This article tends to study the subversive Shakespeare’s religious discourse in the Renaissance England. An adaptive multi-disciplinary dimension of Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth CDA) is applied to lay bare the discursive strategies appropriated by William Shakespeare to safely express his political and religious philosophy in the last scene of the play of Hamlet. This study attempts to bring together linguistic, sociocognitive, and critical metaphorical aspects in one single CDA framework. Serving methods and tools of analysis from various well-known CDA approaches such as Fairclough (1989 and 1995), Van Dijk (1993 and 2001), and the Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA henceforth) model (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) are selected to fulfil the aims of analysis.
