“Relieved by Prayer”: Power, Shame, and Redemption in Shakespeare’s Drama

Abstract

R&L 50.3 (Autumn 2018) 121 I “And my ending is despair / Unless I be relieved by prayer.…” (Epilogue, 15-16).1 At the end of The Tempest, Prospero begs his audience to release him, putting their hands together not simply in applause but in intercession. The actor’s farewell appeal for grace and indulgence is, of course, a convention found in several places in and beyond Shakespeare’s corpus (Puck’s closing speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a good example); but there is an edge of unsettling intensity here, signalled by the word “despair” and the plea not just for a tolerant acceptance of faults in the performance but for a more global absolution, a freeing from all faults. What is the nature of the unfreedom or unforgiven-ness that Prospero pleads to be delivered from? Shakespeare notoriously reworks themes and weaves complex verbal echoes throughout groups of plays; and in this connection it may help to look at (or listen to) the echoes that surround the motif of prayer in some of the dramas of the period from 1599 to 1611—most particularly a group of plays from the earlier part of that period. He returns several times to the theme of what we might call “aborted” prayer—not so much prayer Rowan Williams “RELIEVED BY PRAYER”: POWER, SHAME, AND REDEMPTION IN SHAKESPEARE’S DRAMA *This article was presented by Dr. Williams as the annual Religion & Literature lecture on November 26, 2018, at the University of Notre Dame. Religion & Literature 122 that fails to gain its object but rather prayer that fails to be prayer, fails, in circumstances of moral extremity, to “count” as prayer. Frustrated by the internal conflicts that they bring to light, certain prayers are silenced before they can be properly articulated; and the conflicts in question have to do with a variety of ways in which the prayer ignores or suppresses the fact of disharmony between the person praying and the moral order, a disharmony that regularly has to do with a disordered use of or desire for power. Henry V offers one of the less complex versions, with the King’s brief invocation of the “God of battles” (4.1.286) on the eve of Agincourt;2 and Hamlet, probably written within a year or so of Henry V, includes a pivotal scene of “aborted” prayer in Claudius’s soliloquy in 3.3. The picture there sketched of a disabling schism between “word” and “thought” in prayer is touched on briefly but significantly in Measure for Measure, from 1604; and even more briefly and even more significantly developed a couple of years later in Macbeth.3 Each of these short and highly-charged episodes dramatises one or another degree of guilt and shame; each acknowledges the corrosive contradiction of praying while willing to continue in a state of disorder, or at the very least to continue profiting from a disordered situation. In each case that disorder is some sort of abuse of power, and the attempt at prayer thus highlights the irony of seeking or holding power in such a way that the result is a radical powerlessness. We shall be looking in turn at these instances of frustrated prayer, so as to consider what light they may cast on Prospero’s plea—and so on what The Tempest might be saying about both political and imaginative power. As we have noted, Henry V gives us the most straightforward version of the problem. The King prays that his soldiers will be spared “the sense of reck’ning” (4.1.288)—at the surface level, a plea that they will not be able to count the overwhelmingly superior numbers of the French army.4 But it is as if the word “reckoning” immediately calls up for Henry the other obvious meaning of the word: he is praying that the battle will not be an occasion of moral reckoning, in which his own inherited culpability may be called to account. The “fault” (290) of his father’s usurpation (and, implicitly in the text, his father’s complicity in Richard II’s murder) is still something that has not been rectified or atoned for.5...