Rereading Prayer as Social Act: Examples from Shakespeare

Literary criticism is increasingly interested in prayer as a cultural and literary mode. This article proposes a theoretical framework for reading prayer as a performance, as an act governed by community conventions with effects in the social world. Drawing upon groundbreaking work by Marcel Mauss and Hans Georg Gadamer, and citing critical reading of Shakespeare's King Lear , The Tempest and Hamlet , I show how prayer can be read as an act defined by real and imagined audiences while retaining individual self expression.