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  • Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Prayer Book
  • W. Brown Patterson (bio)
Shakespeare’s Common Prayers: The Book of Common Prayer and the Elizabethan Age by Daniel Swift (Oxford University Press, 2013. Illustrated. viii + 290 pages. $27.95)

Daniel Swift contends, in this lively, combative, and perceptive book, that the Book of Common Prayer, first published in 1549 and used throughout England in the late sixteenth century in its revised version of 1552 (slightly altered in 1559), was an immensely important literary text for Shakespeare. It was, Swift declares, the most important literary text in England. It was, after all, used in every parish church and cathedral for daily and Sunday services. English men and women were required by law to attend prayer-book services in the communities in which they lived. Even those who remained faithful to traditional Roman Catholic beliefs and practices were likely to attend their local parish churches to avoid fines for being recusants. To an extent that has escaped the attention of most scholars, as well as readers and spectators, the literature of the Elizabethan period, as Swift argues, reflects the language, images, and dramatic actions of the prayer book. Swift offers a great deal of evidence to show that this can be seen especially in Shakespeare’s early comedies and several of his major tragedies.

The Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer was prefaced by “An Act for the Uniformity of Service and the Administration of the Sacraments,” which made it unlawful “in any interludes, plays, songs, rhymes, or by other open words, [to] declare or speak anything in the derogation, depraving, or despising of the said book or anything therein contained or any part thereof.” Shakespeare was evidently not inhibited by this prohibition. Indeed, as Swift’s analysis of Shakespeare’s references to the Elizabethan prayer book demonstrate, the playwright saw in this liturgical text a means of expressing a wide range of ideas and emotions. Shakespeare’s early romantic comedies revolve about the complications of courtship, love, and marriage, and echo the prayer book’s marriage rite. For several of Shakespeare’s great tragedies performed in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign and at the beginning of James i’s reign, the prayer book was a rich source. Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth recall in various ways the prayer book’s treatment of baptism, Holy Communion, death, and burial. In Romeo and Juliet the two title characters reflect the language and teachings of the prayer book in seeing their relationship and actions as having a sacred character. Swift observes: “For the two central characters this insistence upon propriety takes liturgical form,” moving [End Page iv] “from consent to solemnization to consummation.”

Swift is skillful in showing that one reason the language and teaching of the prayer book was so much on Shakespeare’s mind was that the book had become the subject of intense controversy in the period during which he wrote his early comedies and some of his tragedies. The inflammatory Admonitions to Parliament in 1572 attacked the very services that Shakespeare drew upon, calling them unreformed, contrary to scripture, and ridiculous. The radical Henry Barrow charged that the prayer book was abstracted from “the Pope’s blasphemous mass-book.” The Millenary Petition submitted to King James vi of Scotland on his accession as James i of England focused on aspects of the prayer book that Puritans found objectionable. These objections were considered by the king and leading clergymen of the Church of England in January 1604, at the Hampton Court Conference, which followed almost immediately after the court’s Christmas festivities in which Shakespeare’s company played an important part. The prayer book authorized after the conference was only slightly changed from that of Elizabeth’s reign. Shakespeare’s interest in the Book of Common Prayer was evidently intensified by his recognition of the tensions and ambiguities within the book seized upon by its detractors. Thomas Cranmer, the prayer book’s chief compiler, translator, and author, had, after all, based his work on the traditional medieval rite used at Salisbury and elsewhere in England and called by its Latin name, the Sarum rite. Cranmer had performed the delicate task of revising the earlier...

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