The prayer book’s history is one of passionately contested revision and of manic sensitivity to a verb or a turn of phrase. In the book’s ambiguities and fierce contestations, Swift argues, William Shakespeare found the ready elements of drama. Tracing the prayer book’s lines and motions through As You Like It, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Measure For Measure, Othello, and particularly Macbeth, he redirects scholarly attention to the religious heart of Shakespeare’s work and time.
