Sterrett, Joseph William, ed. Prayer and Performance in Early Modern English Literature: Gesture, Word and Devotion. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 2018, xii + 275 pp. ISBN 978-1-108-42972-6. Hardback.

What I first expected from Joseph Sterrett’s title was a collection of studies of literary representations as performances of prayer. But the same title also invites us to consider prayer as performance. These two possible directions are somewhat confused in the engagingly anecdotal Introduction: ‘What’, Sterrett asks (before reflecting on prayer today as enacted by Krishna devotees in Prague, on how Christian Communion was experienced by a Jewish academic, etc.) ‘is the difference between the expression of an interior voice … and prayer as an outward performance real or imagined’ (1, italics mine). The opening chapters (by Brian Cummings, Graham Parry and Sterrett himself) confront history and ideology (i.e. ‘real prayer’) directly – drawing on non-literary primary sources and biography, while most of the rest discuss an extensive range of literary and quasi-literary (‘imagined’)  instances – instances dating from the late sixteenth century through until the 1660s, and covering poems, plays, sermons, prose meditations and more.  Effie Botonaki’s fascinating essay on Protestant diaries and Robert Wilcher’s vivid account of Charles I as an actor belong in both camps. Sterrett has curated a rich and interesting volume that will extend the knowledge and understanding of all who read it.  

Prayer as performance was precisely what late sixteenth-century Protestants were concerned to resist. It is exemplified by Spenser’s seemingly prayerful Archimago (aka Hypocrisie, Faerie Queene I.i.Arg.3) who, ‘all the way …prayed, as he went/And often knockt his brest, as one that did repent’ (FQ, I.i. 29. 8-9).[1] The performance of prayer was condemned nor only for its insincerity but also on the basis of its categorisation as meritorious ‘doing’. True prayer was, as we shall see, not so much a matter of giving to God as a matter of receiving (divine grace prompting the repentance that prompted divine forgiveness according to the God’s promise as recorded in 1 John 1: 9).  Inevitably then, as Sterrett rightly declares in the opening sentence of his own chapter: ‘The history of the Reformation [was], in so many ways, a debate about how to pray’ (50). 

Spenser offers ample confirmation of Sterrett’s claim. The Faerie Queene (Book I in particular) contains a conspectus of prayer types. In summary, these include (i) (non) prayer as performance (Archimago); ( (ii) prayer as heartfelt and unutterable contrition (Red Cross in FQ I.x,);  (iii) scripted and ceremonial prayer expressive of Christians as a community (Una’s dwarf), and (iv) contemplative prayer (as of the poet at VIII.viii.2).  Led astray by the seemingly penitent Archimago in canto I, Red Cross must undergo true repentance in the House of Holiness.  There he is tortured (or treated) in a ‘darksome lowly place far in’ (I.x.25.7) - ‘in’, that is to say, his inmost being. The privacy of this place (I.x.25.6) – not to mention its pains - distinguishes it very clearly from Archimago’s austere but restful retreat on the edge of the woods (I.i.34-5).  That the pains endured by Red Cross represent prayer is absolutely clear from I.x.26.5- which explains that the torturer/physician Patience ‘made [Red Cross]  pray both earely and eke late’ (italics mine).  That Red Cross’s agony is psychic is obvious from the names of the surgeon and his assistants. What Patience, Remorse and the rest represent are the intense regret and the sustained longing for personal reformation that characterise the contrite heart. They constitute an essentially emotional anguish incapable of expression - except by ‘ruefull shriekes and gronings’ (I.x.28.5).[2]

These convulsions testify to the sincerity of the sinner’s repentance, on which (and this is so important) its regenerative function depends.  The writer of the Epistle to the Romans, having described ‘how we groan within ourselves, waiting for … the redemption of the body’ (Rom. 8.23, italics mine) goes on to represent the Holy Spirit as groaning  (in its birth pangs) on our behalf: ‘Likewise the spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered’ (Rom. 8: 26, italics mine).[3] As Red Cross experiences it, Charissa’s bed chamber is quite distinct from the knight’s dark cell.  But it seems to be right next-door – as birthing suite (or even birth canal) to nursery. These all-important maternal contexts serve to suggest that prayer is not so much an action on the part of the sinner as it is what Noam Reisner (in a brilliant chapter on Milton’s resistance to the expression of contrition, the last in the anthology) describes as ‘an experience and not a set of ideas’ (204). To experience is to feel, but to display feeling is another thing altogether. Calvin had cited Christ’s warning against the display of devotion in the Sermon on the Mount (at Mark 6: 6) as a forceful injunction against as the ‘importuning [of God] with garrulous loquacity. As if he were to be persuaded after the manner of men’.[4]  If God is not to be visualised (idolatrously) as a super-human human picking up our calls, and if contrition is by its nature unutterable anyway, prayer simply cannot be performed – whether in the form of gestures or words.

While he does not invoke Spenser at any point, Sterrett is alert to the dichotomy that, as we have seen, separates Red Cross from his arch enemy. Somewhat strangely, however, he seems to view the notion of the Reformation as a (cultural) revolution as ‘oversimplified’ (4), preferring to see it as a gradual and incomplete shift from ‘late medieval collective experience toward a Protestant emphasis on the “atomised”, interior, private prayer’ (4). As I see it, this shift was symptomatic of a more fundamental soteriological revolution.  But (and I turn now to the third type of prayer as represented by Spenser) it must be acknowledged that ‘common’ prayer, as imposed by the Prayer Book, was to set Protestant against Protestant and, in the end, to become one of the causes of the Civil War.  In Chapter 5 Alison Findlay  uses the ‘collective identity’ [84] projected by the Book of Common Prayer (cited hereafter as BCP) as a springboard for her discussion of audiences as represented in Early Modern plays.  Spenser’s acceptance of the BCP is implied, as I have argued elsewhere, by the role of Una’s dwarf - that ‘was wont to wait each hour’ upon his mistress (I.ii.7.8), recalling the liturgy of the hours recited by  medieval monks.[5] To the extent that he proves useful, the dwarf testifies to the convenience of the formal arrangements, the  ceremonies that had been (rather vaguely) defended by Cranmer as potentially ‘edifying’ - while  their secondary value is implied by his unreliability and short stature. [6] We may read the dwarf’s triumphant moments as acknowledgements on Spenser’s part of the indebtedness of Protestant devotion to medieval traditions as excavated by Louis L. Martz and J.A.W. Bennett.[7] (The former is cited twice in Prayer and Performance; the latter not at all.)

Although, as I have wanted to suggest, penitential prayer is vividly allegorised by Spenser, it is at no point actually modelled by him. Interestingly enough, Donne, in the Holy Sonnet, ‘Batter my heart, three-personed God’ was to employ imagery of painful quasi-torture (similar to that suffered by Red Cross)  for the contrition he needs to experience, and for which he prays (‘bend/your force to break blow, burn, and make me new’, ll.3-4).[8]  (Helen Wilcox does not discuss ‘Batter my heart’ in her excellent chapter on Early Modern poetry, her example being the almost equally troubled but contrastingly ‘ceremonial’ poem, ‘A Litany’.) But while Spenser does not express contrition in his own voice, he does of course incorporate a personal prayer at the end of the Faerie Queene. This is a different kind of prayer in which he expresses his longing for incorporation in Isaiah’s ‘world without end’ (Isa. 45: 17): ‘O that great Sabbaoth God, graunt me that Sabaoth’s sight’ (FQ VIII.viii.2.9).  If, as Richard Neuse has suggested, this prayer was inspired by the prayer with which Chaucer had ended the Canterbury Tales (‘that I may be oon of hem at the day of doom that shulle be saved’ (CT X [i] 1090), Spenser’s detachment from Chaucer’s specifically penitential orientation must be significant.[9] For the Protestant,  such an orientation was almost by definition incapable of verbal embodiment. The composure projected by the intricately connected clauses of his final stanzas suggests that they were formulated not in the depths of near-despair (that ‘darksome lowly place far in’, FQ I.x.25.7), but on the Mount of Contemplation, which (at FQ I.x) yielded Red Cross his view of the New Jerusalem.  The other side of the coin of self-abnegation so central to Protestant prayer was the worship of an invisible God who (as described in Calvin’s Catechism of the Church of Geneva), ‘hath made himself knowen vnto vs by his works’.[10]

In the first chapter Brian Cummings considers whether embodiment was seen by Bucer and Calvin as at odds with prayer.  His informative and well-documented discussion concludes with the somehow deeply satisfactory suggestion that the Reformers’ insistence on passion as the guarantee of sincerity carried with it (quite paradoxically) the acceptance of theatrical gestures as instinctive and valid (though atrophied) forms of expression. Cummings does not cite Cranmer, but Cranmer’s justification of adiaphora as ‘edifying’ is relevant. Graham Parry examines the private prayers of Lancelot Andrewes, which followed a quasi-monastic regime and were marked by ‘dramatic accompaniments’, including the ‘smiting of the breast to show indignation’ (39)- precisely as practised by Spenser’s Archimago.  Apparently Andrewes also (in this respect much more like Red Cross), ‘groan[ed] to indicate [his] sorrow’ (39). ‘Why’ askes Parry, ‘[was] there such an emphasis on penitence?’ (40). The answer surely lies in Reformation soteriology (which was to survive even in Laudianism).[11] But Parry suggests, quite refreshingly, that it was because Andrewes was not at all as saintly as he had been cracked up to be. He was a sinner! 

Sterrett himself examines non-conformist antagonism to theatrical expression before going on to observe how the non-conformists set up competing ‘shows’ by (for instance), sitting when standing would have been more appropriate and vice versa.  Sterrett points to a somewhat sinister culture of mutual surveillance, according to which Puritans needed to display their Puritanical orthodoxy and virtue to their fellows. But (although he does not say so) their censoriousness mirrored, paradoxically, the much-resented episcopal visitations with their enquiries as to whether ‘members … especially … ecclesiasticall persons doe use seemelie garments and attires’ (etc).[12]

In an interestingly oblique take on the stated subject of the anthology, Chloe Preedy observes that ‘the dramatic representation of the messenger-god in late Elizabethan drama seems to express a certain degree of anxiety about the difficulties of communicating with heaven’ (65). Some of Preedy’s material is compelling, but her interpretation of the Trojan horse in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida as the epitome of the ‘potential falsity of external performed prayer’ (77) seemed to be a step too far (although her interesting reflection on Hector’s ’tis mad idolatry/To make the service greater than the god’ [2.2.55-6] might stand as a contribution to a more comprehensive analysis of idolatry in Shakepeare). Alison Findlay’s starting point is the BCP; her sources are writers evidently receptive to the ‘edification’ argument designed to protect gesture from the implication of insincerity. Notwithstanding Hamlet’s generally supposed misinterpretation of Claudius’ penitential posture, Findlay cites his observation of how ‘guilty creatures are “strook so to the soul” (2.2.590) by seeing their crimes enacted’ (89) to suggest how performance can work to unify the audience as a Christian community. She provides a beautifully contextualised analysis of Faustus’s failure to pray at the gruelling end of Marlowe’s tragedy, and goes on to observe with great sensitivity how the reactions of the on-stage spectators in A Woman Killed with Kindness mean that ‘the play does not end simply as a tragedy but as a triumph of communal forgiveness achieved through prayer’ (98).  The question that remained for me was whether devotion as scripted in the BCP (Findlay’s starting point) could have had an impact equal to that of the brilliant playscripts of Marlowe and Heywood. In ‘Playing at Prayer’ (a chapter that is in some respects complementary to Findlay’s) Christopher Hodgkins compares Hamlet’s play-acting with Claudius’s ‘performative kneeling’ (107).  Hamlet, he observes, is merciless while Claudius – because he is not contrite – cannot access mercy. But what Hodgkins (in an otherwise acute and well-contextualized reading) does not observe, is that Claudius is scarcely ‘acting’.  He does not know that he is being watched. From his own point of view, then, only person Claudius is attempting to deceive is himself.

Simon Jackson’s specialist chapter on ‘Prayer and Musical Performance in the Verse Anthem’, shows how the music of the period, which – embracing the extremes of plainness and artificiality – captures the tension between inward and outward devotion that this volume as a whole adumbrates. Jackson brings out the transparency of Byrd’s ‘Teach me, O Lord’, and the contrasting theatricality of Gibbons’s dialogic ‘This is the record of John’.  (It would be interesting to read Jackson on Donne’s ‘Hymn to God my God in my Sickness’, according to which the poet represents himself, after death, as music.)  Effie Botonaki shifts our attention from the creative arts to what we might think of as ‘actual prayer’. In this respect Botonaki’s admirable discussion is reminiscent of Parry’s remarkable chapter on Andrewes, although her ‘Godly’ subjects lie at the other end of the devotional spectrum. Among her fascinating sources is a mid-seventeenth-century diarist who records not only her own prayer but God’s reply: ‘And the Lord did whisper much comfort in my soule saying fear not … I will not leave thee nor forsake thee’ (132).  On the other hand, Protestant contrition was generally a lonely experience, given that the addressee was not only immortal and wise but also invisible. Catholics had a solution of course, in images, repudiated as idols by the Reformers.  It may have been inevitable that, as Botonaki concludes: ‘Despite the intended “selflessness” of the spiritual diaries …[they] placed so much emphasis on the self … that they nurtured and justified self-centredness and self-importance, if not self-indulgence’ (138). A direct line might be drawn between the dilemma of Botonaki’s diarists and the agony projected in Elenor Bron’s painfully funny stand-up, “Thou knowest Lord” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcTNWehOn5I, in which the Bron persona opens up to God not only on her sins (and petty grievances) but on how she ‘thinks about herself all the time’, as (it occurs to her) her whole confession demonstrates.

Katrin Ettenhuber picks up on Findlay’s theme, through an alert reading of Donne’s Encaenia Sermon. Her observation as to how Donne’s (as I would see it, adiaphoric) position on formal expression (‘as the Congregation sanctifies the place, the place may sanctifie the Congregation’, quoted 148) serves to expose Donne’s essentially poetic sensibility, raising the larger question of the possibility (or, rather, impossibility) of essentially Puritanical poetry. Poetry is Helen Wilcox’s subject. She introduces her chosen poems as occupying ‘an important space between formal prayer on the one hand and staged drama on the other’ (155) – acknowledging the issues raised by prayers that are also performances and as such (as some saw it), invalid. As Wilcox demonstrates, Donne’s poetic prayers are suffused with anxiety about their own validity. Wilcox compares poems characterized by ‘linguistic ingenuity and expressive poetic form’ (161) with Mary Carey’s elegy on the death of her son. Wilcox writes with great insight about this relatively plain poem, in which, as Wilcox writes, God is projected as ‘a partner in the process and not just the one addressed’ (164) – here He is as Charissa to Red Cross in FQ x. 

As already mentioned, Robert Wilcher draws on vivid material to show that Charles I saw himself as a performer. As implied by the title of Wilcher’s essay, ‘The Royal Actor’ (from Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’) Charles lived out his role to the bitter end. Whether or not what is usually thought of as Marvell’s moving tribute to the king’s bravery is double-edged (in the light of the association, so often invoked in this anthology, between performance and hypocrisy) Wilcher does not discuss.  Donald Dickson‘s title ‘Vaughan’s Devotional Prose as Political Act and Prayer’ says it all. Dickson shows that Vaughan ‘counsel[s] spiritual withdrawal while advocating a strategy of “virtuous contempt”’ (181)- a strategy that testifies to his continuing psychic engagement with those who would subvert what he saw as true holiness. The Puritans, as Vaughan saw them, had stepped into the shoes of Spenser’s Archimago. The last words, however, are given to the puritanical Milton. In a penetrating essay, Noam Reisner distinguishes Milton’s fallen Adam and Eve on the one hand (who follow the Protestant recipe, breathing out their contrition in ‘sighs … unutterable’ [Paradise Lost XI. 5-6, quoted 203],) and (on the other) a Milton who considered himself ‘elect above the rest’ (Paradise Lost III 85, quoted 205), his sense of self-worth being voiced in his confident invocations. (Reisner acknowledges Stephen Fallon, condemned in an unfortunate typo as ‘Fallen’ [205].)  As Reisner characterises him, Milton was the inverse of Parry’s self-lacerating Lancelot Andrewes. 

Sterrett’s choice of prayer as a subject is (if I may use the term in this context) inspired.  It is as significant for the period as any subject could be.  A few reservations: Prayer and Performance is subject to the standard limitations of anthologies as opposed to monographs. It does not have a unifying argument or programmatic structure, so that its energy is more centrifugal than centripetal.  The same fundamental primary material is repeatedly invoked by different contributors in their mini-introductions and elsewhere (as a glance at the Index will confirm).  Furthermore, it does not give sustained attention to other secondary studies – to the relevant trajectories of historical, religious and critical commentary.  Finally, although it is fully annotated with an excellent Bibliography and Index, it does not include the compilation of Biblical references that was once appended to any such study – of which there are naturally quite a few in this otherwise excellent collection of doctrinally-based investigations.   

Kathryn Walls

Victoria University of Wellington

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