Shakespeare's Common Prayers

ISBN-10: 0549057277
ISBN-13: 9780549057277
Pages: 343
Language: English
Published: 2007
Author: Daniel Swift

Description

I 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 as literature: available, that is, for creative manipulation and performance. Shakespeare shares this playful linguistic practice. His plays appropriate the weighted phrases of liturgy, and place priestly scripts in the mouths of fallen characters.