Sarah Beckwith Shakespeare and the Grammar of ForgivenessShakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness. Sarah Beckwith. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Pp. xv+228.

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Previous articleNext article FreeSarah Beckwith Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness. Sarah Beckwith. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Pp. xv+228.John D. CoxJohn D. CoxHope College Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreSarah Beckwith’s title resembles the title of R. G. Hunter’s book Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965). Hunter was the first to recognize the function of forgiveness in the denouements of seven plays by Shakespeare, and he described a precedent in medieval plays about the miracles of Our Lady. Since Protestant reformers destroyed English examples of these early plays, Hunter cited French examples, and in establishing the parallels with Shakespeare, Hunter pointed to frequent use of the language of Christian salvation—terms such as sin, mercy, penitent, grace, repent, satisfy, and many others. Hunter’s point was not that Shakespeare wrote miracle plays but that he appealed to their form and even their language in writing his secular comedies.Despite superficial similarities with Hunter, Sarah Beckwith is up to something very different. She writes about just five plays, one of which (Pericles) does not depend on forgiveness, and her argument for Shakespeare’s continuity with medieval religious drama does not point in the direction of literary sources, as Hunter’s does, but to deeply felt ideas of identity and community that Beckwith argues Shakespeare’s plays have in common with pre-Reformation English culture and with its theater in particular. She is not arguing for a Catholic Shakespeare; she is arguing for points of continuity across the Reformation divide, despite the sharp differences that that divide produced. Moreover, she frames her argument consistently in terms of ordinary language philosophy as exemplified by Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and especially Stanley Cavell. The result is a remarkable blend of historical reconstruction, theological discernment, literary close reading, and philosophical insight.Though her primary focus is on the late romances, Beckwith first discusses Measure for Measure as an example, in her view, of a play that employs forgiveness in the manner of the Protestant state, by replacing priestly confession and absolution with political surveillance and coercion. Her reading of this play is familiar from recent negative assessments of it (in contrast to the older view, represented by Hunter), but the reasons for her reading are strikingly new and provocative. She includes Pericles in her discussion, despite the absence of forgiveness from that play, because it is Shakespeare’s “first post-tragic play” (88), imagining “the recovery of self and community” (89) that tragedy denies. The medieval form that influenced Pericles is romance, as Howard Felperin compellingly argued in Shakespearean Romance (Princeton University Press, 1972), and “romance is the form that systematically converts chance into providence,” Beckwith points out (92), with the human voice being “the medium of redemption” in Pericles (92), as she convincingly shows from Shakespeare’s debt to Gower’s Confessio Amantis.She devotes a chapter apiece to the other three romances in powerful essays that are fresh in their interpretations and densely packed with insight, erudition, and always illuminating literary comparison. Cymbeline “links the languages of confession, acknowledgment, and recognition” (105). Here the comparison is with confession in Mankind. The Winter’s Tale “replaces the memory theater of the ghost world” (especially in Hamlet) “with the memory theater of a new theatrico-religious paradigm of resurrection” (128), as “Shakespeare turns with renewed intensity to the structures and practices of pentitence” (135). The Tempest “examines the hold of the past over one who has been harmed, and the means by which the present can make its peace with the past” (147–48). Ariel’s “quaint device” in act 3 is of course an allusion to The Aeneid, but Beckwith shows that it is also closely related to the eucharist as described in the Book of Common Prayer, and she argues persuasively that the play’s mood is subdued at the end, not because Shakespeare is taking his farewell of the stage but because Prospero relies on magic to “autonomize language,” so he can “escape his vulnerabilities to others and his exposure to them” (167), with the consequence that his reconciliation with those who harmed him is not properly mutual.It is impossible to do justice to the richness of these essays in such a bald summary, but I want to suggest two related ways in which I think the riches could be even greater—one general and the other more specific. Beckwith strongly emphasizes differences between Catholic and Protestant theologies of penance, in part, I think, because she aims to complement the argument of her previous book, Signifying God (University of Chicago Press, 2001), that Protestant reformers destroyed the possibility of a “theater of signs,” as exemplified in the biblical history plays from York. She is often compelled to mute the differences, however, as in her discussion of The Tempest, where she argues for “continuity in the practice of restitution” (153) and cites the Book of Common Prayer extensively in helpful ways. I think her observation of continuity is more salutary than her argument for sharp difference, because continuity does more justice both to the capacious and nonsectarian vision of Shakespeare’s plays and to the very faith and charity that Beckwith sees operating in them as a point of continuity with medieval religious drama.As an example of confession moving out of a sacerdotal context and into personal relationships and politics in the Reformation, Beckwith cites Hamlet’s severe catechizing of Gertrude and Othello’s harsh questioning of Desdemona, just before he kills her. The result is something like the modern “show trial,” Beckwith observes (122). The point is well made, but such trials were not an invention of reformers in the sixteenth century, any more than sexual jealousy was or conflicts between adult children and their parents. The most infamous show trial in the English biblical history plays (including York’s) is the trial of Jesus, and Margery Kempe’s way of remembering her own trial for heresy before the Archbishop of York casts her in the role of Jesus before his accusers. In short, official travesties of justice that were also profound violations of charity did not await the Reformation. To be sure, they became most notorious and most vicious then on both sides of the divide, from Jan Hus to Edmund Campion and beyond: European Christians’ attempts to sort out their differences in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were horrifically un-Christian. Still, it is not clear that doctrinal innovation was the only or even the primary cause, nor that such frightful violence was new.More specifically, I think Beckwith understates the importance of forgiveness in King Lear, which she mentions briefly in suggesting that “Pericles is a rewriting of King Lear” (88). Understanding Lear as unremittingly bleak and for that reason the epitome of tragedy has become a critical commonplace, but one of the most striking points Lear has in common with Pericles is the affecting reunion of a father with his daughter, and in Lear that reunion depends on the father’s acknowledgment of his daughter and on her willingness to forgive him. In reading Beckwith’s powerful description of Pericles’s meeting with Marina, I was repeatedly struck by how apt her description is to Lear’s meeting with Cordelia in act 4, scene 7. Richard Strier has brilliantly compared George Herbert’s “Love III” to Lear’s eventual acknowledgment of Cordelia, as described by Stanley Cavell (“Shakespeare and the Skeptics,” Religion and Literature 32 [2000]: 171–96). Strier emphasizes grace as “the central theological doctrine of the Reformation” (187), but grace also functions centrally in pre-Reformation moral plays, from The Castle of Perseverance (1380–1425) to Skelton’s Magnificence (1515–26), so Cordelia’s forgiveness of Lear is arguably an example of the continuity Beckwith describes in her book.The challenge is how to evaluate that continuity in the case of King Lear. Felperin sees Lear as the primary example of what he calls “mimetic empiricism,” which he argues is the opposite of romance (Shakespearean Romance, 97–139). Strier in effect concurs, concluding that Shakespeare empties out forgiveness in Lear by contextualizing it with profound skepticism. Beckwith seems to agree, focusing exclusively on the Gloucester subplot and asserting that “the gods never answer the prayers of those who call upon them” (92). This point has been challenged by George Walton Williams (“Petitionary Prayer in King Lear,” South Atlantic Quarterly 85 [1986]: 360–73), though Williams unaccountably omits Cordelia’s prayer for the “blest secrets” and “unpublished virtues of the earth” to spring with her tears in aiding and remediating Lear’s distress (4.4.15–18). If nothing else, Cordelia’s prayer indicates how profoundly she forgives her father before they are reunited, and her petition is profoundly answered in the relief of his greatest distress—the guilt he bears for refusing to acknowledge her. What happens in the play’s final scene—after their reunion—is indeed the opposite of romance, but it does not necessarily negate the grammar of forgiveness. This book makes clear that Sarah Beckwith could elucidate better than anyone how tragedy and forgiveness come together in King Lear. 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