"The World Must Be Peopled": Shakespeare's Comedies of Forgiveness (review)

This book treats just four plays as "comedies of forgiveness": Two Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado About Nothing, All's Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure. This will surprise anyone who is familiar with R. G. Hunter's term comedy of forgiveness, because Hunter coined it to describe all of Shakespeare's plays that end with pardon asked and granted; so his list includes Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest.¹ Hunter, moreover, located the genre historically, identifying a tradition of medieval religious plays, such as the miracles of Our Lady, that end the same way. Friedman, in contrast, defines the "subgenre" he discusses in formal terms (22-26), without reference to generic precedents; he therefore distinguishes comedy of forgiveness from romance in a way that Hunter did not.

Friedman's principal difference from Hunter, however, is that Friedman identifies his method as "performance criticism" (15), and his first chapter is a theoretical exposition of what his method involves. Friedman distinguishes between a "diachronic approach," involving analysis of a single production, and a "synchronic approach," involving comparison of several productions of the same play (16), and identifies his own method as synchronic. His comparison of various productions is the principal strength of his book. Friedman shows, in careful and convincing ways, that performance choices are interpretive choices, and that patterns of interpretation have a life in the theater as much as in the study.

In addition to careful analysis of performances, Friedman also offers good close readings of the plays' poetry. Discussing Helena's claim, in 1.1 of All's Well, that "The hind that would be mated by the lion / Must die for love," Friedman points to imagery in Much Ado and Two Gentlemen "whereby the Comic Hero is associated with a murderous, ravenous lion" (122). (He capitalizes "Comic Hero" because, in keeping with his formalist analysis, he sees characters as types in the comedies of forgiveness: the Vice, the Friend, the Authority, the Griselda, and the Shrew [23].) Again, with Measure for Measure, Friedman links the image of Angelo flagellating himself onstage with allusions in the play indicating that "the most common public punishment for crime [in Shakespeare's Vienna] is whipping" (181).

These are real strengths, and they make this book pleasurable and profitable to read. At the same time, however, some conceptual issues remain unclear. The most important of these relates to performance criticism. Friedman's begins each chapter/section with a close reading of "the text," focusing on passages that have been considered most problematic. Friedman acknowledges cases (such as Much Ado) where more than one early text has survived, and he weighs differences between them. Still, he uses "the text" as a standard by which to judge performance. Thus many productions have, in Friedman's view, erred by romanticizing forgiveness and its consequences "without textual authority" (136). Friedman offers a spirited defense of this way of arguing elsewhere but not in "The World Must Be Peopled".² In brief, he contends that even multiple texts (as we have with King Lear) do not constitute completely different plays. In making this case, Friedman seriously considers the most sophisticated argument to the contrary, by W. B. Worthen.³

It is unfortunate that circumstances combined to separate Friedman's article from his book, because the book is much better informed theoretically if read in conjunction with the article. Even so, the issues are not always as clear as Friedman avers. Take, for example, Friedman's understanding of the stage directions requiring both Julia in Two Gentlemen and Hero in Much Ado to "swoon." Hero's swoon is important for Friedman because it responds to her father's rejection of her ("Hath no man's dagger here a point for me?") rather than to Claudio's rejection, thus reinforcing Friedman's assertion that "the text" supports a patriarchal emphasis rather than a...