TY - BOOK
T1 - The Unheard Prayer
T2 - Religious Toleration in Shakespeare's Drama
AU - Sterrett, Joseph William
PY - 2012/8
Y1 - 2012/8
N2 - Titus shoots his arrows bearing petitions for justice to the gods; Claudius asks ‘what form of prayer can serve my turn?’; Lear wishes he could crack the vault of heaven with his prayers. Again and again, Shakespeare dramatises the scenario of the unheard prayer, in which the one who prays does so full well in the knowledge that no one is listening, interested, or even there at all. The scenario is keyed to the anxieties that surrounded the act of praying itself, so full as it was with controversy, the centrepiece of sectarian dispute over what was good and bad religion. This study reads the unheard prayer scenario as itself an appeal for a vision of tolerance, unobtainable perhaps, but nevertheless desired and imagined.
AB - Titus shoots his arrows bearing petitions for justice to the gods; Claudius asks ‘what form of prayer can serve my turn?’; Lear wishes he could crack the vault of heaven with his prayers. Again and again, Shakespeare dramatises the scenario of the unheard prayer, in which the one who prays does so full well in the knowledge that no one is listening, interested, or even there at all. The scenario is keyed to the anxieties that surrounded the act of praying itself, so full as it was with controversy, the centrepiece of sectarian dispute over what was good and bad religion. This study reads the unheard prayer scenario as itself an appeal for a vision of tolerance, unobtainable perhaps, but nevertheless desired and imagined.
U2 - Spectators having read Sterrett’s study are now ready to understand the full and complex implications of the visual display of prayers onstage. Ultimately, they are made to realize that Shakespeare actually fashioned a poetics of prayer aimed at distancing himself from sectarian disputes, while reflecting on the meaning of divine sanction and expressing the religious anxieties of his contemporaries. Sophie Chiari, Aix-Marseille University (LERMA), Moreana, Vol 50.191-192, pp. 201-210
DO - Spectators having read Sterrett’s study are now ready to understand the full and complex implications of the visual display of prayers onstage. Ultimately, they are made to realize that Shakespeare actually fashioned a poetics of prayer aimed at distancing himself from sectarian disputes, while reflecting on the meaning of divine sanction and expressing the religious anxieties of his contemporaries. Sophie Chiari, Aix-Marseille University (LERMA), Moreana, Vol 50.191-192, pp. 201-210
M3 - Book
SN - ISBN13: 9789004230057
T3 - Studies in Religion and the Arts
BT - The Unheard Prayer
PB - Brill Academic Publishers, Incorporated
CY - Leiden/Boston
ER -