Religious views of William Shakespeare evidence, no general agreement has been reached. Shakespeare and his immediate family were conforming members of the established Church of England. When Shakespeare was young, his father, John Shakespeare, was elected to several municipal offices, serving as an alderman and culminating in a term as bailiff, the chief magistrate of the town council, all of which required being a church member in good standing, and he participated in whitewashing over the Catholic images in the chapel and taking down the rood screen. Shakespeare's birth and that of his siblings were entered into the church register, as were the births of
The Plays of William Shakespeare a factor in the reception of the work. Instead, Johnson believed that the reader of Shakespeare was the true audience of the play. Furthermore, Johnson believed that later editors both misunderstood the historical context of Shakespeare and his plays, and underestimated the degree of textual corruption that the plays exhibit. He believed that this was because "The style of Shakespeare was in itself perplexed, ungrammatical, and obscure". To correct these problems, Johnson believed that the original works would need to be examined, and this became an issue in his "Proposal". Johnson also believed that an edition of Shakespeare could provide