Scripting a Role for the Speaker of Private Prayer: 2 and 3 Henry VI

Private prayer creates narrative lines about its beneficiaries. Collections of model prayers show kitchen maids how to empathize with war heroes, or gentlemen with pregnant women, or merchants with coalminers, imagining their beneficiaries’ problems in loving detail. Pray-ers refer to themselves as marginalized (sick, criminal, in chains), yet at the same time as provided with an almighty weapons system to change the world. Praying could be a form of ethical and pragmatic life coaching, a way to steel the self to unpalatable actions or perform a thought experiment in alternative outcomes—but it could also shut down radical possibilities. This chapter discusses how alternative plot lines developed by the king’s prayer in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI create a counterfactual history, one opposed by the normative pray-ers in the factions around Henry.

Introduction

Fiction is good at registering how speakers approach God in ways that are specific to their time and place. Literary critics have studied the dramatic qualities in the public prayer of the early modern liturgy; religious historians have taken a lead from lyric poetry when discussing the language of private prayer. This chapter crosses these lines of research to show how private prayer at the turn of the seventeenth century is explicitly dramatic. Shakespeare scholars focus on his plays’ oaths, prophecies, and curses. Yet private prayers in the folio versions of the history plays go beyond these genres, to structure the action on stage. They are, moreover, greater in number and substance than in the quarto versions, and are original, rather than being sourced from the liturgy, Bible, or chronicles.

The Special Case of Royal Private Prayer: Henry VIII and Richard II

Advice texts describe praying for, with, or as though a prince as both an act of grace and as an art of the courtier. Elizabeth I and James VI and I developed strongly differentiated profiles in private prayer. The queen published her addresses to God, addressing him as her fellow sovereign and as her superior. By contrast, the king never published what he said to God, only what God said to him, in the exclusive advisory consultations held in his conscience. Elizabeth joined her people in petitioning God to discern and do his will, James told his people what God’s will was. Prayers written for and about monarchs attempted to manage them within these approaches. Shakespeare’s Henry VIII explores political manoeuvres in prayer, and royal strategies to frustrate these; Richard II shows that grace can drain away from a royal prayer, leaving it theatrical.

Techniques to Compose Private Prayers

Affecting petitions come from skill in characterizing the addressee and beneficiaries of prayer. In this chapter, these figures are considered through the four genres of prayer (praise, thanks, confession, or request), to give a rounded picture and to amplify the emotion behind a petition. While largely agreeing that model private prayers may be provided as training aids, prescriptive texts worry that thinking up words for a prayer in advance (let alone reading or reciting others’ texts) might be trying to limit the promptings of the Spirit. They balance words like inspiration, instinct, and quickening against terms such as rules, moulds, and forms. Since theorists of creativity are also at the time trying to think about how the process of writing brings together originality and craft, the conceptual frameworks of prayer and poetics converge in advice on when, and how, preparation should yield to improvisation.

Discerning a Response to Private Prayer: Richard III and Henry V

Advice texts on praying argue that this should be a dialogue, but are uneasy about how real and live a conversation can be when talking with an omniscient God, who already knows what will be asked for, how this will be voiced, and what his reply will be, before the prayer ever starts. Pray-ers cope by imagining that God is passible (capable of being moved by their words), and then by reflecting on facts that might support this fiction. Their prayer fails if (or rather, when) it lapses into a monologue that merely apostrophizes its speakers’ projection of a subordinate god. This chapter examines the domesticated version of the theology behind prevailing in prayer, and the passibility of God. It then looks at how Shakespeare’s Henry V and Richard III dramatize the difference between invoking the Almighty and calculating on the actions of a delivery device.

Afterword

Prayer on stage might, at points, have been felt to be real. Private prayer was made in the wider context of a domestic performance culture, in which people sang, danced, played, and read aloud to each other. Such prayer was seen as a dialogue, not a charm, so, when it came to staged prayer, the actor and audience were primed to understand that God was listening with them to a character speak to him. Passages of solitary prayer would have got the same rehearsal, under the same conditions, as a real private prayer. A moment of prayer in a play lets actors revive a sense of the options open to their character (blocking out for the moment their knowledge of what subsequently happens), thus aiding the blending of actor into character. Prayer that is worded conventionally, in particular, may encourage audiences to respond as they do to such signals off stage.