The Uses and Abuses of Prayer Book Properties in Hamlet, Richard III, and Arden of Faversham

elizabeth williamson

The Uses and Abuses of Prayer Book Properties inHamlet, Richard III, and Arden of Favershamenlr_1051 371..395

One of the most familiar aspects of English Protestantism is itsstated preference for books over idols. In recent years, however,

historians of the Reformation have sought to complicate the over-simplified distinctions between godly books on the one hand andpopish images on the other.Alexandra Walsham, for example, has foundthat Protestant prayer manuals were often indistinguishable fromCatholic ones, and that for all the emphasis placed on developing adematerialized faith, many members of the Church of England becamedeeply attached to the material objects that anchored their devotions.1

The Edwardian and Elizabethan reformers had set out to eliminate allthe superficial signs of piety that characterized traditional Catholicism,but in everyday worship they were constantly confronted with themateriality of Protestant texts such as prayer books and bibles, forcingthem to acknowledge the difficulty of removing all external elements

An early version of this essay was presented at the meeting of the Renaissance Society ofAmerica in April of 2005. I am grateful to all those who have offered comments since then,especially Jane Degenhardt, Lori Anne Ferrell, Jean Howard, and Mathew Martin.

1. See “Jewels for Gentlewomen: Religious Books as Artefacts in Late Medieval and EarlyModern England” in The Church and the Book: Papers Read at the 2000 Summer Meeting and the2001 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. R.N. Swanson (Woodbridge, 2004).Walsham writes that “a growing body of scholarship” is now complicating the alleged “paradigmshift from a culture revolving around images, rituals, and symbols to one that converged uponthe abstract, invisible, and didactic word” (p. 127). In some cases Protestant prayer books drewtoo closely upon Catholic precedents. Walsham cites the example of Richard Cosin, who wasnotorious in the north of England for turning communion tables back into objects that lookedfar more like altars, and whose Collection of Private Devotions (1627) included the letters IHS onthe title page (p. 141). But Walsham points out elsewhere that although Cosin was famous forhis anti-Calvinist tendencies, he “was by no means the first to adapt, purge, or simply reissueRoman Catholic devotions and meditations for Protestant use.” “The Parochial Roots ofLaudianism Revisited: Catholics,Anti-Calvinists and ‘Parish Anglicans’ in Early Stuart England,”Journal of Ecclesiastical History 49 (1998), 641–42.

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from the visible church. And although the leaders of the Reformationsought to downplay the persistence of an object-oriented faith inProtestant churches and homes, the subject was raised frequently in thepublic theater.

The drama proved to be the ideal medium for exploring thisongoing contradiction between theory and practice precisely because itwas so open about its own reliance on objects such as properties andcostumes. When they turned books—especially prayer books—intostage properties, the playing companies drew attention to the physi-cality of the Protestant codex and the practices associated with it,revealing a preexisting but often unacknowledged rift between theideal of an immaterial faith and the realities of daily life in the latesixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. During this period prayerbooks were as common on the stage as they were in private homes andparish churches, and prayer book properties appear in a wide variety ofearly modern scripts from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1601) to Webster’sThe Devil’s Law Case (1619).2 Although the vast majority of these propswere used rather inconspicuously as tokens of personal devotion, theyallowed performers to explore a central paradox in Christian practicethat stemmed from the need, experienced by Protestants as well asCatholics, to express an inner faith through bodily gestures andmaterial objects.3

Prayer books were among the most prevalent objects in the livesof English Protestants. Devotional works designed for the individualbeliever were traditionally associated with Catholic lay piety (accordingto Eamon Duffy, primers or books of hours were as ubiquitous as

2. By my count, prayer books are called for in at least eighteen of the surviving plays firstproduced before 1642. A handful of others call for bibles or copies of the Qur’an. Given theproliferation of small books in early modern London, it is likely that the playing companies usedan actual codex on stage; whether or not that book was a religious one is less certain.Middleton’s The puritaine or The Widdow of Watling-streete (1607) provides the most historicallyspecific description of a book as prop when it calls for a set of characters to enter with “[b]ooksat their Girdles, as coming from Church” (sig. B2v).

3. The visual appearance of the book was important only insofar as it allowed the actor, andon another level the character, to perform the act of reading.The term “prayer book” could alsorefer to the Book of Common Prayer, first circulated in 1549 as a reformed version of the Catholicmass book, but none of the surviving play texts goes so far as to represent the Protestantliturgical manual on stage. Several plays, including Heywood’s If You Know Not Me,You KnowNobody (1603), do present the Bible on stage, but these stage properties present a different setof representational issues, and for the sake of clarity I focus exclusively on prayer manuals here.

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rosary beads in the early 1500s4), but they continued to be printed andsold widely even after the Reformation. The prayer book propertiesthat appeared in public plays could thus be closely identified withprivate manuals such as Edward Dering’s Godlye priuate praiers forhousholders to meditate vpon, and to say in their families (1578), AnneWheathill’s A handfull of holesome (though homelie) hearbs (1584), JohannHabermann’s The enimie of securitie, or,A daily exercise of godlie meditations(1591), and Arthur Dent’s A Plaine Man’s Pathway to Heaven (1601).These types of books, many of which were written by women, wereimmensely popular and provided a convenient framework for dailydevotion. At the same time they were directly analogous to Catholictexts with identical functions, and therefore cut across the lines thereformers attempted to draw between superstitious Catholic practiceand appropriate Christian worship.5 The reformers had removedcontroversial objects such as the missal from their churches, but thevery materiality of the prayer book, which resembled that of Catholicmanuals, continued to haunt post-Reformation practice.6

Thus, despite their iconoclastic principles, the reformers wereconstantly confronted with the physicality of books themselves. AsAnthony Dawson suggests,“with the extraordinary pressure put on theWord, there was an implicit danger of idolizing the Book as the sourceof the Word.”7 But even if we set aside the particular problem ofovervaluing the scriptures themselves, the material presence of so many

4. Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–c. 1580 (New Haven, 1992),p. 213.

5. For more on these manuals, see Helen White, Tudor Books of Private Devotion (Madison,1951) and Eamon Duffy, “Continuity and divergence in Tudor religion,” in Unity and Diversityin the Church: Papers Read at the 1994 Summer Meeting and the 1995 Winter Meeting of theEcclesiastical History Society, ed. R.N. Swanson (Oxford, 1996). Ian Green provides additionalexamples of such treatises, particularly those that were issued in multiple editions. The Christian’sABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c.1530–1740 (Oxford, 1996), p. 561.

6. The 1549 Act for the Abolishing and Putting Away of Divers Books and Images calls for thechurch wardens of every parish to deliver up “all antiphoners, missals, grails, processionals,manuals, legends, pies, portasses, journals, and ordinals, after the use of Sarum, Lincoln, York,or any other private use, and all other books of service . . . and them so deface and abolish thatthey never after may serve either to any such use, as they were provided for, or be at any timea let to that godly and uniform order.”This statute clearly articulates both the need to eliminateCatholic prayer books and to prevent Cranmer’s Prayer Book from having to compete with anyother reformed books of service.William Maskell, Monumenta Ritualia Eccleasia Anglicanae, 3 vols.(Oxford, 1882), II, 208.

7. Anthony Dawson and Paul Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England: ACollaborative Debate (Cambridge, Eng., 2001), p. 143.

373Elizabeth Williamson


private prayer manuals points to a broader paradox. For if faith was aninternal phenomenon, how could it be measured through acts of piety,namely prayer and meditation, that involved objects such as books?Thomas Becon, chaplain to Archbishop Cranmer and a prolific satiristin his own right, outlined the dangers of false prayer in particularlystark terms: “To pretend outwardly a holy manner of praying and yetnot pray in deed in our hearts is double iniquity, and increaseth muchdamnation unto us.”8 The problem Becon articulates, namely thatprayer can be falsified, was further exaggerated when combined withthe necessity of using material objects and gestures in the act of prayer.

Given these existing gaps between Protestant theory and Protestantpractice, sixteenth-century playwrights did not need to put any addi-tional pressure on the central role that prayer books played in Englishparishes. Rather, they justified their own reliance on material objectsand gestures by commenting upon an existing problem, the inescapablecorporeality of early modern worship. Some plays used scenes of prayerin order to satirize religious practices, but others prompted spectatorsto draw a more radical set of conclusions–namely, that worship couldall too easily be interpreted as an “act” because devotion, like playact-ing, required a set of bodily gestures as well as a recognizable prop. Atstake in the theater companies’ use of books on stage, therefore, wasthe physicality of religious practice, both Catholic and Protestant. Byexamining scenes of prayer book use in Hamlet, Richard III, and Ardenof Faversham, this essay argues that the drama highlighted that physi-cality by creating an analogy between the actor’s use of the book asprop and the worshiper’s use of the inescapably material book as an aidto spiritual meditation. Moreover, these plays suggest that the Protes-tant reformers’ attempts to deploy representations of women readers asemblems of true piety were often undercut by misogynist stereotypesdirected at the fragility of the female body. In both cases, the veryconditions under which public theater plays were produced—the useof ordinary books as properties and the casting of boy actors inwomen’s roles—provided the ideal means for exposing the weakness of

8. The catechism of Thomas Becon.With Other PiecesWritten by Him in the Reign of King Edwardthe sixth (Cambridge, Eng., 1844; New York, 1968), p. 135. In later decades, however, the leadersof the church established the body and language as “unmanipulatable signifiers of the worship-er’s internal state” in order to justify the focus on public devotion. See Ramie Targoff, “ThePerformance of Prayer: Sincerity and Theatricality in Early Modern England,” Representations 60(Fall 1997), 58.



Protestant claims about reformed reading practices. Whether in thechurch or the theater, it was impossible to put one’s faith entirely inthe visual or metaphorical image of a pious reader, since both thecodex and the body could be turned into mere props in an “act” ofprayer.

On one level, the problem of the book’s materiality was a theologi-cal one, but the subject of religious books and their proper use wasfamiliar to all those who had lived through the Reformation andits aftermath, for the written word played a crucial role in both thedoctrine and the mythology of the Church of England. From Lutherto Calvin to Tyndale, the reformers consistently argued that salvationresulted not from the priest’s intervention in the miracle of theeucharist, but from the individual believer’s understanding of the wordof God, which was to be enshrined in his or her heart. They oftendisagreed about how scripture was to be interpreted, but Protestantleaders were universally in favor of replacing the Latin mass with aministry based on godly preaching and on the reading of the scripturesin the vernacular. Along with the new translations of the EnglishBible, first legalized in 1539 and reissued under Elizabeth’s supervisionin 1569, Archbishop Cranmer’s 1549 Book of Common Prayer wasintended to pave the way for a new generation of literate believerswho could augment their experience at church with their own privatemeditations. The members of the new church were no longer to payattention to the sounds and smells of the liturgy, but to the arrange-ment of letters on a page. The images that once hung over the altarwere replaced by tablets embossed with the ten commandments, andthose who could afford to were encouraged to bring their own copiesof the Book of Common Prayer to church so that they could followalong during the service.9

The process of replacing popish idols with godly books was not aneasy one, but by the time Elizabeth came to the throne English biblesand prayer manuals had become a staple of Protestant life, and by the

9. Tessa Watt’s work in Cheap Print and Popular Piety (Cambridge, Eng., 1991) details the wayin which verbal symbols, including the Decalogue, replaced the forbidden image of the crucifixover the altar. She explains that in the initial decades of the Reformation, the unfamiliararrangement of letters would have taken on an almost talismanic quality. But for those who werealready literate, and who could afford to purchase a copy, the Book of Common Prayer performeda more traditionally textual function, as both a guide to the Reformed church service and anaid to private devotion.



time of James’s coronation in 1603 these objects had become familiarto most English parishioners. Accordingly, Patrick Collinson describesthe radical shift in popular religious culture during this period in termsof an opposition between images and books. “In 1500,” he observes,“for a lay person of humble status to be found in possession of a book(almost any book) was to be suspected of heresy. It seems that by 1600to be found in possession of a picture (almost any picture) was to bea suspected papist.”10 And yet the binary opposition between imagesand texts, between the material and the immaterial, was not so easy toestablish when religious books were highly valued by their owners asphysical objects.

In striving to create a society in which prayer books and bibleswould be available to all of the faithful, Protestant theologiansparadoxically confirmed the fact that one could not have holy wordswithout a vessel to convey them in. These vessels, moreover, could bequite beautiful ones. According to Alexandra Walsham, the elaboratelyembroidered bindings that once protected Catholic primers were oftenreattached to Protestant books in order to serve a similar function.“Such bindings,” she writes, “seem to have weathered the storm of theReformation very successfully, becoming exquisite emblems of conti-nuity absorbing, embracing, and mediating change” (p. 131). The slip-page between Catholic and Protestant prayer manuals, both of whichwere frequently transformed into sumptuous accessories, provides aparticularly striking example of the persistent physicality of reformeddevotion, a problem that was accentuated by the relatively conservativenature of the Elizabethan settlement. Because Elizabeth had refused tooutlaw gestures such as kneeling outright, the proper manner ofpraying continued to be hotly debated throughout her reign, and wellinto James’s. During these comparatively tolerant times, many self-identified Protestants were able to argue that it was entirely appropriateto register piety through bodily postures.11

10. Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Changein the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York, 1988), p. 118. Collinson, who seemedconvinced at the time that Tessa Watt was on the right track, also points out that bookillustrations were everywhere, including in bibles and on walls, suggesting that ordinaryProtestants were not quite as iconophobic as hard–line Reformers would have liked them to be.

11. As Targoff notes in Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early ModernEngland (Chicago, 2001), the dichotomy separating spontaneous, private Protestant prayer fromprescripted, public Catholic prayer is complicated both by the central role of the Book ofCommon Prayer and by the fact that traditional Catholicism included a strong focus on private



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The problem with physical gestures such as kneeling, however, wasthat they could be used by the most impious worshipers to create theillusion of humility, a paradox that theater practitioners were particu-larly sensitive to. Shakespeare’s Hamlet presents perhaps the bestexample of the threat of falsification that was still present in everydaygestures of piety, especially female piety, at the end of the sixteenthcentury.The language Polonius uses when he instructs Ophelia to takeup her prayer book as a kind of stage property is particularly full ofreferences to the problem of turning faith into a performance. Like theproduction of “The Mousetrap,” this deception is designed to provokea revelation of truth, but as Polonius himself admits there is a shamefulprecedent for such falsehoods when he tells Ophelia to

Reade on this booke,That shew of such an exercise may colourYour lonelinesse. We are oft too blame in this,’Tis too much prou’d, that with Deuotions visage,And pious Action, we do surge o’reThe diuell himselfe.12

On one level, Polonius seems eager to articulate what his daughter isnot doing. By following her father’s instructions, she opens herself upto a comparison between her show of devotion and the false acts of

devotion using prayer manuals such as books of hours (p. 5). This issue has been explored indepth by Lori Anne Ferrell, who points out that the 1559 Book of Common Prayer was far lessradical in its reforms than the second Edwardian Prayer Book of 1552, and that “[t]he queen’smoderation disappointed many of her reform-minded subjects who had expected finally to stripthe English Church of all its popish ceremonies, the remnants and remainders of a disconcert-ingly recent Catholic past.” See Government by Polemic: James I, the King’s Preachers, and theRhetorics of Conformity, 1603–1625 (Stanford, 1998), p.148.The problem, as Ferrell points out, wasthat too many questions were left open to interpretation, including kneeling at communion.While Targoff assigns the belief in the unity of thought and gesture to the Elizabethan bishops,Ferrell finds it first and foremost in the sermons of anti-Calvinists such as Lancelot Andrewes,who in the 1610s began to complain that too little kneeling was going on in English churches,and who linked displays of religious loyalty to the proper obedience owed to James as the headof the church.

12. 3.1.43–48. All quotations from Shakespeare’s works refer to Mr. William ShakespearesComedies, Histories & Tragedies: Facsimile of the First Folio, 1623, ed. Doug Moston (New York,1998). Line numbers correspond to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans andJ. J. M. Tobin, 2nd. ed. (Boston, 1997).



prayer that frequently took place off stage, and as a result, Polonius isquick to assert that he is aware of the precedent in order to distanceher from it. On another level, by referring to “pious Action” and“Deuotions visage” Polonius’ speech points beyond the particularproblem of Ophelia’s fake reading to the performative nature of prayeritself, and to the anxieties that surrounded those performances, espe-cially when the actor in question was a woman.

Several variants between the folio and second quarto help draw outthe gendered implications of Polonius’ word choice, which obliquelyrefers to the falseness of women as well as the hypocrisy of those whopray insincerely. Many apparently religious people, Polonius remarks,use material gestures to “surge o’er” their hidden faults, but for thefolio’s “surge,” Q2 reads “sugar,” a word that complements the asso-ciations between Ophelia’s attractive outside and the unpleasant taskshe has been ordered to fulfill.13 The folio also reads “lowliness,”whereas Q2 reads “loneliness,” a choice that makes little sense unlesswe interpret the word as a description of her deceitful actions. It is notOphelia’s deception that needs to be smoothed over, however, but herfather’s, and like Guildenstern she has not “craft enough to color” herintentions (2.2.280). That Ophelia is first instructed by her father andthen rebuked by Hamlet calls attention, as each of the plays discussedin this essay do, to the charged nature of female piety.Although womenwere praised for their devotion, negative stereotypes linking membersof the female sex to falseness and changeability—the themes ofHamlet’s attack—often caused their acts of piety to be called intoquestion. But despite Hamlet’s lewd suggestions about the separationbetween honesty and chastity, Ophelia is neither a good actor nor awhore.14 Rather, her very inability to hide the fact that she is actinghighlights the facility with which other characters, including Hamlet,carry out their deceptions.

In his attempts to reframe Ophelia’s “show” as a useful fiction ratherthan a false deception, Polonius works to distance her from anti-Catholic attacks such as William Tyndale’s critique of “a false kind ofpraying, wherein the tongue and lips labour . . . but the heart talketh

13. See the Arden edition of the play, ed. Harold Jenkins (New York, 1994), pp. 276–77.14. See, e.g., Hamlet’s pointed observation that “the power of Beautie, will sooner /

transforme Honestie from what it is, to a Bawd, then the / force of Honestie can translateBeautie into his likenesse” (3.1.110–13).



not . . . nor hath any confidence in the promises of God.”15 Would-bebelievers, Tyndale remarks, ground their faith “in the multitude ofwords, and in the pain and tediousness of the length of the prayer,”rather than in its substance. In this commentary on the book ofMatthew, Tyndale uses the terms an antitheatricalist might apply tothe false shows put on by stage players.16 A similar rhetoric, one thatcontrasts the Catholic mass to the reformed liturgy, appears inArchbishop Cranmer’s preface to the Book of Common Prayer, in whichhe argues that those who listened to the mass in Latin during the daysof popery “haue heard with their eares onely, and their heartes, spirite,and minde, haue not been edified thereby.”17 Although it was not truein practice that Protestants could forego all physical forms of worshipand focus exclusively on the heart, spirit, and mind, the language usedby the reformers often works to align Protestantism with inner faithand Catholicism with outer shows. In light of this kind of rhetoric,Hamlet demonstrates the contradictions involved in associating physicalobjects such as books with genuine devotion, a concept that, accordingto Protestant doctrine, was based on the understanding and acceptanceof the immaterial word of God.

Polonius’ meditation on this opposition between genuine prayer andmere performance is underscored by Claudius’ response, delivered asan aside to the audience:

15. This is not to say that Tyndale rejects bodily evidence of devotion altogether; rather, hedescribes the power of prayer to comfort and revive the body as one of its primary benefits. ForTyndale, the problem occurs when prayer appears to be an unpleasant, strenuous task rather thana delightful one, but in either case he sees the body as an accurate reflection of the success orfailure of the prayer. Cf.Targoff, “The Performance of Prayer,” esp. pp. 56–57. Ian Green pointsout that there were a number of treatises published from the 1590s to the 1630s that dealt withthe problem of “ ‘how to tell’ if one was displaying the marks of the elect, if one’s heart wastruly broken or deceiving one, if one was walking like a godly man, and so on” (p. 313).

16. In drawing attention to the surprising likeness between playacting and everydayProtestant practice, the theater was working to undermine the existing analogies that linkedactors to hypocritical Catholics. Catholicism had been rejected because it relied too heavily onobjects that the reformers labeled “trinkets,” and by the same token the theater was seen as anenterprise that attracted customers through its gorgeous visual displays. In Jonathan Gil Harrisand Natasha Korda’s apt formulation, “Protestant iconoclasm and antipathy to the theatreoperated in tandem with a pronounced hostility to objects: the props of religious and dramaticritual alike served—as did the paltry Eucharist biscuit—to distract attention from more godly,hidden truths, by virtue of their very visibility.” See Staged Properties in Early Modern EnglishDrama, ed. Harris and Korda (Cambridge, Eng., 2002), p. 5.

17. The Booke of Common Praier (1559), sig. A5.



Oh ‘tis true:How smart a lash that speech doth giue my Conscience?The Harlots Cheeke beautied with plaist’ring ArtIs not more vgly to the thing that helpes it,Then is my deede, to my most painted word.Oh heauie burthen! (3.1.48–53)

Struck by Polonius’ remarks on false prayer, Claudius immediatelyrecognizes the parallel between his actions and those who conceal “thedivell himself ” in their hearts. Claudius calls his own words, which hehas used to cover up the act of fratricide, “painted,” and thus shallow,superficial. His allusion to the “Harlots Cheeke” and Polonius’ use ofthe term “color” also highlight one of the play’s pervasive metaphors,the idea that cosmetics cover over blemishes but also damage the skinunderneath.18 The phrase “painted word” may also refer to manuscriptilluminations, drawing a contrast between these adornments, whichwere associated with Catholic primers, and the simplicity of the blackink used in printed books. Prompted by Ophelia’s feigned act ofdevotion, Claudius is forced to acknowledge the disjunction in his ownlife between the lips and the heart, organs which, to use Cranmer’swords, were meant to “go together in prayer.”19 This disjunction isemphasized once again when Hamlet catches him at prayer two sceneslater.As he struggles to repent his act of fratricide, he admits that “[m]ywords flye vp, my thoughts remain below, / Words without thoughts,neuer to Heauen go” (3.3.96–97). Even more than Ophelia’s perfor-mance, which has no pretensions to actual piety, this speech presents adirect indictment of unsuccessful prayer, the kind that has no “sweet-ness,” to use Tyndale’s terminology. Hamlet, however, takes Claudius’outward gestures at face value. Assuming that the king is repenting inearnest, he resists the temptation to kill him, believing that if he doeshe will send his soul to heaven.

From Hamlet’s point of view, it is impossible to tell Ophelia’s formof deception from Claudius’ because both the would-be penitent andthe actor who is pretending to pray use an object and a set of gesturesto communicate their intentions. Thus, the play’s various stagings of

18. See Annette Drew-Bear, “Face-Painting Scenes in Ben Jonson’s Plays,” RenaissanceDrama 77 (1980), 388–401, and Jacqueline Lichtenstein, “Making Up Representation: TheRisks of Femininity,” Representations 20 (1987), 77–87.

19. Thomas Cranmer, The Miscellaneous Writings and Letters, ed. John E. Cox, 2 vols.(Cambridge, Eng., 1846), II, 173.



prayer also point out that anyone can fake the act of devotional readingif given the right prop.And although the play does not charge Opheliawith the crime of falsifying her religious belief, her performance withthe prayer book reinforces the unsettling similarity between theatricalpractice and religious practice by demonstrating the ease with whicheven a bad actor can imitate true piety. It is important to rememberthat in this scene Ophelia is construed as an actress rather than a failedpenitent.The threat comes not from the idea that she is pretending tobe pious, but rather from the recognition that it is impossible to tellgenuine devotion from false devotion, a slippage which is accentuatedby the fact that members of Shakespeare’s acting company were them-selves mimicking gestures of reading.The troubling similarity betweenOphelia’s act of prayer and Claudius’ presents a vivid example of thetheater’s ability to draw out the analogies between stage properties andthe physical books used to “prop up” acts of devotion. Through thejuxtaposition of these two characters, Hamlet provides an example ofthe way in which claims about women’s corruptibility often fail tohold up in practice. Thus, in addition to pointing out the ironiessurrounding the unreformed materiality of prayer manuals, the theaterwas referencing a pressing set of issues surrounding the supposed moralfrailty of the ordinary people who were handling them.

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If Ophelia’s use of her prayer book addresses the way Protestant claimsabout an immaterial faith tend to break down under pressure, theperformance of prayer in Richard III (1592) openly links Richard’sMachiavellian tendencies with the errors of medieval religion, present-ing an apparently straightforward endorsement of anti-Catholic stereo-types. Just before arranging for the death of his nephews, Richardstages a public appearance with his prayer book, hoping to convincethe citizens of London that, despite all the evidence to the contrary,he is a deeply pious man.20 The entire sequence, which is elegantly

20. Several plays with foreign settings follow Richard III in associating the prayer book withhypocrisy.A stage direction in TheWit of aWoman (1604), for example, specifies that a priest whois about to accept a bribe appear with a book to underscore his duplicity. Prayer books were soprevalent on the stage that in Webster’s The White Devil (1612) Lodovico jokes about theirabsence, complaining that he and his complotters ought to have poisoned one and used it as amurder weapon against Bracciano.



orchestrated by Richard’s followers, makes Ophelia’s momentarydeception seem negligible by contrast. Having been coached byBuckingham, the mayor sets out to convince the Duke of Gloucesterthat he, not Edward’s bastard children, should become the head ofstate. But when he arrives with citizens in tow, the mayor is met byCatesby, who sadly informs them that Richard is busy “with two rightreuerend Fathers, / Diuinely bent to Meditation,” and cannot be tornaway “from his holy Exercise” (3.7.61–62, 64). Finally, eagerly respond-ing to his cue but feigning ignorance, Richard appears “aloft, betweenetwo Bishops” and asks the assembled crowd what they could possiblywant with him (94 sd).

This scene is a classic example of political propaganda, but it isalso a quintessentially hypocritical use of the prayer book as prop. Bypresenting himself with his two spiritual “companions,” either bishopsturned reluctant actors or actors hired to dress up like bishops, Richardsets out to give the citizens the perfect image of aristocratic devotion.21

His visual appearance is then interpreted for the on-stage spectators byBuckingham:

Ah ha, my Lord, this Prince is not an Edward,He is not lulling on a lewd Loue-Bed,But on his Knees, at Meditation:Not dallying with a Brace of Curtizans,But meditating with two deepe Diuines:Not sleeping, to engrosse his idle Body,But praying, to enrich his watchfull Soule.

(3.7.71–77)

Buckingham’s speech epitomizes the duplicity Protestants associatedwith Catholicism’s false shows, and although most of the bystanders areaware that Richard is no god-fearing man, his followers equate his

21. This scene is immediately preceded by Buckingham’s attempt to get the citizens to givetheir voices to Richard, an attempt that results in a resounding silence. Buckingham reports hislack of success at the end of Act 3, but later, in the speeches cited here, he and Richard provideboth oratory and a visual image of piety, ultimately producing the desired result. A similar butsimpler version of this scene appears in George Ruggle’s comedy Ignoramus (1634), in which afriar named Cola announces that he will put a book in his hand to signify that he is deep inspiritual contemplation.



bodily devotion with his “watchfull Soule.” In contrast to Polonius,who decries the practice of using “Deuotions visage, / And piousAction” to hide the devil underneath, Richard, Buckingham, and theirsupporters are hoping that the citizens will draw a direct analogybetween his outward gestures and his inner faith.

Richard’s staged appearance before the citizens of London representsthe most extreme example of the use of a prayer book as a negatively-inflected theatrical device, but perhaps the most intriguing aspect ofthis scene is the fact that the choreography is not entirely Richard’sidea.22 Before the citizens and the mayor appear, Buckingham urgesRichard to “get a prayer book in your hand, / And stand between twochurchmen, good my lord, / For on that ground Ill build a holydescant” (3.7.47–49).Thus Richard’s part in this scene has literally beenscripted for him, and the book’s status as a property is further under-scored by the fact that it contains not one actor, but several, all ofwhom conspire to create this vision of pious royalty.23 Richard’sperformance, a more overt version of the trick by which Poloniusbecomes his daughter’s prompter, is carefully choreographed byCatesby and Buckingham, and supported by the two “bishops” whoaccompany him. Unlike Polonius, Buckingham’s instructions candidlyembrace the trope of a woman as a false actor, as he urges the duke to“be not easily wonne to our requests, / Play the Maids part; still answernay, and take it” (3.7.50–51).This piece of dialogue points to the waysin which women were often associated with false piety, but as in

22. Richard does tell Buckingham in advance that they will find him “well accompanied /With reuerend Fathers, and well-learned Bishops” when they seek him out, but the businesswith the prayer book seems to be Buckingham’s invention (3.5.99–100).

23. The very public, scripted nature of this performance may, as John Jowett suggests, havereminded some playgoers of the Book of Common Prayer, which sought to increase “devotionalefficacy” by collapsing “the distinctions between personal and liturgical worship” and thus drewscorn from strict Protestants who found it too much like the restrictive Catholic mass.“Thoughthe prayer book is unlikely to have been forgotten by actors or to have become unmentionedthrough choice, the lines are not in Q1. Compositorial omission of the two lines is possible.Theprayer book and the lines referring to it may, however, have never reached the Shakespeareanstage.The Office of the Revels might have seen an anachronistic reference to Common Prayerthat affronted the established church.” See The Tragedy of Richard III, ed. John Jowett (Oxford andNew York, 2000), pp. 272–73). In Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England(Cambridge Eng., 1998), Judith Maltby has shown that some Protestants considered the “setforms” established by the Book of Common Prayer to be “a shallow exercise,” a latter-dayequivalent of the popery that Tyndale had protested against (p. 30).



Hamlet, the audience is reminded that men are not always innocent ofsuch sins.

Speaking as much to the spectators at the Globe as to the fictionalaudience of citizens, Buckingham provides a further gloss on thetableau that provides the most direct reference to the book’s status asa mere accessory:

Mayor of London. See where his grace stands tween two clergymen.Buckingham. Two props of virtue for a Christian prince,To stay him from the fall of vanity;And see, a book of prayer in his handTrue ornaments to know a holy man. (3.7.95–99)

This exchange explicitly highlights the tokens or “ornaments” that arecrucial to the success of the deception, reminding playgoers that thebook is an accessory and the bishops are—quite literally—“props.”Thisis perhaps the theater’s most explicit statement of the way that bookswere used both on stage and off to signify prayer and to “surge o’er”misdeeds. The lines also suggest that the medieval mind was moresusceptible to such illusions. Under the sway of Catholicism, the playimplies, unsuspecting bystanders were more likely to believe that aperson carrying a prayer book and a set of beads was necessarilythinking pious thoughts.

Shakespeare’s audience, by contrast, would have been well aware thatboth book and bishops are false tokens of Richard’s piety, and this iswhere the reading of this scene as a straightforward example of anti-Catholic satire begins to break down. Because the dialogue is soexplicit about the prayer book’s function as a visual aid, it opens up aspace for the performer playing Richard to share with the audience amoment in which the spectators, the actor, and the character are allsimultaneously attuned to the similarity between the object withinthe drama and the prop used in the theatrical production.24 In thismoment, which celebrates both the virtuosity of Richard himself andof the actor playing the part, the negative associations surroundingthe histrionic or “Catholic” use of the prayer book are temporarily

24. When the play was performed at the reconstructed Globe in 2003, the actor playingRichard playfully held the book upside down before, grinning at the audience, she quicklyturned it right side up again. J.P. Kemble, for his part, made a show of flinging the prop fromhim as soon as the citizens left the stage, as did David Garrick before him ( Jowett, p. 272).



displaced by a more positive image of theatricality. Thus, throughRichard’s misuse of the prayer book property, which is also a prop forthe narrative he and his supporters are working to construct, the playcalls attention to the theater’s own investment in the business ofcreating fictions and forgeries.The play does not necessarily undo thestandard attacks that linked the theater with the hypocrisy of medievalCatholicism, but it does preempt them. By celebrating the talents ofboth the player and the would-be king, this scene “invites the audienceto suspend their moral judgment and evaluate [Richard’s] actionssimply as theatrical performances.”25 And if it is possible to separate theprotagonist’s personal charisma from the wickedness of his deeds,scenes such as this also allow us to conclude that the theater is neithermoral nor immoral, Catholic nor anti-Catholic—first and foremost, itis simply entertainment.

Shakespeare’s Gloucester is a highly self-conscious manipulator whoshares with his audience a pleasurable sense of appreciation for hisabilities as an actor. By contrast to Hamlet, in which Ophelia is forcedto commit an act of deception that is entirely unsuited to her tem-perament, in this play the audience sees a man whose skill in prevari-cation is equaled only by that of the actor who portrays him.Confronted with the spectacle of Ophelia reluctantly posing with herbook, playgoers were encouraged to take Polonius’ Protestant rhetoricas a legitimate critique, while acknowledging that it is ultimatelyimpossible to tell false prayer from mere playacting. In this way Hamletundermines standard Protestant attacks against women and hypocriticalCatholics by providing the exception to the rule, in which a woman isforced to play along with the hypocrisy of the men who surround her.Richard III, by contrast, is less concerned with Protestantism’s highlyfraught relationship with materiality and more interested in debunkingthe stereotypes that indiscriminately grouped actors, women, andCatholics together as “bad” readers. The text gives us a surprisinglypositive model of playacting, despite the fact that the actor in questionis playing the role of an especially wicked papist.

25. Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation:A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’sEnglish Histories (London, 1997), p. 111. Howard and Rackin persuasively argue that the “femi-nization” of the title character in Richard III ironically forecloses the possibility that the femalecharacters will have any of the force of characters such as Margaret and Joan in the Henry VIplays. In response to Buckingham’s line about “the woman’s part,” they suggest that this elementhas been “included in the master showman’s repertory from the very beginning” (p. 109).



Through their highly self-conscious dramatization of the book asprop, these plays seek to defend the theater against charges of superfi-ciality by pointing out that objects were just as central to religiouspractice as they were to theatrical practice. But the most radical impli-cation of the scenes discussed above is that even godly Protestants whodespised idolatry and artifice had to employ outward signs in order toindicate to anyone who might be watching that an act of prayer wastaking place.26 Just as an actor used a prayer book property to representa state of devotion, so an otherwise modest Protestant was expected todemonstrate that she was engaging in a holy exercise by maintaining aphysical proximity to her copy of Dering’s Godlye priuate praiers or itsequivalent. And by incorporating a physical object into a visual repre-sentation of the act of worship, even the most devout churchgoer laidherself open to charges of falsifying her faith through outward shows.

iv

Richard’s self-conscious posing, like that of the male characters inHamlet, helps to undermine the rhetoric that associated women withfalse superficiality. Even as these plays refer to the language that linkedwomen to bad actors and to false Catholics, they suggest that theproblem lies not in women’s weakness but in the unreformedmateriality of the prayer book as a prop for lay devotion. Both texts,however, focus on gender only as an adjunct to their exploration of theinherently theatrical nature of piety, and give little subversive space tofemale characters. This absence belies the fact that women readers infact occupied a position of prominence in contemporary Protestantpropaganda.The Church of England prided itself on putting the wordof God into the hands of all the members of the church, includingwomen, and images of reading, especially on the part of female churchmembers, became one of the most familiar elements of Protestanticonography. As John N. King has argued, contemporary woodcutillustrations frequently celebrated women “as embodiments of pious

26. As Targoff’s work on common prayer suggests, the positive influence of other parish-ioners was a key element in the idealized church imagined by the Elizabethan bishops. Ferrellmakes a similar point in her work on the reign of James I, but focuses more on the overlapbetween spiritual and political conformity. See note 11 above.



intellectuality and divine wisdom.”27 The archetype of the godlywoman reader was complicated, however, by the reformer’s eliminationof a rich tradition of women’s literacy when they dissolved the Englishnunneries. Moreover, many Protestant polemicists were deeply anxiousabout the possibility that women’s moral and physical frailty wouldlead to the abuse of religious objects such as prayer books.This was anunsettling thought, for the increasingly important role women playedin the nuclear Protestant household meant that their treatment ofbooks, including prayer manuals, had serious ideological implicationsfor the project of constructing the Protestant state.28 As a model for herchildren and a companion to her husband, the virtuous wife wascentral to the maintenance of the godly household. Because of herperceived fragility, however, she was also perceived as a threat to theproject of godly reading that served as one of the cornerstones ofpost-Reformation practice.

If, as Francis Bacon claimed, Elizabeth herself was not interested inmaking “windows into men’s hearts and secret thoughts,” Protestantpolemicists were nonetheless deeply interested in what godly menand women did when they were not at church.29 The ideal Protestanthome relied on the presence of an obedient yet competent wife aswell as an empowered husband, precisely because the success ofthis microcosm reflected the success of the Protestant state. In LenaCowen Orlin’s words, “the archetypal good woman was a godlymatron, obeying her husband, caring for her children and servants, andspending her spare time in private devotion.”30 According to contem-porary polemics, her acts of “private” prayer book reading representedthe successful integration of the reformed faith into the domestic

27. “The Godly Woman in Elizabethan Iconography,” Renaissance Quarterly 38 (1985), 41.King focuses mainly on the way in which the image of the godly woman reader was used tojustify Elizabeth’s rule. One of his most evocative examples is a woodcut from Foxe’s Actesand Monuments (1563), which depicts Hugh Latimer delivering a sermon to an audience thatincludes, quite prominently, a woman with a book open on her lap (p. 47).

28. There are several English history plays that exploit the sensuality of the female prayerbook reader, highlighting the irony inherent in Protestant polemics that put images of womenreaders front and center while celebrating the immateriality of Reformed reading practice.These include AWarning for FairWomen (1599), Heywood’s Edward IV, part 2 (1599), and Dekkerand Webster’s Sir Thomas Wyatt (1602).

29. Francis Bacon,“Certain Observations Made Upon a Libel Published in this PresentYear,1592, entitled ‘A Declaration of theTrue Causes of the GreatTroubles,Presupposed to be IntendedAgainst the Realm of England,’ ” in Works, 8 vols., ed. James Spedding (London, 1861), I, 178.

30. Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca, 1994), p. 39.



sphere, and testified to her feminine propriety in keeping her holythoughts to herself, rather than seeking to advertise them as Richarddoes. Flying in the face of such a model, the anti-heroine of Arden ofFaversham (1591) rejects both her earthly husband and her divineparamour. A flagrant adulteress, Alice Arden uses her prayer book toimpress her lover with her lack of reverence for this emblem ofdomestic loyalty. As a dramatization of the godly home turned upside-down, this play can be fruitfully read alongside both the passagesdiscussed above, especially the scene of Ophelia’s fake reading, for theyeach expose a basic flaw in the way male-dominated Protestant rheto-ric articulated the image of the woman reader and her role inmaintaining the sanctity of the domestic sphere.

In general, the public theater exploited the pervasiveness of thisimagery rather than challenging it, and several plays actually catered totheir audience’s desire to see characters acting out the cultural fantasyof the godly woman. Just before Anne Saunders, the wayward wife ofA Warning for Fair Women (1599), is led away to the gallows, she repentsher husband’s murder and, as part of her penance, gives her prayerbook to her children. Instructing them to benefit from its lessons andfrom her mistakes she exclaims: “Oh children learne, learne by yourmothers fall / To follow vertue, and beware of sinne, / Whose baites aresweete and pleasing to the eie, / But being tainted, more infect thanpoyson.”31 The book she gives them is no generic prayer manual,however; it is specifically identified as the Godlie Meditations of JohnBradford, originally published in 1562.32 By allowing its audienceaccess to this recognizably English moment of penance, in which aformer adulteress performs her proper function as the moral exampleto her children and identifies herself with the writings of a Protestantmartyr, the play reinscribes the values that were threatened by Anne’sinitial transgression, and in so doing foregrounds her role as a verycontemporary reader.

The fact that early modern family values often centered around acts ofreading is also evidenced by non-dramatic works such as A Pattern forWomen (1619).This instructional text describes the daily life of one LucyThornton, a devout and learned lady whose religious habits dominated

31. A Warning for Faire Women Containing, the Most Tragicall and Lamentable Murther of MasterGeorge Sanders of London Marchant (1599), sig. K3.

32. Viviana Comensoli, “Household business”: Domestic Plays of Early Modern England(Toronto, 1996), p. 97.



her entire household.“In her priuate familie,” the author proudly asserts,“praiers morning and euening, reading of the Scriptures, and singing ofPsalmes, were never wanting in manie yeeres.” Unlike the “dul Hebrue,”who had the text but not the understanding, Lucy “was capable of greatmysteries” in her use of holy books; importantly, these mysteries werenot superstitious ones, but useful lessons for herself and the membersof her household.33 In a more personal account a Somerset clothierdescribes his dead wife as “full of virtues . . . godly of mind, a diligenthearer of the word preached, devout in her secret prayers.”34 This senseof nostalgic admiration for a woman who was humble enough to keepher devotions to herself is echoed in The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606). “Imarkt not this before,” Lord Antonio says of his wife after her death,“[a]prayer Booke the pillow to her cheeke, /This was her rich confection.”35

Through a husband’s discovery, the play creates the portrait of a womanwhose prayers are free from any taint of false theatricality preciselybecause no one ever sees them.This scene provides a striking contrastto ones that suggest that prayer must be manifested through gesture ifit is to be understood, but it also sheds light on the image of devotionRichard and his followers are attempting to recreate in the scene wherehis private meditations are conveniently interrupted.36

But while some women such as Antonio’s wife were lauded for theirchaste dedication to prayer and/or learning, the presence of books inthe private home had the potential to take on more erotic overtones,as in Richard Crashaw’s ode “praefixed to a little Prayer book givento a young Gentlewoman.” This poem, which admittedly reflects thepoet’s high-church aesthetic, lingers over the physical nature of thebook, its proximity to the reader’s body, and the many pleasuresassociated with divine love.The speaker of Crashaw’s “Prayer” calls thebook “a nest of new-born sweets” who desire to be cradled in “kind

33. John Mayer, A Patterne for Women: Setting Forth the Most Christian Life, & Most ComfortableDeath of Mrs. Lucy Late Wife to the Worshipfull Roger Thornton (1619), sigs. A8-B1v.

34. Quoted in Collinson, p. 73.35. The Reuengers Tragaedie (1607), sig. C1v. Ironically, this piece of dialogue describes a

nameless character whose early death, along with the absent presence of the virtuous Gloriana,makes way for a distinctly misogynist view of the outward showiness of female sexuality,culminating in the moment when the protagonist,Vindice, dresses up the skull of his belovedGloriana as a prostitute in order to poison the Duke who sought to force her chastity.

36. The Revenger’s Tragedy also bears out Lena Orlin’s argument that household spaces wereseldom either safe or “private” in the current sense of the word when Antonio advertises hiswife’s chastity to the entire court, using the book as a prop.



hands . . . And confidently look / To find the rest / Of a rich bindingin your Brest.” And though he urges the owner of the book to keepthose hands “pure” and her eyes “chast and true,” he refers not to awithdrawal from sensuality but to her constant devotion to a singlelover.37 Inverting an entire set of gendered metaphors, the poem givesthe young gentlewoman the right to

rifle and deflourThe rich and roseall spring of those rare sweetsWhich with a swelling bosome there she meetsBoundles and infiniteBottomless treasuresOf pure inebriating pleasures

But the speaker also warns that anyone wishing to study this craft“[m]ust be a sure house-keeper,” and not allow her lover to find herabsent, mentally or physically, when he comes to call (ll 115–20, 37). Inthis sense Crashaw’s poem picks up on the values espoused elsewherein A Pattern for Women. Whether construed as a probing lover or awell-trained reader, the female prayer book owner must treat the bookwith care lest she violate the sanctity of her home.

v

In spite of such warnings, the threat to domestic stability was everpresent, and is vividly dramatized in the anonymous Arden of Faversham,in which Alice’s deviant attitude toward her role as homemaker beginswith her preference for Mosby over her husband. When Arden goesaway on business, for instance, Alice makes Mosby head of her house-hold, asserting that it is her husband who unjustly “usurps” her lover’splace:

Sweet Mosby is the man that has my heart;And [Arden] usurps it, having nought but this,That I am tied to him by marriage

37. Richard Crashaw, Steps to the Temple. Sacred Poems, with Other Delights of the Muses (1646),ll. 2, 7, 9–10, 28, 30. The poem is printed on sig. E1v-E2v of the collection.



Love is a god, and marriage is but words;And therefore Mosby’s title is the best.38

Marriage, Alice argues, is nominal, while love is sacred, and thereforeMosby, not Arden, has the best claim to her affections.39 By displacingexisting legal structures in favor of the doctrine of romance, Alice hasinjured not only her husband but also the social structures that makehim her superior. But the full extent of Alice’s apostasy is not revealeduntil she threatens to destroy a crucial emblem of spousal virtue: herprayer book.

Like husband and wife, Alice and Mosby are constantly quarrelling,and after a particularly brutal exchange she begs for his forgivenessusing her prayer book as proof of what she is willing to do to regainhis favor:

I will do pennance for offending thee,And burne this prayer booke, where I here vse,The holy word that had conuerted me,See Mosbie I will teare away the leaues.And al the leaues, and in this golden couer,Shall thy sweete phrases, and thy letters dwell,And thereon will I chiefly meditate,And hould no other sect, but such deuotion.

(8.115–22)

Ironically, the acts Alice promises to do in the name of “pennance” arecloser to Protestant iconoclasm than they are to traditional gestures ofrepentance. First she offers to burn the book, which she admits has“converted” her. Like any good iconoclast, however, she knows thatthe defaced object is a more powerful reminder than the one that has

38. 1.1.98–102. Quotations from the play are based on The Lamentable and True Tragedie of M.Arden of Feuersham in Kent (1592). Line numbers correspond to M.L. Wine’s edition (London,1973).

39. During her flirtation with the Duke of Anjou, Elizabeth I had portraits of herselfand the Duke inserted into her prayer book, a gesture that alarmed the English Protestants whowere wary of a Catholic match. See Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and ItsDiscontents (Berkeley, 1988), p. 72. A prayer book is referred to as the secret container for loveletters in Shirley’s The Wedding (1626), but the impact of Alice’s transgression is made moreforceful by her suggestion that she will literally tear out the leaves of the book she is holdingin her hand and replace them with profane, adulterous thoughts. Prose narratives with romanticthemes often made prayer books play covert roles in love trysts. See, e.g., Henry Wotton’s ACourtlie Controuersie of Cupids Cautels (1578) and the various volumes of The Triumph of God’sRevenge, published in the 1620s and 1630s.



been destroyed altogether, and so she offers to “teare away” the leavesthemselves. Finally, she proposes to put Mosby’s love notes in herprayer book, making them, rather than Christian virtue, the object ofher private meditations.40 But although her proposed deeds echosanctioned forms of anti-Catholic behavior, they pose a profoundthreat to the patriarchal family unit. Rather than serving as proof ofher piety, the prayer book becomes the focus of her rejection of theideals explored in texts such as Crashaw’s.And unlike Ophelia’s “piousactions,” which are analogous to the false gestures of the actor, Alice’swords refer to actual crimes that she is more than ready to commit.The play thus demonstrates the potential disruption of the associationsbetween women and domestic virtue by highlighting the vulnerabilityof the prayer book as well as the supposed weakness of the femalebody. While some men and women might erect what Ramie Targoffcalls “a pretense of conformity that successfully masked their unreach-able inwardness” (p. 2), Arden of Faversham depicts on a woman who iseager to bring her unholy thoughts to light.

By focusing on the tragic events that take place in a middle-classhome, Arden of Faversham alerts its audience to the potential for themisuse of religious texts that accompanies their broad distribution, butthe play also indicates that it is not only Alice who is at fault.41 When hechooses to tolerate the affair between Alice and Mosby,Arden abdicateshis proper role in the household and, quite literally, leaves the door openfor Alice’s betrayal. Accentuating his cowardice, as well as the inappro-priate control his wife exerts over him and all the other men in the play,Arden of Faversham exposes existing fears about the state of a religionthat valorizes the widespread use of prayer books, making them availableto unscrupulous women such as Alice Arden. If the godly woman ismeant to represent the purity of the new Protestant nation state, Aliceposes a threat to that ideal that is purposefully left incomplete. As aprotagonist, she embodies the “subversive, theatrical energy” that JeanHoward and Phyllis Rackin argue is unavailable to the female charactersin Richard III because Gloucester has commandeered all of it (p. 107).

40. It is possible that Alice is referring to a book with a detachable binding, asserting thatshe will re-bind her love letters as if they were the pages of the prayer book.

41. Anthony Dawson argues that the problem introduced by “the dissemination of thebiblical text through printing” is one of misreading, but in this play there is clearly anotherproblem associated with the popularization of sacred texts, namely the misuse of the prayerbook (p. 146).



The shock value of Alice Arden’s proposed attack on her prayerbook is considerable, but the play does manage to preserve the possi-bility that the social order can be reestablished. Following the historicalevents on which it was based, Arden of Faversham never allows Alice tocarry out her threats, and later emphasizes the severity of her punish-ment for the murder of her husband when she and Mosby areexecuted in Canterbury. In this sense the play answers Orlin’s defini-tion of the purpose of domestic tragedy: “to identify disorder and toimagine that in this way it is mastered, to participate in communalrestoration of the preferred order of domestic things.”42 Because thistype of play is ultimately concerned with social stability, the destruc-tion of the prayer book is one crime it is not willing to stage. But byraising the specter of what might happen if a woman were to reject herprayer book altogether, Arden of Faversham reminds its audience howimportant the performance of female piety was to the dominant valuesystems in post-Reformation England.

Because so much is at stake in Arden of Faversham’s representation ofEnglish domesticity, Alice’s mistreatment of her prayer book is perhapsthe most dramatic example of the way in which religious books can bemisused. It focuses less on the slippage between playacting and piousgestures than it does on the vulnerability of the prayer book itself, avulnerability that jeopardizes the social and religious virtues attached toit.The implications of Alice’s speech may in fact be more provocativethan a mere challenge to patriarchal values, for it also draws attentionto the overlap between book and prop in a surprisingly direct way. Ifshe were to burn the book on stage, we could group Alice with othericonoclasts whose acts of destruction ironically confirm the power ofthe things they hate. Instead, she eventually discards her prayer book asa stage prop that no longer has any value.Whether using it to performthe role of devout wife in Arden’s presence or to convince Mosby ofthe fierceness of her love, Alice views the prayer book as immanentlyreplaceable, and in this sense, the play anticipates the Duke ofGloucester’s explicitly metatheatrical use of his own prayer book.As inJ.P. Kemble’s interpretation of Richard III, in which he threw the bookaway the moment the citizens left the stage, the fictional book’s lack ofsingularity links it to the equally expendable stage property. Bookproperties were necessary for playing scenes such as the ones I have

42. Orlin p. 8.



been describing, but in each case nearly any small codex would do. Byimplying that the prayer book is, like the prop, a mere thing withoutany intrinsic value, Arden of Faversham suggests that the ideal of thegodly woman reader is itself a highly visual, theatrical performancewhose central focus, the prayer book, is itself an empty sign.

Alice has voluntarily given up her faith in favor of love and inde-pendence, and so it is appropriate that she likewise casts aside herprayer book, but the actual value of the stage property is not entirelynegligible. This essay began with the assertion that the playing com-panies justified their own reliance on props and costumes by pointingout Protestantism’s dependence on physical objects such as books.Arden of Faversham goes one step further in eliding the differencebetween the book property and the thing it is designed to represent.When Alice abandons her book, she also abandons the property thatstands in for her book, which exits the fiction and re-enters the tiringhouse. It becomes temporarily useless, worth no more than the paperit is printed on, whereas the virtue of the property, especially this typeof property, lay precisely in its anonymity, which made it reusable.Theprop could easily reappear in a scene of secular reading, or as anotherwoman’s prayer book—even as a Catholic character’s primer.Thus thefluctuation in the prayer book property’s status, from an emblem ofdomestic loyalty to a symbol of Alice’s transgression, and to an anony-mous sheaf of papers, also speaks to Walsham’s research on the trans-formation of Catholic prayer books into Protestant ones. Neither theoutlawed book of hours nor the discarded stage property were entirelyvalueless, for both might be transformed in the next moment, endowedwith a new set of meanings and reestablished as something differentbut not entirely unrecognizable. The Catholic prayer book that theKing carries with him into the woods in 3 Henry VI (1591), might, forinstance, have reappeared in Gloucester’s hands a year later. Similarly,the copy of Bradford’s meditations that Anne Saunders gives to herchildren in A Warning for Fair Women might have been reintroduced asthe book that Polonius presses on the hapless Ophelia.43

Small codexes were inexpensive enough that it would be foolish totry to make a definitive statement about the possibility that a single

43. Both 3 Henry VI and Richard III were performed by Strange’s Men, probably at theTheatre, while the first productions of both Hamlet and A Warning for Fair Women have beenattributed to the Chamberlain’s Men.



prayer book would be reused over and over again by the samecompany. Nonetheless, the theoretical point remains a compelling one.Through the actions of its iconoclastic protagonist, Arden of Favershamsuggests that, like stage properties prayer books, cannot maintain apermanent, fixed value.The very materiality of the prayer book resiststhe symbolic functions assigned to it by the reformers, undermining itsrole as a clear alternative to Catholic worship, as an antitype to the falsetheatricality embodied in the gestures of the priest, and as the ideo-logical anchor of the male-dominated Protestant household. In every-day practice, however, the flexibility of private prayer manuals was anasset to their owners, just as it was an asset to the playing companies.Scholars of the period are now well aware of the centrality of publicprayer, and of the anxieties surrounding the business of putting godlyworship on display. This essay extends existing analyses of the perfor-mance of prayer, first by emphasizing the central but highly fraughtrole of the godly woman reader, and second by addressing theproblem—which for the theater was not a problem so much as a wayof life—of the prayer book’s materiality. The surprising likenessbetween theatrical props and religious ones elegantly exposes theinvestment in material things that Protestants, whether they admittedto it or not, shared with Catholics, and with the commercial theater.

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Documents

The Uses and Abuses of Prayer Book Properties in Hamlet, Richard III, and Arden of Faversham