This is an engaging and accessible book which studies the importance of the Book of Common Prayer as a source for Shakespeare. Swift believes in the value of source study in general (‘although Shakespeare stands apart, we can know him only in his meetings’: p. 27) and for this text in particular, arguing that Shakespeare ‘picked up [on the Prayer Book's] habits and riffed upon its promises’ (p. 170). This book is at its strongest in its fresh approach to the Book of Common Prayer itself, and the first chapter explores the way that the word ‘common’ is ‘tense with its own contradiction’ (p. 29). Swift suggests that the density of biblical allusion in the Book of Common Prayer – ‘a tight palimpsest of phrase, remembered and reworked’ – means that ‘this liturgy performs its ideal of commonness even on the level of style’ (p. 38). The second and third chapters consider the influence of the marriage rite, and the debates surrounding it, on the comedies, Othello and Romeo and Juliet; noting for example that Helena's formulation of ‘a mother, a mistress, and a friend’ is precisely modelled on the reasons given for marriage in the Book of Common Prayer (p. 100). An interesting section linking the Puritan opposition to the giving of rings in marriage and the ring-giving in Romeo and Juliet (p. 85) seemed likewise resonant for the strikingly prominent part played by rings in the dénouements of All's Well and Merchant of Venice. The fourth and fifth chapters argue for the influence of the Prayer Book communion service on Hamlet and Macbeth. Swift illustrates the way in which both plays are concerned with a notion of community which includes the dead, and notes that the burial rite of the 1549 Book of Common Prayer culminated in the reception of communion, an act eliminated in all future versions (p. 134). These chapters reinvigorate the connection between burial and communion (in both senses): ‘in the broken music and troubled twinning of the rites for Communion and burial, [Shakespeare] found a narrative and dramatic form of mourning, of reaching out and touching the living and the dead’ (p. 160). These chapters contain some of Swift's most convincing parallels: the suggestion that Hamlet's coarse eucharistic joke about Polonius' body attempts ‘a rough kind of burial’ (p. 152) and the liturgical source for Macbeth's ‘no man that's born of woman’ which means that ‘what Macbeth understands as a promise of immortality is an echo of the words said by the priest as he welcomes the corpse’ (p. 186). The final two chapters on baptism and Macbeth suggest that ‘The play is not simply immersed in the prayer book. Rather, it is beginning to tell a story about the power we admit to patterns of language and arrangements of ritual’ (p. 237).

Swift's prose is deft, poised and disarmingly ready to question its own methodology. The book starts by recreating the moment when theologians and the King's Men met together in Hampton Court for the Christmas season of 1603–4. At the Hampton Court Conference the Prayer Book was being attacked by Puritan theologians for its linguistic ambiguity, while elsewhere in the palace such ambiguities were being exploited for their dramatic potential by Shakespeare and his company (p. 25). It is an engaging tableau, but as Swift notes ‘the geographical and temporal coincidence of royal revels and liturgical debate at Hampton Court in the winter of 1603–4 is a bountiful symbol, but is also, in the end, a coincidence’ (p. 25). Elsewhere Swift acknowledges the subjective foundations of source study: ‘there is no whole science by which to gauge literary affiliation; we must each decide whether we find these moments incidental or resonant’ (p. 238). My own caveat about the book, however, is that in attempting to carve out a niche for his argument, Swift underplays the achievements of previous scholars. His contention, for example, that historians of Elizabethan literacy have ‘left out common readers’ (p. 40) ignores much work of the last forty years (cf., for example, Margaret Spufford and Tessa Watt). Swift states that ‘critical attention to the apparent religiosity of Shakespeare's plays has always left out the Book of Common Prayer’ (p. 59), despite the fact that the classic text in this field is Richmond Noble's Shakespeare's biblical knowledge and the use of the Book of Common Prayer (1935). This work has now been superseded by Naseeb Shaheen's excellent Biblical references in Shakespeare's plays (1999), a work which Swift only references in his text when he feels that Shaheen ignores the Book of Common Prayer (pp. 55, 58). Swift uses these moments to imply a larger absence: ‘The prayer book is a curiously forgotten work, overlooked even by those who might be expected to know it’ (p. 59). In fact Shaheen gives around 300 examples of Shakespearean allusions to the Book of Common Prayer and is far more attentive to what he calls ‘the most cherished monument of the English Church’ than Swift allows. Shaheen notes, for example, the link between Macbeth's ‘Man that's born of woman’ and the burial service (which Swift explores so well) but also notes (which Swift does not) that Lady Macbeth's death – ‘The queen… Died every day she liv'd’ (iv.iii.109–11) – likewise contains an allusion to a biblical passage which formed part of the burial service. Swift's argument, however, does not need to underplay the achievements of others in order to justify itself. Despite Shaheen's magisterial catalogue, Swift is quite correct in his belief that the importance of the Prayer Book has been understated. For most critics it has remained inert, while its unique status as a text which marks both the daily rhythms of life, and the shape of life itself, makes it a peculiarly rich source for Shakespeare's texts. As Swift states ‘it is a work of and about human time, both a record and a template’ (p. 243) and he does an excellent service in reinvigorating the Prayer Book as a critical subject for Shakespeare studies.