As you might expect, there's not a straightforward answer to how common suicide was, though the second part about religious perspectives is easier to answer. I'll begin with the second part, because it's the more straightforward, and helps to explain some of the difficulties in answering how common suicide really was.

I have discussed beliefs around suicide in an answer before which you might find interesting, and which fleshes out some of what I'll mention here. Suicide was one of the most unforgivable crimes in early modern England, as it involved rejecting God's gift of life. While a murderer would have the opportunity to repent their crime (often publicly - a confession at the scaffold was a routine part of capital punishment)^(1), a self-murderer has no opportunity to repent their 'crime' before their death. Those who die by their own hand are therefore automatically damned. To reiterate what I said in my previous answer, suicides brought enormous shame to living relatives, and these relatives would be subject to state punishment. A posthumous coroner’s jury would try cases of suicide as a crime, and if found guilty, the individual in question would have all of their movable goods and any leases on land surrendered to the crown, or a holder of a royal patent which granted them the right to such windfalls.^(2) I'd refer you to the discussion I've linked above for more in-depth details on this, but there were also punishments for the deceased too, largely in the form of 'improper' burial in unfavourable places or without the usual religious ceremonies that would be regarded as essential for a 'good' burial.

It is difficult to estimate precisely how common suicide was, at least in part because of this very pronounced culture of shame, and the very real fear that a death by suicide was a sure-fire route to hell. If the family had any scope whatsoever to demonstrate that their relative had not been of sound mind (and therefore not guilty) they would do so. The reliability of official records is also suspect - Ralph Houlbrooke's review of Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England articulates some of the issues very concisely, a few of which I will list here:

- 'between 1500 and 1580 closer supervision of coroners and the Crown's drive to maximize the profits of justice caused a dramatic increase in suicide verdicts'

- female suicides are under-reported in the historical records

- Those who are wealthy and whose relatives stood to lose a lot of inheritance feature prominently in records, whereas 'the unmarried, strangers, misfits and criminals either did not leave dependants whose plight made them objects of compassion, or died deaths which seemed of a piece with their lives.'^(3)

The London Bills of Mortality shed some light on rates of suicide, though for several reasons (including those cited above, as well as an incomplete set of records during the Civil War years) these are not to be considered flawless. Nonetheless, the Bills provide a record of annual deaths in London, and from 1629, they list categories of deaths, not just a tally. The Bills that survive this period record 283 deaths between 1629-1660 as a result of suicide (entries include 'hanged themselves', 'made away with themselves' and 'made away with themselves wilfully'). For comparison, the Bills record 113 murders, 147 deaths from gout, and 89 for 'falling sickness' (usually thought to be epilepsy) in the same period.^(4) We can cautiously conclude form such data that suicide was not especially uncommon, in spite of the social and religious scorn for the act.

As for why suicides appear so commonly in plays from this period (as Shakespeare is by no means alone in this), there are a few answers. The obvious is that suicides are quite the dramatic spectacle, and Renaissance stagecraft is all about grabbing the audience's wandering attention. There are also more explicitly literary reasons for this, largely stemming from the Humanist education system in which these writers were educated. Nicholas Mann describes Humanism as 'that concern with the legacy of antiquity - and in particular, but not exclusively, with its literary legacy [...] It involves above all the rediscovery and study of ancient Greek and Roman texts, the restoration and interpretation of them and the assimilation of the ideas and values that they contain.'^(5) Classical perspectives on suicide are substantially different - it might be a means to preserve honour, a noble sacrifice etc. The source material for a lot of Shakespeare's work therefore contains a number of 'noble suicides' (e.g. Anthony and Cleopatra, and *'*The Rape of Lucrece' come to mind). Even when early modern writers are not working directly with Classical material, we often see that tension between Classical and early modern values played out in literary texts, as one 'ideal' competes with another, and a degree of permissiveness for actions which would not be tolerable in 'real life' are acceptable in literature/on the stage.

I hope this answers your question, as ever, let me know if you have more questions.

^(1) J. A. Sharpe, ‘“Last Dying Speeches” Religion, Ideology and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past and Present, 107 (1985), 144-67.

^(2) Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 15.

^(3) R. A. Houlbrooke, Review Reviewed Work(s): Sleepless Souls. Suicide in Early Modern England by Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy, The English Historical Review , Apr., 1992, Vol. 107, No. 423 (Apr., 1992), pp. 393-394.

^(4) See Erin Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy: Sadness and Selfhood in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) p.53.

^(5) Nicholas Mann, 'The Origins of Humanism' in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism ed. by Jill Kraye (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), p.2.