Catholic author Joseph Pearce was strongly sceptical of claims that William Shakespeare was secretly a Catholic until he began to examine the evidence and followed where it led.

Now an author of three books in support of the Bard’s Catholicism, Pearce tells fellow convert Dr Gavin Ashenden, in this 25th episode of Merely Catholic, the podcast series for the Catholic Herald, that the evidence for Shakespeare’s faith is practically irrefutable.

He argues that the circumstances of Shakespeare’s life, the religion of his family and of his patrons and the texts and subjects of his plays all point in a single direction: that Shakespeare could be nothing but a loyal and believing Catholic who agitated for religious toleration in the face of totalitarianism. There is no evidence, says Pearce, that Shakespeare was remotely anything else.