In acknowledging the inconclusiveness of his ‘reading’ and ‘observations’, Much Ado's Friar serves as an emblem of Shakespeare's dramatic representations of the interpreting self. This book draws on an intellectual history that connects the Reformation to modern hermeneutics to argue that the sources of the Shakespearean selves (to borrow the title of Charles Taylor's well-known book) whom we moderns find so relevant to our own self-perceptions and experiences can be found, first of all, at the heart of the playwright's theologically full culture. Hans-Georg Gadamer, modern philosophical hermeneutics’ leading light, asks about the origins of ‘our effort to understand’: ‘Why are we interested in understanding a text or some experience of the world, including our doubts about patent self-interpretations?’ Jean Grondin, cited in my third epigraph, captures the basic consensus that the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation must feature in responses to Gadamer's inquiry.

The Reformation was the most significant impetus behind a refiguring of how people know and ensuing sense that to be human is to understand through interpretation. This chapter examines how this ‘hermeneutic revolution’, with its emphasis on interpretation as ontology, developed out of Luther's ‘reforming acts’ and the theological ideas which both drove and emerged from these acts. But first, I will take us to the end of the story – to a sketch of Shakespeare's theologically full world and the interpreting self living within it. The weight of scholarly work done in recent years has (thankfully) relieved me of the need to contend for the relevance to Shakespeare of religion and the Reformation. Instead, I will highlight key aspects of the playwright and his contemporaries’ hermeneutical experiences, experiences connected to the Reformation's role in relocating sense-making into the domain of individual being.