. Thinking about Shakespeare and religion has never seemed such fun." - Professor Peter Holland, Notre Dame University, USA

Professor Peter Holland, Notre Dame University

"If Nietzsche were put in charge of Dente's afterlife, and then asked to find appropriate places for Shakespeare's characters, the result would be something like this. Eric Mallin's perverse and excoriating anti-metaphysic shows just how many settled assumptions about Shakespeare are overturned when religion in his plays is taken seriously. Audacious and innovative, Mallin conflates renaissance scepticism and modern atheism, scattering light and darkness equally as he sears Christianity with a torch lit from the Christian flame." - Professor Graham Holderness, University of Hertfordshire, UK

Professor Graham Holderness, University of Hertfordshire, UK

"At last! An iconoclastic Shakespeare with a mind and spirit unconstrained by orthodox religion. Eric Mallin guides us through the undiscovered country where the bard's spirituality survives in and as unbelief. Godless Shakespeare is beautifully written, well-conceived, and irresistibly funny. I felt as though I were encountering the plays for the first time." - Professor David Riggs, author of The World of Christopher Marlowe

Professor David Riggs, author of The World of Christopher Marlowe

"Defying recent Catholic and Protestant claims to Shakespeare's endorsement, and challenging Stephen Greenblatt's claim that Renaissance atheism was merely a defensive shadow cast by Christianity, Mallin's wide-ranging book suggests that Shakespeare recognized Christianity as a defense against the burdens of unbelief, which has important values of its own. With its taxonomy of characters into a non-religious ethical hierarchy, Godless Shakespeare jauntily defies the conventional wisdom about a writer who himself typically defied such wisdom." - Professor Robert Watson, UCLA, USA

Professor Robert Watson, UCLA

-Mention. Daily Telegraph/ April 8, 2007

Daily Telegraph

"This is a persuasive and well-argued work, based on evidence and examples from key texts in the Shakespearean oeuvre.  It succeeds very well in fulfilling the aim of the general editors of the series in reaching out to the general reader, without compromising its scholarly rigor." -Abdulla Al-Dabbagh, The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 39, Winter 2008