Joseph Pearce
Can we fail to see the significance of Hamlet’s last words, “the rest is silence,” uttered immediately before Horatio’s prayer from the Requiem Mass? Since “requiem” means “rest” in Latin, can we avoid the suspicion that Shakespeare is alluding to the “something rotten” in the state of England which has silenced the Requiem Mass and banished prayers for the dead?
Having surveyed the Middle Ages in the broadest sense in the previous essay (“Liturgy and Literature in the Middle Ages“), beginning with Beowulf in the late seventh or early eighth century and concluding with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight seven hundred years later in the late fourteenth century, we will continue by focusing on liturgy and literature in Early Modern England during the age of Shakespeare. We will begin, however, not with Shakespeare himself but with the great Jesuit martyr and poet, St. Robert Southwell. Prior to his arrest in 1592 and the three years of torture which followed prior to his execution and martyrdom, Southwell had published a bestselling volume of poetry. These poems were evidently admired by Shakespeare, who engages intertextually with Southwell’s “Upon the Image of Death” in the famous graveyard scene in Hamlet and with Southwell’s eulogy and elegy to Mary, Queen of Scots, “Decease Release”, in King Lear.
Southwell was fond of writing Christmas poetry, of which the most famous and most anthologized is “The Burning Babe”, but his greatest contribution to liturgically inspired literature is indubitably “Of the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar”. Any of this glorious poem’s fifteen stanzas could serve to illustrate its brilliance but we’ll let this solitary example speak for the poem as a whole:
The God of hosts in slender host doth dwell,
Yea, God and man with all to either due,
That God that rules the heavens and rifled hell, » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2024/10/liturgy-literature-early-modern-england-joseph-pearce.html