Shakespeare's Common Prayers: The Book of Common Prayer and the Elizabethan Age
- ISBN-10
- 0199976937
- ISBN-13
- 9780199976935
- Category
- Literary Criticism
- Pages
- 304
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2012-10-05
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Author
- Daniel Swift
Description
Societies and entire nations draw their identities from certain founding documents, whether charters, declarations, or manifestos. The Book of Common Prayer figures as one of the most crucial in the history of the English-speaking peoples. First published in 1549 to make accessible the devotional language of the late Henry the VIII's new church, the prayer book was a work of monumental religious, political, and cultural importance. Within its rituals, prescriptions, proscriptions, and expressions were fought the religious wars of the age of Shakespeare. This diminutive book--continuously reformed and revised--was how that age defined itself. In Shakespeare's Common Prayers, Daniel Swift makes dazzling and original use of this foundational text, employing it as an entry-point into the works of England's most celebrated writer. Though commonly neglected as a source for Shakespeare's work, Swift persuasively and conclusively argues that the Book of Common Prayer was absolutely essential to the playwright. It was in the Book's ambiguities and its fierce contestations that Shakespeare found the ready elements of drama: dispute over words and their practical consequences, hope for sanctification tempered by fear of simple meaninglessness, and the demand for improvised performance as compensation for the failure of language to fulfill its promises. What emerges is nothing less than a portrait of Shakespeare at work: absorbing, manipulating, reforming, and struggling with the explosive chemistry of word and action that comprised early modern liturgy. Swift argues that the Book of Common Prayer mediates between the secular and the devotional, producing a tension that makes Shakespeare's plays so powerful and exceptional. Tracing the prayer book's lines and motions through As You Like It, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Othello, and particularly Macbeth, Swift reveals how the greatest writer of the age--of perhaps any age--was influenced and guided by its most important book.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2012-11-22
- 300 pages
- Paperback
- Oxford University Press
-
- 2012-10-05
- 304 pages
- Ebook
- Oxford University Press
Similar books
-
Shakespeare's Common Prayers
By Daniel SwiftI begin with an archival study of the marginal annotations left by early modern worshipers in their personal copies of the Book of Common Prayer. Prayer book readers treated liturgy...
-
Four Birds of Noah's Ark: A Prayer Book from the Time of Shakespeare
By Thomas DekkerThis lovely book at once surprises and enchants with its literary voice, devotional heart, and accessible writing.
-
Prayers for an Inclusive Church
By Steven ShakespeareThis is a beautifully crafted collection of prayers for each Sunday and most major festivals in the church's year, together with additional material for each season.
-
Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England
By Ramie TargoffCommon Prayer explores the relationship between prayer and poetry in the century following the Protestant Reformation.
-
The Work of Form: Poetics and Materaility in Early Modern Culture
By Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Ben Burton'The Work of Form' investigates ways of reading early modern poetry which unite historical and formal approaches.
-
The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography
By Alan JacobsJacobs shows how The Book of Common Prayer--from its beginnings as a means of social and political control in the England of Henry VIII to its worldwide presence today--became a venerable work whose cadences express the heart of religious ...
-
Prayers for an Inclusive Church
By Steven ShakespeareThis is a beautifully crafted collection of prayers for each Sunday and most major festivals in the church's year, together with additional material for each season.
-
Shakespeare and the Play Scripts of Private Prayer
By Ceri Sullivan42 40 J. Knapp , Shakespeare's Tribe : Church , Nation , and Theater in Renaissance England ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 2002 ) , pp . 9–11 , 14–15 , 111-12 , 120–38 . 41 A. Gurr , Playgoing in Shakespeare's London ( 1987 ...
-
The Book of Common Prayer, 1559: The Elizabethan Prayer Book
By Church of EnglandThe Book of Common Prayer, 1559: The Elizabethan Prayer Book
-
The Bard and the Bible: A Shakespeare Devotional
By Bob HostetlerSLEEP. For some must watch while some must sleep, Thus runs the world away. Hamlet, III, ii, 271 He that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. Psalm 121:3–4 Hamlet's strategem for ...