The Importance of Shakespeare in the Reformation Period

Shakespeare was a stone cold genius, so he's not necessarily representative of late 16th and early 17th century attitudes. His plays had a much more popular audience in mind than, say, a treatise by Richard Hooker or Thomas Moore. Troyless and Cressida alludes to a passage in Aristotle's Nicomahian Ethics which declares the young, unfit hearers for lectures on moral philosophy. Even more telling are some passages where Shakespeare has characters say things about philosophy itself.