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  • Male Friendship in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries
  • Daniel Juan Gil (bio)
Male Friendship in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. By Tom MacFaul. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xi + 222. $36.00 cloth.

Tom MacFaul's Male Friendship in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries aims to contribute to our understanding of the affective experience of friendship between men in early modern culture. Although his book bears a family resemblance to historicist studies like Alan Bray's The Friend (2003) and Alan Stewart's Close Readers (1997), MacFaul's method is ultimately quite different; rather than tracking the historical nuances of heterogeneous early modern discourses of friendship, MacFaul posits a single, philosophically defined idea of friendship in order to examine how it is refracted in literary contexts. Although MacFaul's book illustrates some of the pitfalls of such an approach, a conceptual methodology like his can be a useful addition to more traditionally historicist approaches. Early modern texts are not passive registers of historical data but complex acts of socially embedded thinking; conceiving of early modern texts in this way requires a methodological approach that can bracket "thick" historical description by aiming to clarify the conceptual categories at play in the texts themselves.

The chief drawback of MacFaul's book, however, is the relative simplicity of its conceptual model. In an introductory chapter, MacFaul defines the idea of friendship by reading early modern humanist theorists such as Sir Thomas Elyot and Erasmus, as well as classical writers who influenced them, notably Cicero. MacFaul also examines philosophical accounts of friendship by Blanchot, Derrida, Plato, Aristotle, and Alan Bloom. But the philosophical ideal of friendship he ends up positing-the perfect, noninstrumental union of identical selves-is suspiciously simple. MacFaul does consider complications of this model; for example, he argues that Erasmus articulates a notion of friendship that supplements identity between friends with a sympathy that bridges difference. However, he does not follow through on such complications, returning the book to the uncomplicated ideal of friends as two identical selves.

With chapter titles such as "Friends and Brothers," "Love and Friendship," and "Servants," MacFaul goes on to consider how the pure philosophical ideal of friendship registers in the context of real social relationships. Naturally, MacFaul's methodological decision to track an idea of friendship in a variety of social contexts leads him to foreground what is common in the experience of friendship between masters and servants, brothers, subjects and kings. But while the search for conceptual commonality across social registers can be revealing, the author's account risks erasing specific differences in how men experience close connections to other men. When MacFaul discusses the role of class in relationships between men, for example, he tends to treat it as an obstacle to friendship that ideally ought to be transcended, rather than as an inescapable part of the social scaffold on which concrete and particular relationships are built. [End Page 220]

This undesirable flattening of social and affective experience is clearest in his tendency to neutralize expressions of sexuality between men. MacFaul writes, "If homoeroticism in the Renaissance is a normal component of friendship, then we must learn to treat it casually, avoiding the modern hysteria about sexuality" (18). It is easy to suspect a conservative predilection in such statements, yet there is an odd way in which MacFaul's neutralizing approach parallels the commonplace assumption within sexuality studies that early modern sexuality is inextricably intertwined with social ties between men-call it the "homosocial premise." Indeed, MacFaul seems to rely on this secret kinship between his conservative instincts and mainstream sexuality studies when he approvingly quotes Mario DiGangi observing that "homoerotic practices [e.g. kissing, hugging] were 'normal' aspects of even the most socially conventional relationships. . . . early modern gender ideology integrated orderly homoeroticism into friendship more seamlessly than modern ideological formations, which more crisply distinguish homoeroticism from friendship, sexual desire from social desire."1 By illustrating the downside of treating friendship as a broad conceptual locus that blurs sexual and social experience, MacFaul's text inadvertently highlights the need to supplement the homosocial framework itself with a sociologically informed account of what distinguishes the sexual from the social in particular social and textual...

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