WORKSHOP - Shakespeare at Prayer

ABSTRACT: With political and religious difficulties in performing liturgy and rites on the early modern stage, performing prayer seems 'safer' yet it is not without difficulties. What does 'hearing' prayer do to the audience? Are we the ears of god/s? While formal prayer might have demonstrative signs, what of informal and spontaneous prayer that is crafted into a play text?
Supporting Professor Rutter in animating this interactive session, we will be looking at one of the most famous performances of prayer in Shakespeare's corpus with Hamlet, 3.3. Claudius' prayerful confession is a performance of prayer in many senses and it stops Hamlet in his tracks. Working with this and other Hamlet extracts, we will be staging and shaping prayer together to address the demands the play text places upon us.

Ryan Service is a full-time priest and sometime poet based in the Midlands (UK). Before training in Rome he read English at the University of Warwick. He recently completed a MA in Christian Social Teaching and Public Ethics at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. His interests include civil society, cultural studies and religious literature. He is currently working on a project looking at the performance of none-religious literature in religious ritual.