Shakespeare's common prayers

When Shakespeare's contemporaries discussed the dangers and the powers of theatre, they reached for a religious vocabulary. There are simple reasons for this---sixteenth-century English drama was only incompletely separated from its origins in medieval church rites---but the consequences are resonant. My dissertation argues that the specific language of liturgy breaks through the surface of Shakespeare's plays at key moments. Without close attention to the Book of Common Prayer---the most widely distributed book in early modern England, the inspiration for flights of personal devotion, and the site of constant controversy---these moments of dramatic shock and pleasure remains illegible to us.; 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.; Shortly after King James' accession to the throne of England in 1603, he held a conference at Hampton Court Palace to debate the revision of the prayer book; for the evening entertainments, plays were staged in the great hall. Shakespeare's company, the King's Men, performed during the festivities. This spatial coincidence of liturgical debate and Shakespearean drama gestures towards a profound and constitutive interplay between early modern devotion and theatre.; Each of the three main chapters of my dissertation focuses upon a specific prayer book rite---for baptism, marriage, and the burial of the dead---and tracks Shakespeare's use of patterns of liturgical language and performance. I focus upon those key phrases that were most controversial to argue that the same tensions animate both the plays and contemporary sacramental controversy. The sacraments offer a vocabulary of consolation and explanation for the social thresholds of life. In their contestations, they are also profoundly dramatic, and familiarity with them---lost to modern audiences---gives a resonance and depth to Shakespeare's drama.