The twin certainties of baptism and burial

Can there possibly be anything new to say about the old subject of Shakespeare’s sources? As early as the 18th century, scholars realised that he made up very few of his own plots. Whether he was bringing to life Plutarch’s biographies of the noble Romans or rescripting a hoary old drama from the existing repertoire or turning a saucy Elizabethan novel into a stage comedy, Shakespeare was always a literary magpie or, as Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale describes himself, ‘a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’. The shelves of the Shakespearean library groan with volumes on his uses of classical poets such as Ovid, of the Bible, of Montaigne’s essays.

Astonishingly, though, no one until Daniel Swift has thought to consider in detail the impact on his plays of the book that was more deeply ingrained in the Elizabethan consciousness than any other: Thomas Cranmer’s Anglican Book of Common Prayer (the BCP, as it is known to aficionados).