Shakespeare's Common Prayers

The Book of Common Prayer was the most popular book in early modern England; it was also a key source for Shakespeare's plays of the period 1598-1606, in which the playwright repeatedly borrows the phrases and instructions from church rites and transforms them into dense, precise theatrical moments. When Rosalind pretends to merry Orlando, or when Macbeth considers his terrible guilt, each are really re-phrasing the Book of Common Prayer, and this paper will explore how Shakespeare adapted, stole, and metamorphosed this vital source.

Daniel Swift is the author of Shakespeare's Common Prayers (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Bomber County (Hamish Hamilton, 2010), as well as the editor of the Selected Poems of John Berryman (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2014). He is Senior Lecturer in English at the New College of the Humanities.