WORKSHOP - Shakespeare at Prayer

Abstract: William Shakespeare lived in a culture that had prayer to hand the way we have electricity. Prayer was everyday locution: 'pray you, undo this button'; 'pray, do not mock me'.  'Pray' was used colloquially the way it still is in Italian, 'prego, signore'. As a playwright working in a theatre reckoned to be a 'market of bawdry', Shakespeare spent a significant amount of time 'at prayer', writing prayer put into characters' mouths, prayer enacted on the public stage. Some of it is hardly pious, like Cleopatra's girls praying for sex, or Ferdinand using prayer as chat-up line. But other scenes act almost as case studies of, or meditations on, the problem of prayer. What is the 'power of the word' for Henry V on the night before Agincourt? Or for Claudius-the-fratricide conducting a parodic catechism on the efficacy of prayer? This workshop will focus on Hamlet, 3.3.36 - 98 (the 'prayer' scene) and 1.5.10 - 90 (the Ghost's instructions to his son) . Participants should come prepared to investigate text in rehearsal conditions -- that is, on your feet. So please wear loose clothes and be ready to take off your shoes.

This workshop is capped at 20 participants and details for participation in the workshop can be found here.

Carol Chillington Rutter is Professor Emerita at the University of Warwick where her teaching, research and publication focused on Shakespeare performance studies. She taught 'Shakespeare without chairs': putting students on their feet in rehearsal conditions to work on Shakespeare's writing as texts for performance. She holds a Warwick Award for Teaching Excellence and is a National Teaching Fellow. In 2023 she was Visiting Fellow at Ca' Foscari, Università di Venezia. Her monographs include Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare’s Women Today, Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage, Shakespeare and Child’s Play: Performing Lost Boys on Stage and Screen and Antony and Cleopatra in Performance. She is the author of some fifty articles and chapters in edited books. Her current project is a biography of Henry Wotton, ambassador to the Venetian Republic in 1604, provisionally titled Lying Abroad: Henry Wotton and the Invention of Diplomacy.