The End of Satisfaction: Drama and Repentance in the Age of Shakespeare by Heather Hirschfeld (review)

In this rich book, Heather Hirschfeld recovers a world of meaning in a word: “satisfaction.” In contemporary use, the word is perhaps most familiar in what Hirschfeld calls its “‘appetitive’” or “‘receptive’” sense, as the fulfillment of a need or want (3). Yet such familiarity, reflecting what Hirschfeld sees as a “‘banalization’” and privatization in the word’s post-Reformation history, can be misleading for modern readers of early modern texts (9). Contemporary critics’ neglect of the word’s historically wider significance reveals the lasting influence, Hirschfeld suggests, of its “Protestant rescripting” (3). From the Latin “satis” and “facere” (2), to do or make enough, satisfaction in medieval and early modern usage dealt in particular objective “circuitries” (9) or “‘economies’” (relationships of action and reception [2]), as well as subjective gratifications. Yet as both a stage in the Catholic sacrament of penance and a key term in traditional accounts of Christ’s Incarnation and Passion, satisfaction and the relationships it presupposed were subject to major challenge and redefinition in the Reformation. The twofold burden of Hirschfeld’s book is to recount these hotly disputed theological transformations and to examine their wide cultural purchase, especially in “our most dynamic archive” of them, the early modern theater (12). On the stage, Hirschfeld argues, Iago’s goading question, “‘Where’s satisfaction?’” (1), was a revealingly recurrent one.

What happens when satisfaction as it had once been understood is no longer on offer? Hirschfeld charts in her first chapter how Protestants rejected penance as a sacrament while also repurposing satisfaction, one of the sacrament’s defining terms. Providing a compact but nuanced survey of medieval penitential history and literature, Hirschfeld highlights the positive forms of human agency that medieval views underwrote. She sets up a contrastive picture of agency, viewing satisfaction in its pre-Reformation history as “compensatory activity” (25). While a strength of Hirschfeld’s study is her expressed commitment to the “imaginative resources” (14) of theological language and the “reciprocal relation” (14) of doctrine to drama, here her own critical idiom (around medieval accounts of agency as “compensatory” [4], “placating” [24], “assuaging” [24], and “transactional” [8]) sometimes obscures theological dimensions rather than clarifies them. Thinkers like Anselm and Aquinas were in fact astute critics of crudely compensatory pictures of satisfaction, since as they affirmed satisfaction changes human beings not God as such. The term’s subtle imbrication in medieval Trinitarian theologies, and the diversity of late medieval theologies of agency more generally (including but beyond the so-called moderni, as recently explored, for example, by David Aers in Salvation and Sin), would likewise have revealed a still richer medieval discussion.

Hirschfeld’s story in her opening chapter accounts well, however, for pervasive Protestant rejection of the idea that our own works could be “satisfying” in any respect. Satisfaction was the work of Christ alone. For Protestant Reformers, as Hirschfeld catalogues, the medieval and Tridentine church’s penitential economy looked like so many moments of “participation” (26) and “‘proportionate’” (21) satisfactions gone wild. For Philip Melanchthon, the means of “proportionate” satisfaction had itself become an intolerable burden: “‘In short, the whole business of satisfactions is endless, and we cannot list all the abuses’” (28). In his Christian Dictionarie (1612), Thomas Wilson shared this view: “‘Adew, to al Popish satisfactions’” (16). The plural here, Hirschfeld explains, was crucial. The “endless” pluralization of satisfactions meant, as Luther argued, that true repentance and faith in Christ’s singular satisfaction on the cross on our behalf were crowded out. Hirschfeld is persuasive in showing that in such terms “satisfaction” was “invoked with an almost compulsive regularity by English Reformers” staking out a position distinct from both medieval and Tridentine accounts of sin, repentance, Christ’s atoning work, and salvation (29). What Hirschfeld culls from her account of these theological transformations is a compelling “problem of enough” (7) in early modern England. As embodied...