Reconceptualises Shakespeare's representations of selfhood by drawing on the long history behind the modern West's assumption that to be human is to be an interpreter of reality Provides a ground-breaking contribution to the expanding field of study situated at the intersections of Shakespeare, religion and philosophy Illuminates the indebtedness of Shakespeare's dramatization of human understanding as interpretive to the Protestant Reformation's reconfiguring of people's relation to knowledge and people as knowers (that is, the Reformers' theological hermeneutics) Offers a distinctive vantage point on our sense of Shakespeare's modernity by employing a critical framework that shows the influence of the Reformers' hermeneutics on the thinking about humans as knowers of Hans-Georg Gadamer and other prominent modern philosophers of hermeneutics Presents innovative, substantial readings of Shakespeare's 'problem plays' - Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well - and their viewpoints on human subjectivity We share with Shakespeare, it seems, the assumption that to be human is to be an interpreter of oneself, others and the world - seeking but not always arriving at understanding. Shakespeare, the Reformation and the Interpreting Self explores this perspective on human subjectivity. This study reads the complex, compelling representations of the self as an interpreter (and misinterpreter) of reality in Shakespeare's 'problem plays' alongside an intellectual history that links the culture-shaping theological hermeneutics of the playwright's day to the similarly influential philosophical hermeneutics of our times. What is it to be an interpreting self? This book's critical approach brings to the fore questions about the self's finitude, agency, motivations, self-knowledge and ethical relation to others, questions that were of great relevance in Shakespeare's England and which continue to resonate in our present-day dilemmas and debates about human experience and human being.