Shakeshafte and Other Plays

<p>Gathered together for the first time these three plays by Rowan Williams-known throughout the world not only as a religious leader and theologian but also as a poet and critic-explore the inner life of words and images. </p><p><em>Shakeshafte</em> imagines an encounter between a young sixteenth century Englishman with a faintly familiar surname and an undercover Jesuit missionary. Two visions of how words change the world collide and converge and slip away again. </p><p> <em>The Flat Roof of the World</em> introduces us to the ageing and troubled artist and poet David Jones haunted by his experience of both war and love struggling to hold together a world of insight and connectedness that is being torn apart by modernity-and by his own fragmented and traumatic history.</p><p> <em>Lazarus</em> is a vivid meditation on what it means for a word literally to give life.</p><p> Dramatically and verbally intense these plays memorably open up the space where faith and imagination speak to each other.</p>