Prayer, Despair, and Drama: Elizabethan Introspection"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 |
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Bibliographic information
| Title | Prayer, Despair, and Drama: Elizabethan Introspection Volume 9 of Studies in Anglican history |
| Author | Peter Iver Kaufman |
| Publisher | University of Illinois Press, 1996 |
| ISBN | 025202222X, 9780252022227 |
| Length | 166 pages |
| Subjects | › › Religion / Christianity / Episcopalian |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |