Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (review)

History, according to the dominant narrative, took an epochal turn at the Reformation. For Sarah Beckwith, in Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness, the turn was decidedly for the worse. By suppressing works and rituals, the Reformation pulled the mind inward away from world and others. For Hegel, this “introversion” was a great boon: it released Spirit from worldly materiality on its progressive course toward absolute freedom. For Beckwith, however, the Reformation was anything but liberating. It produced a rift—what she likes to invoke as the “Mind’s Retreat from the Face”¹—that locked the mind (and soul) into a remote inner region. Language was similarly privatized and drawn into that same solipsistic abyss. Responding to the crisis, Shakespeare in his late plays brought language back to its communal home, effecting something of a Counter-Reformation of his own, not by returning to the old Church, but by “restoring the mind and the soul to the face” (33) through a new kind of inter-subjective utterance: the Grammar of Forgiveness.

In Beckwith’s critique, one single act of the Reformation stands in for the damaging whole: its abolition of the sacrament of penance. For Luther and the Reformers, this particular sacrament was the most corruptible, both fiscally and spiritually. For Beckwith, however, it proffered a linguistic ideal essential to personal and communal well-being. Through auricular confession and priestly absolution, the medieval penitent could be reconciled to God and others. But when the Reformation dissolved the sacrament, “a speech act to an individual” (the penitent’s confession to an absolving priest) became a “private utterance to the deity” (the penitent’s silent and solitary prayer to an unresponsive deity) (112). Increasingly, too, sacerdotal practice was transferred to the depersonalized administrations of the ecclesial courts. In both cases, the mind withdrew into itself, bequeathing to modernity “a model of language as private property enclosing a sovereign will” (103). Hamlet, as always, figures prominently in this history of consciousness, more casualty than hero, possessing that within that passes show, bearing witness to “the relentless costs of imagining that language can be a private property of the mind” (2).

For Beckwith, Shakespeare’s theater “from first to last” charts the “revolution in language” precipitated by the sacramental reform (4). In her race to reach the romances, she skips over the histories (a missed opportunity, perhaps, when penance looms over the entire Henriad), but the other three genres line up to demonstrate how Shakespeare “evolved his theater” to counter the reform’s injurious consequences (12). Measure for Measure stands in for the comedies, or rather “the End of Comedy” (59), since the genre appears to buckle under Reformational pressure. She reads the comedy as an indictment of the new regime, as the state apparatus clumsily and furtively preempts church practice. A reconciliation is reached, but only by compromising the genre through egregious violations of consent (the bed trick, the coerced marriages). Tragedy gives full acknowledgment to such impasses, as is demonstrated by King Lear, in which characters conceal themselves behind their language: Goneril and Regan’s flattery, Cordelia’s withholding, Edgar’s fatal failure to reveal himself to his father, and above all Lear’s avoidance of Cordelia. These are all instances of the linguistic deadlock that Shakespeare sets out to repair in the romances or, or in Beckwith’s term, “post-tragedies.” In Dowdenesque fashion, Shakespeare moves from the depths to the heights, where in the late plays “the grammar of forgiveness” receives full articulation.

In tracing the final stage of Shakespeare’s mind and art, Beckwith gives a chapter to each of the four romances, concentrating on their endings. In Pericles, unlike in Lear, parent and child happily reconcile through mutual recognition, made possible by “the recovery of voice” (93), stifled in the tragedies but here laying the basis for the “grammar of forgiveness.” Since neither Pericles nor Marina has wronged the other, the grammar awaits completion in Cymbeline, which concludes...