James Shapiro. A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare 1599

Shakespeare, then, was born into an England poised between worlds. While the Elizabethans didn't suffer the bloody religious wars that racked much of the Continent, its reformations meant among other things a stripping away of altars, paintings, ceremonies, vestments, sacramental rituals, and beloved holidays. At least in theory, for reformers seeking to purify a Church they saw encrusted with idolatry, this made good sense. But in practice, it also left a tear in the fabric of daily life. Traditional seasonal rhythms were disrupted, the long-standing equilibrium between holiday and workday unbalanced. The reformist effort to do away with the distracting rituals of Catholic worship resulted in a kind of sensory deprivation, for the rush to reform had overlooked the extent to which people craved the sights and sounds of the old communal celebration. It soon became obvious to Tudor authorities that reform had left a potentially dangerous vacuum. The official and avowedly Protestant Book of Homilies acknowledged as much when it incorporated into the homily "Of the Place and Time of Prayer" an imaginary dialogue between two churchgoing women confused by all these changes: "Alas, gossip," one says to her friend, "what shall we do now at church, since all the saints are taken away, since all the goodly sights we were wont to have are gone, since we cannot hear the like piping, singing, chanting, and playing upon the organs, that we could before?" (James Shapiro. A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. New York: HarperCollins, 2005, pp. 150-51.)

(For more on this topic, see especially Eamon Duffy's masterful The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580. Yale UP, 1992.)