And yet again Chesterton expresses splendidly what I dimly have been thinking for a long time:

[George Bernard Shaw’s] misunderstanding of Shakespeare arose largely from the fact that he is a Puritan, while Shakespeare was spiritually a Catholic. The former is always screwing himself up to see truth; the latter is often content that truth is there.  The Puritan is only strong enough to stiffen; the Catholic is strong enough to relax.

Shaw, I think, has entirely misunderstood the pessimistic passages of Shakespeare. They are flying moods which a man with a fixed faith can afford to entertain.  That all is vanity, that life is dust and love is ashes, these are frivolities, these are jokes that a Catholic can afford to utter.  He knows well enough that there is a life that is not dust and a love that is not ashes.  But just as he may let himself go more than the Puritan in the matter of enjoyment, so he may let himself go more than the Puritan in the matter of melancholy. The sad exuberances of Hamlet are merely like the glad exuberances of Falstaff.  This is not conjecture; it is the text of Shakespeare. In the very act of uttering his pessimism, Hamlet admits that it is a mood and not the truth.  Heaven is a heavenly thing, only to him it seems a foul congregation of vapours.  Man is the paragon of animals, only to him he seems a quintessence of dust. Hamlet is quite the reverse of a sceptic.  He is a man whose strong intellect believes much more than his weak temperament can make vivid to him.  But this power of knowing a thing without feeling it, this power of believing a thing without experiencing it, this is an old Catholic complexity, and the Puritan has never understood it.

Shakespeare confesses his moods (mostly by the mouths of villains and failures), but he never sets up his moods against his mind. His cry of vanitas vanitatum is itself only a harmless vanity. Readers may not agree with my calling him Catholic with a big C; but they will hardly complain of my calling him catholic with a small one.  And that is here the principal point. Shakespeare was not in any sense a pessimist; he was, if anything, an optimist so universal as to be able to enjoy even pessimism.

And this is exactly where he differs from the Puritan.  The true Puritan is not squeamish:  the true Puritan is free to say “Damn it!” But the Catholic Elizabethan was free (on passing provocation) to say “Damn it all!”

G.K. Chesterton: George Bernard Shaw