The twin certainties of baptism and burial

Can there possibly be anything new to say about the old subject of Shakespeare’s sources? As early as the 18th century, scholars realised that he made up very few of his own plots. Whether he was bringing to life Plutarch’s biographies of the noble Romans or rescripting a hoary old drama from the existing repertoire or turning a saucy Elizabethan novel into a stage comedy, Shakespeare was always a literary magpie or, as Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale describes himself, ‘a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’. The shelves of the Shakespearean library groan with volumes on his uses of classical poets such as Ovid, of the Bible, of Montaigne’s essays.

Astonishingly, though, no one until Daniel Swift has thought to consider in detail the impact on his plays of the book that was more deeply ingrained in the Elizabethan consciousness than any other: Thomas Cranmer’s Anglican Book of Common Prayer (the BCP, as it is known to aficionados). It was cheaper and more widely distributed than the Bible. It shaped the practice of worship in an age when churchgoing was compulsory under the law. It was the most reprinted book of the era, and bore an intimate relationship to the other two most reprinted books, the Cathechism and the metrical Psalms of Sternhold and Hopkins (about which Swift should have said more). Cranmer’s cadences and phraseology echoed in the minds of every articulate Elizabethan. So in what specific ways did they shape the imagination of Shakespeare?

Swift sets out to answer this question by triangulating three distinct forms of study: contextual, textual and theatrical. Contextual first. Even if you have no interest in Shakespeare, this book is worth reading for its account of the importance of the BCP in early modern England, and the fierce debates around the revision of its liturgical imperatives in successive editions.