Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness by Sarah Beckwith (review)

Bible, Ryken instead makes the ideological assertion that history ‘‘obviously encompasses most of the Bible,’’ which, he avers, is a ‘‘collection of factual accounts’’ (102, 103). These personal opinions do not illuminate the Bible’s use of the literary form of historical chronicle. While such convictions are matters of personal belief and faith, they are misplaced in a work advertised as a research aid suitable for general use. Rather than enhancing understanding of Scripture, such statements work to promote a particular religious ideology without explicit warning or readerly consent: a general reader is likely to pick up this book without recognizing that it promotes a particular sectarian belief set, and in this respect Ryken’s personal opinions are intrusive but concealed under the false guise of scholarly objectivity. Leland Ryken’s book seems like a missed opportunity to provide a condensed, scholarly handbook useful to students and scholars alike. It will doubtless be useful to religious schools of a particular sectarian orientation, but this reader wishes that Ryken’s book had been explicitly marketed as such. Claudia Stokes Trinity University Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness. By Sarah Beckwith. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2011, ISBN 978–0–8014–4978–9. Pp. xv + 228. $45.00. By Sarah Beckwith’s count, hers is the third study of this particular subject, the first two being Robert Grams Hunter’s Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (1965) and Michael D. Friedman’s The World Must Be Peopled: Shakespeare’s Comedies of Forgiveness (2002) (173). It is easily the most remarkable, testifying to Professor Beckwith’s impressive comprehensive knowledge of the Roman Catholic sacrament of penance and its displacement by the Reformation Protestant practices of confession and repentance. Involved in each of these differing paradigms is forgiveness, both of one’s own sins and faults as well as those of others. Beckwith persuasively shows how important the knowledge of 16th-century Catholic and Protestant doctrine is for understanding the staging of confession, penance (or repentance), and absolution (or its absence) in a number of Shakespeare plays written in different modes. These plays include Measure for Measure, Hamlet, Othello, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. Like so many commentators on Shakespeare, Beckwith is a nicely acute close reader of Shakespeare’s language. Her methodology is twofold: the application of a theological and doctrinal 16th-century understanding to the details of a Shakespeare play augmented by certain assumptions of J. L. Austin’s speech–act theory and the ethical philosophy of Stanley Cavell. In other words, she considers the typical or formulaic utterances of a Catholic priest or a Protestant minister as Book Reviews 535 different kinds of deeds performative of the penance for (or repentance of) sins and their absolution and forgiveness (as well as the forgiveness of others that selfforgiveness makes possible). Her methodology thus resembles that of Stephen Greenblatt in Hamlet in Purgatory, but with the presence of Austin’s theory and Cavell’s philosophy. Beckwith is wonderfully enlightening about the freedom from the loneliness and isolation of an unforgiven self made possible by a new mutuality of speech deeds that forges the relative happiness of the end of Shakespearean comedy—the freedom that Cavell describes when one is able to stop avoiding loving another and bravely achieve through painful acknowledgment of fault a mutuality of forgiving dialogue within the self and especially among others in a family or society. When this process is abused or one party denies the mutuality of speech deeds, as is the case in four plays—Measure for Measure, Hamlet, Othello, and, remarkably, the last scene of The Tempest—the enabling religious paradigm ending in forgiveness never occurs. This author demonstrates that the terms for Shakespearean forgiveness are more complex and exacting, driven by the fissure between Catholic and Protestant doctrine that so many critics have recently claimed is important for appreciating Shakespeare. Understanding these doctrines, while at times difficult, illuminates aspects of Shakespeare’s plays that have remained in the shadows. Part I of Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness involves a rich religious/ historical account of the displacement in early modern England of the Roman Catholic sacrament of...