In stating that the plays of William Shakespeare are imbued with the spirituality of the Book of Common Prayer, the official order of religious ritual of the Elizabethan Church, I am not suggesting that Shakespeare simply applied or allegorized Prayer Book spirituality. His plays are clearly not directly religious, and indeed are often set in pre-Christian contexts; they are neither allegories of nor apologies for classical Anglicanism. But none of this prevents his works from being deeply Christian and specifically Anglican in their ethos and most basic assumptions. Indeed, it would be surprising if they were not, as this was the religious culture into which Shakespeare was born.
For many twenty-first-century readers, it seems that Shakespeare has either no religious belief or those beliefs are irrelevant to interpreting or enjoying his plays. It is, of course, perfectly right to experience Shakespeare's plays as essentially secular and as having an internal dramatic integrity that doesn't point beyond the world of the play. For the point I want to make, I would insist on the worldliness of Shakespeare's art. However, it is important to recognize this worldliness as that of the Renaissance, not a modern atheistic naturalism. Shakespeare's dramatic world is never without a relation to the divine, even if that divinity is often in the background. My argument here is to suggest that Shakespeare's plays bring about an invocation of the divine from out of that Renaissance worldliness which both corrects and points beyond that worldliness and in such a way that parallels the Book of Common Prayer, a religious and devotional manual which points its users to look beyond their own works to God's providential will as the true source of redemption and godliness.
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