Prayer and Performance in Early Modern English Literature

Gesture, Word and Devotion

Joseph Sterrett

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781108429726
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108572392
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Early modern England was a nation alive with intense religious debate, with often violent results. Central to these debates were questions of prayer, questions powerful enough to splinter the English church and to fuel a ferocious civil war. This collection of thirteen newly commissioned essays traces the controversy and value given to the performance of prayer, through the body, the spoken word and written text, as well as its representation on stage. Through close readings of the works of Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Donne, John Milton and Henry Vaughan amongst others, this book examines the performative aspects of prayer in a range of literary modes. This broad range of study is expanded further with chapters focussing on the private religious diaries of men and women throughout the seventeenth century, and the convergence of music and prayer in the work of William Byrd.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Thanksgiving
• Introduction: The Power of Performance in Prayer, Now and Then
• Chapter 1 Prayer, Bodily Ritual and Performative Utterance: Bucer, Calvin and the Book of Common Prayer
• Chapter 2 The Tradition of High Church Prayer in the Seventeenth Century
• Chapter 3 Performed Prayer and Sixteenth-Century Non-Conformism
• Chapter 4 Enter Mercury, Sleeping: Delivering Prayers on the Early Modern Stage
• Chapter 5 Prayer, Performance and Community in Early Modern Drama
• Chapter 6 Playing at Prayer: The Spiritual Failure of Performance in Hamlet
• Chapter 7 Prayer and Musical Performance: The Verse Anthem
• Chapter 8 The Protestant Diary and the Act of Prayer
• Chapter 9 Prayer in Context: The Dynamics of Worship in Donne’s Encænia Sermon (1623)
• Chapter 10 ‘Your Suit is Granted’: Performing Prayer in Early Modern English Poetry
• Chapter 11 ‘The Royal Actor’: King Charles I and the Performance of Prayer
• Chapter 12 Vaughan’s Devotional Prose as Political Act and Prayer
• Chapter 13 ‘The Spirit of Prayer Inspired’: Invocation as Prayer in Milton’s Poetic Imagination
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index