Heaven Hath My Empty Words Religious Piety and the Strain of Belief in Shakespeares Drama

This paper explores how religious piety is represented in Hamlet (1600), Measure for Measure (1603), and King Lear (1606) with an eye on the scenes where prayer, confession and entreaty to divine justice are still pronounced but no longer bring hearing, efficacy and moral resolution. Instead of developing a general historical assertion concerning belief, the essay provides sustained close readings of specific scenes in which pious utterance turns to linguistic and ethical instability, between word and thought, inner awareness and external address, invocation and reply. Religious language in Hamlet and Measure for Measure continues to be a familiar means of devotion but its ability to obtain absolution or moral authority is not clearly defined, giving rise to characters intimately aware of their own spiritual failures. King Lear puts the same strain of piety to the utmost extreme; the divine invocation yields place to reproach, to command, to disarmament and to silence, revealing a world in which prayers to the justice of the universe are forced to the bestial weakness instead of redeeming. The article opposes the portrayal of religious piety as just empty foolishness, pompous, or a sham. Rather, it treats pious speech as self-conscious language, which is aware of its precariousness. Performativity is invoked with the intention not to defineperformance as insincerity, but to ask what might happen in the event of the religious utterance recognising its own inability to do what it claims to do. In these plays, Shakespeare does not present the demise of piety, but shows it withstanding doubt, misunderstanding and the silence of God, showing that religious language is a place of moral tension, not of religious dogma.