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

Heather Hirschfeld’s excellent new book explores the cultural and dramatic resonances of a central but often overlooked aspect of the Reformation in England: the impossibility of expiatory atonement in Reformed theology. Whereas other literary scholars and historians have discussed “more spectacular points of religious conflict, such as purgatory, iconoclasm, or the Eucharist,” Hirschfeld makes a convincing case for the significance of the redefinition of “repentance, atonement, and satisfaction,” which gave rise to considerable psychological anxiety and structural vicissitudes across a range of cultural practices and institutions (29). Hirschfeld explores the theological implications of the impossibility of doing or making “enough” in penitential satisfaction for several such practices and institutions—ecclesiastical debate, revenge, finance, and marriage—which she pairs with refreshing and nuanced readings of some of the period’s most important plays: Doctor Faustus, The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello. She examines the ways these plays work through questions of “enough” in repentance, and in her “Post-Script” she suggests that the theater offered the possibility and the pleasure of satisfaction no longer available in Reformed theology.

Hirschfeld situates her work squarely in the so-called turn to religion in early modern literary studies. Such work assumes that the early modern secular and theological realms were inseparably intertwined, and that religious practice and doctrine cannot be reduced to or subsumed under the heading of “politics,” “economics,” or “power.” Like Sarah Beckwith, Huston Diehl, Bryan Crockett, Elizabeth Mazzola, Michael O’Connell, John Stachniewski, and Adrian Streete, Hirschfeld’s primary interest is the way early modern English drama acted as both an arena and an archive for the public exploration of radical doctrinal change: “doctrine is itself a language, an aesthetic, and a structuring of meaning,” she claims, “and it remained in our period in crucial, mutual dialogue with the lived practices we associate with dramatic performance and content” (14–15). She examines an impressive range of ecclesiastical texts, conduct manuals, and other non-dramatic texts—spanning multiple periods, languages, and geographical origins—in order to chart this dialogue, and in doing so she navigates potential literary, historical, and theological minefields with experienced precision.

Hirschfeld acknowledges the work by historians and literary scholars who have insisted upon continuities between the medieval and early modern periods in general and between Catholic and Protestant theology in particular, but she demonstrates the way that Protestant reformers emphasized “the radical difference of their model of repentance and its connection to solfidianism”—the Protestant doctrine of sola fide, or justification through faith alone (33). Whereas Catholic penance allowed for human beings to be agents in their own repentance—to do enough in order to satisfy God for their sins and thus to be satisfied in return—Luther and Calvin put renewed stress on original sin and insisted that men and women could never do enough to atone for it. What was for Catholics an increasingly calculable and precise transaction between God and the sinner was for Protestants entirely one-sided: human beings could only be justified through the inexplicable mercy of Christ’s passion, God bestowed his grace when and on whom he pleased, and repentance was the effect of this grace (and therefore the mark of election) rather than its cause. Hirschfeld’s most important historical claim is that this idea of “satisfaction” became “the premier shibboleth” for “differentiating Protestant from Catholic repentance,” and that the Reformation therefore “marks the historical juncture at which satis was satis only for Christ, when humans recalibrated—and rejected—their potential for doing enough in matters of atonement” (34–36).

Hirschfeld’s chapters on the Descensus Tradition and revenge tragedy are particularly notable for her deep ecclesiological, historical, and generic contextualization. Her second chapter traces the consequences of penitential recalibration for the Reformation debate about Christ’s descent into Hell. Whereas...