Shakespeare’s Prayers

Abstract The various prayers in King Lear, Hamlet, Henry V, Cymbeline, and The Tempest are complex. If Shakespeare inherited medieval Catholic forms of prayer he preserved them in altered form, with considerable ambiguity. They provided useful dramatic forms, although any explicit appeal to Catholics in the audience seems unlikely. Since the English Reformation was still in the process of transition, Shakespeare’s prayers would have appealed to his “Protestant” as well as Catholic audience. Against the overstated claim that to look for Shakespeare’s religious affiliation is an impossible task and finally futile, I argue that the various inadvertent allusions to Catholic forms of prayer, and their sometimes ambiguous expression, are precisely what we would expect of a Catholic working under the Elizabethan and Jacobean regimes.