Date of Award
Spring 5-19-2018
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
MA English
Department
English
Advisor
Dr. Donovan Sherman
Committee Member
Dr. Angela Weisl
Keywords
William Shakespeare, Richard II, The Comedy of Errors, Sacrament, Sacramental
Abstract
Following England’s break from the Catholic Church in 1534, Protestant thought gradually transformed the English Church’s understanding of sacraments. The influence of Reformation thinkers such as Thomas Cranmer, the author of The Book of Common Prayer, propelled the idea that that a ritual is only as good as the worthiness of a recipient. Ritual, the “outer” component of a sacrament, now had the potential to be distant from divine favor, the “inner” component of a sacrament. This potential distance caused anxiety over the authenticity of sacraments, affecting English thought well into Shakespeare’s day. Shakespeare’s plays Richard II and The Comedy of Errors both struggle with sacramental anxiety in ways that challenge the fruitfulness of sacramental rituals: the anointing of a king, marriage, and baptism. Sacramental anxiety plagues not only (un-staged) sacred ceremonies of baptism, marriage, and the anointing of a king in these two plays, but even more so plagues the “ceremonies” of words, “rituals” of behavior, and “forms” of faces: the words, acts, and looks of a person became more greatly suspect, all the more capable of deceiving, of being mismatched to the inner true character.
Recommended Citation
Casey, Aria, "Sacramental Anxiety in Richard II and The Comedy of Errors" (2018). Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs). 2542.
https://scholarship.shu.edu/dissertations/2542
