"Strikingly original and beautifully written....Prayer, Despair,
and Drama is an extremely rich, complex study." -- John Corrigan,
Arizona State University West
Prayer, Despair, and Drama explores the godly sorrow and pious
dis-ease, or lack of ease, of Elizabethan Calvinists and finds that what
some have characterized as an evangelism of fear functioned more as a
kind of religious therapy.
In this major contribution to discussions of the relationship between
religion and literature in Elizabethan England, Peter Iver Kaufman argues
that the soul-searching and self-scourging typical of late Tudor Calvinism
was reflected in the rhetoric of self-loathing then prevalent in sermons,
sonnets, and soliloquys. Kaufman shows how this spiritual psychology informs
major literary texts including Hamlet, The Fairie Queene,
Donne's Holy Sonnets, and other works.
A volume in the series Studies in Anglican History, edited by Peter
W. Williams