5

Acknowledgment and Confession in CYMBELINE

Vladimir: Suppose we repented.

Estragon: Repented what?

Vladimir: Oh…. (He reflects.) We wouldn’t have to go into the details.

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Confession is a speech act that seeks its completion in the acknowledgment of another.

James Wetzel

What is it I can confess? I can confess that I envy that man’s art and this man’s scope, the anger I failed to suppress at the last faculty meeting, that I have been wasting my time. To whom am I confessing this? If I have been unfaithful I can confess this to my husband; if I am Bill Clinton, I must apparently confess this to the nation. Who will then forgive me or him? Can I confess that my very existence here and now takes up far more than my fair share of the world’s resources, and so I harm others, specific others, every day just by living the life I live? I can confess all the things—but only the things—for which I am accountable. I can hardly confess your sins, though it might, at times, in certain moods, be tempting to accuse you of them.

And what is it I can forgive? Can I forgive, say, my uncle’s alcoholism, my rapist, my husband’s betrayal? Will my uncle, my rapist, my husband be forgiven because of my forgiveness? Who is to say? Who can say?

Confessing is a speech act and so it is more closely akin to declaring, revealing, admitting, avowing, allowing, telling, than it is to lamenting, sorrowing, regretting.1 The latter was encompassed in an older theological language of attrition and contrition, but the difference between contrition and feeling sorrow for something lies in the fact that contrition keeps the reality of the harm I have done before me, whereas I can be sorry for a million and one different things that do not involve my own responsibility in hurting. We have all been at the other end of: “I am sorry you feel that way.” Perhaps we have even said it. Contrition keeps the reality of someone else’s pain, a pain connected to my actions, before me, and it is this sense of the harm of the other that keeps me from the many possible corruptions (and consolations) of remorse as a private language, including a fascination with the cleanliness of my conscience, or the complexity of my own mind. Confession in short must be performed; it is not something that takes place inside the mind.2 And the kinship, the family resemblance of confessing to admitting, avowing, revealing, acknowledging, shows why it is hard to do.3 In confessing I have not only revealed something about myself, but committed myself to a different future.

In the last chapter I concentrated predominantly on the last “recognition” scene in Pericles; in chapter 6 I shall do the same for The Winter’s Tale. As with Pericles, the recognition scene in Cymbeline is predicated on the fact or act of speaking and the new community that comes into being as a result of these acts of speech. As with The Winter’s Tale, a self-involving remorse is overcome publicly: however spectacular and histrionic the divine intervention is, remorse is addressed through the overwhelming response to human others. The last extraordinary scene of Cymbeline links the languages of confession, acknowledgment, and recognition to create the unprecedented peace that is the “mark of wonder” in this play, the play that harmonizes Britain with ancient and contemporary Rome. Is it a pax romana or a pax Britannia? Pardon, in any case, is the word to all.4 In this pointed Christianization of Aristotle’s “anagnorisis,” in the multiple recognitions that come so thick and so fast in this bravura scene (twenty-four in all), in the crescendo of self-disclosures and the infection of truth-telling that overcomes the protagonists, in the narrow path between the ludicrous and the wondrous, and between delight and dangerous risk, Shakespeare once again parses out an astonishing exploration of the grammar of remorse, acknowledgment, and the recreation of a new community through forgiveness. Once again we might see this as a eucharistic community because it embodies forgiveness, and because it imagines the restoration of each person to him or herself as inseparable from, intimate with, the restoration of that community. In the multiple confessions that end the play, the expression of each person’s remorse engenders further truths, and these truths are seen to be part of a shared story that makes sense only when told together, a story whose each individual part turns out to be part of the same whole, a whole not visible until each individual part of those stories is told. It is, in short, a re-membrance.

Posthumus’s Keys: The Penitent Lock

Posthumus speaks the inherited languages of sin and repentance and begins to show us the contours of remorse, a remorse that is vital to the acknowledgments of the last scene. The linking of remorse and acknowledgment here is key. Just as in my chapter on The Winter’s Tale, I am depending on a particular understanding of remorse as an awakening to the reality of an other.5 That is why confession is not about the revelation of a past belonging to me, but a recognition of the reality and effects of my speech and action in the lives of others. As James Wetzel has said in a passage I use for the epigraph to this chapter, confession is a speech act that seeks its completion in the acknowledgment of another.6 It is not an inward language at all, though of course it must be voiced in the language of acknowledgment.7

It is Posthumus who asks: “Is‘t enough I am sorry?” (5.4.11), and his question might be said to sum up a few centuries of penitential discourse in one highly economical query. For the question of sufficiency, as I suggested in the first part of this book, haunts penitential discourse. Early medieval contritionist understandings, such as that of Peter Lombard in the Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, on which every scholastic commentator cut his teeth, held that contrition was sufficient for God’s forgiveness; for others it was priestly absolution that constituted the “matter” of the sacrament of penance, a penance that could be administered only through the church’s officers.8 For Luther nothing could ever be enough, there could therefore be no language of sufficiency or accounting, no earning or calculating, meriting or measuring to limit or usurp God’s one-sided, utterly gratuitous, preemptive and prevenient gift of grace. Posthumus’s own language in the prison scene in act 5, scene 3 here is shot through with the language of accounting and with a vocabulary straight from the medieval confessional. I quote at length:

My conscience, thou art fetter’d

More than my shanks and wrists. You good gods, give me

The penitent instrument to pick that bolt,

Then free for ever! Is’t enough I am sorry?

So children temporal fathers do appease;

Gods are more full of mercy. Must I repent,

I cannot do it better than in gyves

Desir’d more than constrained. To satisfy,

If of my freedom ’tis the main part, take

No stricter render of me than my all.

I know you are more clement than vild men

Who of their broken debtors take a third,

A sixt, a tenth, letting them thrive again

On their abatement. That’s not my desire.

For Imogen’s dear life take mine, and though

’Tis not so dear, yet ’tis a life; you coin’d it.

’Tween man and man they weigh not every stamp;

Though light, take pieces for the figure’s sake;

You rather, mine being yours; and so, great pow’rs,

If you will take this audit, take this life

And cancel these cold bonds.

(5.4.8–28)

I count: bonds, coins, audit, render, debtors, worth, repent, clement, satisfy, and a jumble of possessive pronouns trying to work out what belongs to whom. This is the logic of penance as counting and accounting, and it has an old and scandalous history, the history that prompted Luther’s liberation from the impossibly exacting cost of sinning and its ruthless, insatiable demands. Here this penitential logic is rendered aporetic through the image of a life that is “coin’d.” The very most Posthumus can render for Imogen’s life is his own. But Posthumus ends up caught in a dilemma which is also a discovery: how can he pay in a coin (his life) which it is not in his power to give, even though that is the utmost he could ever tender or render:

For Imogen’s dear life take mine, and though

’Tis not so dear, yet ’tis a life; you coin’d it.

(5.4.22–23)

The image of the sovereign’s coin hovers between an understanding of himself as a creature, made in the image of God, therefore gifted, gift and recipient at once, and one of despair.9 He can’t pay, because nothing will be enough and the coin he might wish to pay in is not his to give. So he can only say: “great powers / If you will make this audit, take this life / And cancel these cold bonds.” The language of contrition is like the words with which children appease their temporal fathers; it can’t possibly be enough to be sorry, he thinks, and the language of payment is hopelessly inadequate. How could even his life pay for his taking of Imogen’s? Neither Imogen nor Posthumus own their own lives. So the prayer to the “great powers” ends by turning to Imogen. His remorse leads him again and again to his sense of the utter particularity of the woman he imagined he has murdered and his soliloquy ends with an address to her: “O Imogen / I’ll speak to thee in silence” (5.4.28–29). Here he is like Leontes: “Whilst I remember / Her and her virtues I cannot forget / My blemishes in them, and so still think of / The wrong I did myself…” (5.1.7–10). Here is the perspective in which the meanings of what one has done, what one has become through doing it, and what victims have suffered are inseparable.10

The “cold bonds,” as both Martin Butler and Roger Warren note, stand for prisoner’s fetters, the bond of life itself, and the bonds of old legal agreements.11 In the penitential context of this speech they also stand for the chains of sin. What, then, is the penitent instrument? The language of the keys, of binding and loosing and its theological and doctrinal fortunes tends to be traced around a series of scriptural passages: Luke 24.47–48, Mark 16.15–16, Matthew 28.18–20, John 20.21–23, and especially Matthew 16.18–19: “and I say unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rocke I will build my congregation: and the gates of hel shal not prevaile against it. And I will give unto thee the keyes of the kingdome of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt binde in earth, shal be loosed in heaven.” 12 These keys are defined by medieval theologians as the apostolic authority granted to the church to confess and absolve. But the authority “of binding and loosing,” as I suggested in the first part of this book, is redefined by reformers (for whom sinners are always already forgiven) in a range of ways: for Tyndale, the gospel is the key; for Becon, the key is preaching; for John Jewel the keys are not of confession but of “instruction” and “correction” and so on.13 The point here is not to locate what particular doctrine of the keys is held by Shakespeare, a reductive and pointless, probably impossible endeavor. It is rather to show how the language of imprisonment and release is displaced from the physical fetters to the pinching, excoriating dilemma of a conscience in chains; to see, moreover, how such language is inextricably bound up with questions of the relationship between human effort and divine will, of despair, and of the felt anguish of acknowledgment without grace; and finally to see how deeply engaged such a predicament might be to the most central and agonizing questions around guilt, responsibility, and salvation in his culture.14 The scene poses itself as a felt and existential question for a haunted soul confronting the results of his own murderous rage, for whom there appears to be no recourse but death.

The medieval theology of the keys would have stressed the tripartite nature of the sacrament of penance in contrition, confession, and satisfaction. The penitent lock would have consisted in the contrite sinner confessing to a priest, and the sacrament of penance encompassed both his speech act and the speech act of the priest in absolving him. Sins, says, Aquinas, are like bonds which must be loosened or dissolved; the priest’s words “I absolve you,” “derive from Christ’s own words to Peter: Whatsoever you shall loose on earth…and is the form used in sacramental absolution.” 15 Calvin too consistently imaged sin itself as bondage.16 The longevity and purchase of this figure is apparent in the fact that sin as bondage is used by Lancelot Andrewes in “A Sermon Preached at Whitehall upon the Sunday after Easter, being the Thirteenth of March, AD MDC.” Linking the texts from Luke 4.18 and Isaiah 61.1, Andrewes comments on the word “captive”:

The mind of the Holy Ghost then, as in other places by divers other resemblances, so in this here, is to compare the sinner’s case to the estate of the person imprisoned…. The very term of “the keys”—wherein it was promised, and wherein it is most usually delivered—the terms of opening and shutting, seem to have relation as it were to the prison gate. The terms of binding and loosing, as it were, to fetters or bands. And these here letting forth or detaining, all and every of them to have an evident relation to the prisoner’s estate, as if sin were a prison and the case of sinners like theirs that are shut up.17

Andrewes’s sermon defends the work of the ministry in the act of absolution. In a long gloss on the grammar of John 20.23 the sermon says that “remiseratis” stands first, and “remittuntur” second. Thus “it begins on earth and heaven follows hereafter.” It is important, states Andrewes, that the Scriptures set this down in two words. The Apostle’s part is delivered in the active and his own part in the passive, and thus “it is so delivered by Christ as if he were content it should be counted as the Apostles agency” in the act of the remission of sins. This is Andrewes’s avant-garde conformity and defense of the central office of priesthood in the act of reconciliation.18 But Posthumus has no priest to confess to, no friend, no human other. So he calls first to the gods, and then to his dead lady: “Imogen, I’ll speak to thee in silence.”

The Incorporate Past: Confession in the Book of Common Prayer

In the massive reevaluation of the ritual language of Catholicism, the Book of Common Prayer may be understood both to extend the penitential reach of the liturgy and to contract it. How is it possible to make both these claims at once? Annual auricular confession had been inaugurated as a legal requirement for all Christians at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215.19 This practice was associated with the rites of Easter. To imagine it as some hole-in-the-corner affair, some “ear-shrift,” as Tyndale put it, would be to accept the polemical description of its most ardent enemies.20 Confession as practiced by the vast majority of parishioners was a preparation for the Easter eucharist, and as such a part of the mass and, with the eucharist, one of the only other repeated sacraments incorporated into the liturgical year. It was never, for such parishioners, a particularly private event since it was done mostly on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, or Easter Sunday when parishioners queued up in a crowded line to kneel before the parish priest. This kind of mandatory annual auricular confession associated with the Rites of Easter is abolished in English reformed practice, as I explored in part 1 of this book, but in the revised rites of the Book of Common Prayer, parishioners are repeatedly beseeched to consult their minister if, after examining their consciences, they felt themselves to be out of charity with their neighbor and so not ready to receive the sacrament worthily. There is still a form of private and auricular confession and absolution in the Order for the Visitation of the Sick, but as far as able-bodied people were concerned, it was only those who found that they could “not quiet their consciences,” the ones who “requireth further comfort of counsel,” who were encouraged to “come to me or some other discrete and learned minister of Gods woorde and open his griefe, that he may receive ghostly counsaile, advice, and comfort, as his conscience may be relieved.” 21 The rite was thus exceptional rather than routine. The difference here is that the onus falls on the sinner alone and consultation of the minister is at the sinner’s discretion. As Patrick Collinson has memorably said: It was “as if the great unwashed public had said to the clergy, ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you.’” 22

Nevertheless the Book of Common Prayer allowed considerable scope for the minister to decide whether his parishioners were in a position to participate in the eucharist, and it is clear that the extra-liturgical practices of the ministry of reconciliation continue almost unbroken from the Middle Ages.23 The Morning and Evening Prayer, adapted from the medieval Breviary, begins with a collection of scriptural quotations all of which concern amendment of life, any of which the minister is to read during the service. These readings (from Ezekiel 18, Psalm 51, Joel 2, Daniel 9, Jerome 10, Matthew 3, Luke 15, Psalm 143, and 1 John 1) form a patchwork of petitions for mercy, acknowledgments of sin, desires for amendment, and they weave together both the penitential psalms and the central parables of forgiveness in the New Testament. Even more important, they are immediately succeeded by a general exhortation of the minister: “And although we ought at all times, humbly to acknowledge our sins before God: yet ought we most chiefly so to do, when we assemble and meet together….” 24 John Booty, the editor of the Elizabethan BCP, has said that the penitential introductions to Morning and Evening Prayer (which resembled the Order of Communion of 1548) “changed their spirit, if not their nature.” 25 What follows is a general confession, a speech act made together in which the whole congregation kneels and is generally confessed and generally absolved.26 That is, the congregation are confessed and absolved all together and of all that they have done and left undone: “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.” 27 “Forgive us,” says the general confession in the “Order for the Administration of the Lord’s Supper, or Holy Communion,” “all that is past.” 28

The ostensible intent of the reforms was, of course, to realize the communal aspects of eucharist as a prayer of thanksgiving, rather than to see it confected by a sacrificial clergy; the reforms worked against both the notion of a secret ear-shrift to a priest and the idea that a priest could, for example, celebrate a mass on his own.29 But there has been a quiet revolution in the nature of the speech acts of both confession and absolution. In the rubrics which specify the preparations for holy communion, each parishioner is called upon to examine his own conscience (rather than with an interlocutor), to think where he/she might have offended, and to “confess yourselves to Almighty God.” What is the consequence of making confession a private utterance to the deity rather than a speech act to an individual? Does it not have the effect of putting a rift between the notion that an offense against neighbor is an offense against God and vice versa, and so the guiding concept of the simultaneity of sin against God, self, and neighbor. Might the effect not be to render sin more abstract, as it were, a private thought? 30

“I confess to God, not to Tutu,” declares General Tienie Groenewald as he chafes against the protocols of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. But here is Tutu’s reply:

Jong, if you’ve had a fight with your wife, it is no use you only ask forgiveness of God. You will have to say to your wife you are sorry. The past has not only contaminated our relationship with God, but the relationship between people as well. And you will have to ask forgiveness of the representatives of those communities that you’ve hurt.31

There is no separation for Tutu between the actions committed by Groenewald in his criminally ugly defense of the apartheid regime and the actions committed against God; their separation is a corruption of Christian justice.

In the abolition of auricular confession, the vast, subtle and capacious literature of classification of the sins and their remedies in the manuals for confessors, and penitential literature, a literature that was at once theological and psychological, was simply dispensed with. The new theology regarded the enumeration of sins in auricular confession as both intolerable and superfluous.32

I am reminded of George Eliot’s brilliant depiction of Bulstrode’s downfall in Middlemarch. Bulstrode had committed a great sin in his youth, when he had hidden the existence of a daughter who was likely to inherit the wealth of the widow he had married. Now the man who found the daughter, and then concealed her identity, and who has been blackmailing him on the strength of it ever since, is in his medical care, a care he neglects in such a way as indirectly to lead to his convenient death. Eliot makes it clear how comforting to his sense of holiness, how sweet to his nonconformist heart, is the confession of general sinfulness and unholiness that he makes regularly in the quiet of his own conscience and in the face of his maker. How different this is from the kinds of hard particularity he must face when his misdeed becomes public. Here, Eliot stresses, “his struggle had been securely private, and…had ended with a sense that his secret misdeeds were pardoned and his services accepted.” 33 Here, Eliot continues:

Sin seemed to be a question of doctrine and inward penitence, humiliation an exercise of the closet, the bearing of his deeds a matter of private vision adjusted solely by spiritual relations and conceptions of the divine purposes. And now, as if by some hideous magic, this loud red figure had risen before him in unmanageable solidity—an incorporate past which had not entered into his imagination of chastisements.34

This is a brilliant description of the difference between the ruminations of a private conscience no matter how demanding it might appear in its own best lights, and the nature of that “incorporate past” when it is confronted by the effects of that past in the actual lives of others. This is indeed the difference between a confession which is a speech act, one which says something to someone about something, and one which speaks of a general and ubiquitous sinfulness and therefore confesses either nothing in particular—or everything all at once: “forgive us all that is past.”

Debates over confession remained central to doctrinal, liturgical, and disciplinary concerns in the first three decades of Elizabeth’s reign because of the concerted, but in the end failed, attempt to reform the structure of the ecclesiastical courts into a classis structure. Something of this understanding of a mutual proclamation and mutual absolution is understood in some of the proposals for “church discipline” put forward in the “Admonition to Parliament” (1572) and constantly sought after by Thomas Cartwright and others in his arguments with Whitgift.35 Excommunication was a sanction that Cartwright saw as grossly abused by the ecclesiastical courts, and taken therefore so lightly as to be useless. Excommunication should be left to elders in the classis structure of a proper consistory, enacting a discipline which was one of the marks of a true church.36 Confession should therefore be “to the church” and penitential discipline from first to last a public performance, not a private contract between priest and penitent. Shakespeare had of course brilliantly examined what it might mean to make this a state policy in Measure for Measure, a searing indictment of the enactment of the presbytery.

But, as I suggested in my introduction, in the later plays the search for forgiveness is a search for community, and the language of forgiveness, of confession and absolution, is made available for passionate utterance.

Passionate Utterance

It is time to explain what I mean by passionate utterance. The language and the crucial vision here belong to Stanley Cavell’s recent work on the legacy of J. L. Austin and Wittgenstein. In a richly suggestive essay Cavell has revisited some of the key distinctions by which Austin had anatomized performative utterances. Austin had (famously) attempted to isolate some features of language in which something is done in the saying of words, and he had further divided performative utterances into the illocutionary, in which something is done in virtue of saying something, and the perlocutionary, in which something is done by virtue of saying something. Cavell notes that whereas Austin had lovingly and lavishly and minutely parsed out the forms of illocutionary verbs, he was both vague and parsimonious when it came to discussing perlocutionary verbs: “Clearly, any, or almost any, perlocutionary act is liable to be brought off, in sufficiently special circumstances, by the issuing, with or without calculation, of any utterance whatsoever.” 37 “Any, Almost? Liable?” responds Cavell. “Why is that roughly the end of a story rather than the (new) beginning of one?” 38 He starts over again with Austin’s distinctions and begins to map out a realm of speech about which Austin was skittish: the expression of desire.39 He calls this “passionate utterance,” and notes that it may include illocutionary and perlocutionary verbs in equal measure. It is striking that Austin did not name perlocutionary effects. Moreover, it is characteristic of perlocutionary verbs that their effects are not named in the saying as for illocutionary utterances.40 The perlocutionary act is “not…built into the perlocutionary verb.” 41 And this is because the second person essentially comes into the picture. I do not, suggests Cavell, generally wonder how I might make a promise or, if I am a judge, render a verdict, or, if I am a minister, declare this man and woman man and wife, whereas I might well give considerable ingenuity and attention to how I might persuade you, or console you, or seduce you, and as I do so the possible parameters of your response are constantly before me.42 If I am a priest I do not generally wonder how I absolve you, but I may well wonder how I confess to you if you are not a priest. And how, then, will you hear my confession if you cannot absolve me? Absolution is an office, as I explored in chapter 2, but confession—even if it is made to an absolving priest—is not. Perlocutionary acts “make room for, and reward, imagination and virtuosity”—and “passionate expression makes demands upon the singular body in a way illocutionary force (if all goes well) forgoes.” 43 Austin had described six necessary conditions for the felicity of performative utterance, and Cavell shows how these may be extended or overturned in the case of passionate utterance. If in performative utterance, there is a conventional procedure, in passionate utterance there is none. If I confess my sins to my parish priest in the Middle Ages, I will enumerate my sins according a particular schema, the “forma confitendi.” 44 I will be asked how I have sinned against the ten commandments, the seven sins, how I have not performed the seven corporal works of mercy and so on.45 Of the circumstances and contexts of my sins, I will be asked: “quis: quid: ubi: quibus: cur: quomodo: quando” and sometimes “per quos” and “quotiens.” 46 But if I am confessing something to you, there will be no set form to follow. I am at the mercy of my own conviction, my own eloquence and honesty, and of your ability to bear and hear my words, and so I am also at the mercy of your response. If, in performative utterance, the particular persons and circumstances must be appropriate for the invocation of the procedure, now who has the authority, or the standing, is precisely what is at issue. Auricular confession, of course, must be to a priest.47 But I might have to dare to confess something to you, and you may well think I have completely overstepped the mark and transgressed an unspoken rule of our relations, and so refuse my right to speak to you in this way. My confession will involve a claim to a particular standing with you, and it will risk refusal and rebuff. So, “establishing standing” and “singling out” are now the second conditions of passionate utterance. If, in performative utterance the procedure must be executed correctly and concretely, 48 such requirements are utterly moot in the case of passionate utterance for there is no agreed procedure. For example, a condition of auricular confession is that it must be complete, a particularly troubling, demanding, even impossible requirement for the scrupulous such as Luther. In the medieval practice of the sacrament of penance, confession had been intrinsically linked with absolution. The sacrament of penance is begun when the penitent is moved to confess, and completed when the words of absolution have been said over the penitent. But if there is no such procedure, we will have to improvise, make it up as we go along. You may forgive me, but you will not absolve me. Austin’s fifth condition—where the procedure requires certain thoughts and conditions, the parties must have those thoughts and feelings—is also applicable to passionate utterance: the one declaring passion must be moved to declare it. The sixth condition—a requirement of subsequent conduct—is, in passionate utterance, a requirement for response in kind and now. “Unlike the performative case, it is open to the one addressed to resist the demand” such that “what is at stake is the question whether a ‘we’ is or is not in effect now.” 49

Now, the “we” in the Book of Common Prayer is meant to instantiate rather than describe a pre-existent “we.” But I am suggesting that the paths from the “I” to the “we” are constantly in the process of interruption and derangement. The ejection, isolation, and estrangement, not to say madness, withdrawal, resentment, and frustration, of the Renaissance protagonists who strut and fret their way across the stage point to the immense dissatisfactions, to the premature coercions of a preemptive “we.” Cymbeline tries a different pathway from the “I” to the “we,” one enacting a fantasy of communal truth-telling which is itself an exploration about the conditions under which truth-telling might be possible.

Absolution still exists, of course, in the practices of the reformed English church. It exists not merely in the general absolution, but also in the service for the Visitation of the Sick. But in general it tends now to be associated with the discredited (at least to some) church courts, therefore sometimes administered by lay people, and notoriously subject to financial commutation. In the Sarum Use, the word “absolvo” is used of God and the minister: “Deus…absolvat: ego te absolvo.” But in the Book of Common Prayer, God forgives but the minister absolves.

We might say that in the grammar of forgiveness a king pardons, a priest absolves, but only humans and God forgive. And the Christian God (along with the ministers who must administer the Book of Common Prayer) has been banished from the stage. The Shakespearean grammar of forgiveness is up to humans. But perhaps the theater, or at least Shakespearean theater, can teach the church a thing or two about forgiveness.

Scenes of Confession

Before I return to the last act of Cymbeline and its multiple confessions, I want to examine some scenes of confession both in medieval drama and in Shakespearean tragedy. In medieval drama Confession is a personification who offers shrift and absolution. Two onstage confessions are worth mentioning here, one in The Castle of Perseverance and one in the late medieval morality play Mankind. It is worth exploring these to show the consequences of a drama that no longer has such figures. In medieval drama, confession is more likely to happen offstage, and the work of the drama is often to bring its audience to an appreciation of the rite of penance.50 Yet in The Castle of Perseverance we get an onstage confession from Humanum Genus to Confession. Confession seeks out Humanum Genus after he has sinned and begs him to confess:

If he wyl be a-knowe hys wronge

And nothynge hele, but telle it me,

And don penaunce sone amonge

I schal hym stere to gamyn and gle

In joye þat euere schal last.

(ll. 1328–32) 51

The logic of the play is that mercy is available for the man who asks for it: “Whanne Mankynde cryeth,” says Confession, “I am redy” (l. 1430). In The Castle, Humanum Genus confesses according to the schema of the ten commandments, the five wits, etc., and he is absolved by Confession:

If thou wylt be a-knowe here

Only al thi trespass

I schal the schelde from helle fere

And putte the fro peyne, unto precyouse place.

(ll. 1455–58).

The Castle stages the repeated necessity of confession in the context of mankind’s indefatigable perseverance in sin.52

In the morality play Mankind, the speech act of confession itself is given a more specific focus in a play that thematizes accountability for speech. Indeed Mankind is reciprocally understood when the nature of Mercy is understood. Mankind is a creature in need of mercy; he will know himself only when he calls upon mercy. Both these plays then centrally stage acts of confession. The personifications are not priests (though they may of course be dressed in the costume of priests), but part of the point of these penitential plays is to explore the efficacy of penitential ritual. Both plays may be understood in the context of the polemical status of penance as a sacrament and the office of forgiveness in the judgment of confession. Wycliffite attacks on the necessity of confession and the sacrament of penance had contested the authority of the priest in the act of confession and absolution because Wyclif had argued that true penance exists in the mind alone. Such a view, as I mentioned earlier, had been ridiculed by his opponent, Thomas Netter, who had profoundly grasped the theological and epistemological as well as ecclesiological and political implications of such a statement, but Wyclif’s view was widespread among Lollard communities.

When Mercy explains to Mankind that for “every ydyll worde we must ‰elde a reson” (l. 173), he is invoking Matthew 12.36–37: “But I say unto you that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the Day of Judgement. For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.” The play explores the horrors, challenges, and difficulties of this terrifying judgment, in languages which move from the scatological to the sublime. In exploring the extent to which we are creatures who express or evade our cares and commitments in words, the play exposes us to the difficulty of saying certain words, and of the necessity of our implications in what we say and do.

It is worth paying close attention to the play’s acts of naming since this is where the chief work of the play is located—in the move from naming to calling. The dramatis personae, Mercy and Mankind, announce who they are; they name themselves to the audience offstage and on (ll. 17; 113–15; 194–95; 219; 221–25), but the work of the play is to get the audience to see that they can be understood only reciprocally, through their mutual relationship and recognition. As Mankind is suborned by the vice characters, Titivillus, Mischief, New Guise, Nowadays, and Nought, he comes to ask their mercy for the beating he has originally given them (ll. 650, 658). Seeking mercy from a place where it cannot be granted, where it is negated, he is brought to despair. Such despair, as I mentioned in chapter 4, was always considered one of the most troubling and vitiating sins because it disappears the mercy of God and so imperils the salvation of the immortal soul. “Certes, aboven alle synnes thanne is this synne most displesant to Crist, and moost adversarie,” as Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale has it.53 In despair mercy is unavailable; it can no longer be a felt presence and so it cannot be called upon. Such is the vicious and intensifying hold of despair that it renders impossible the very thing it is most in need of. It thus obviates its own cure, and this is not quite true of any of the other sins. When Mankind seeks mercy from this confederacy of thieves and murderers—“I crye yow mercy of all þat I dyde amysse” (l. 658)—he is “noughted” and a few lines later tempted to kill himself at Mischief’s suggestion.

Mercy re-enters and in the formal language of confession asks him to “aske mercy”:

Dyspose yowrsylff mekly to aske mercy, and I wyll assent.

‰elde me neythr golde nor tresure, but yowr humbyll obeisance,

The voluntary subjeccyon of yowr hert, and I am content.

(ll. 816–19)

Mankind cannot bring himself to utter the words: it is a “wyle petycyun,” a “puerilite” (l. 820) to ask for mercy again and again. But Mercy wants him to articulate words that seem such a long way from his sanguine and perfunctory, superficial invocation of mercy at their first encounter. Now the words will be sheerly difficult to say, but it is part of the discourse of confession that they must be spoken. Mercy exhorts Mankind time and time again to articulate the words that must come from his mouth to mean anything at all: “‰et, for my lofe, ope thy lyppes and, sey, ‘Miserere mei, Deus!’” (l. 830). And finally Mankind, who has been unkind, is brought back to his own kind, to his own nature, and utters these words:

Than Mercy, good Mercy! What ys a man wythowte mercy?

Lytyll ys oure parte of paradyse, where mercy ne were.

(ll. 835–36)

With these words he acknowledges his specific relation to the character Mercy (that he is direly in need of him), to himself (that he is in need), and to God (this is what it means to be one of his creatures, mankind) at one and the same time. Mercy and Mankind are coincidently understood because mankind is a creature in need of mercy.

This is a crucial moment in the play to which the careful patterning of Mankind and Mercy’s address has been leading all along. Mankind only recognizes Mercy at the same time as he knows himself; but he can only bear knowing himself under Mercy’s loving gaze. It is not simply an identification of mercy, but one which is only utterable and conceivable as a self-recognition—a self-recognition, moreover, that comes not through introspection but through mercy received at the hands of another. The play dramatizes a dawning process of recognition and self-recognition, a self-recognition dependent not on introspection, but on relations with others. The play thus brilliantly charts what Wittgenstein calls “the dawning of aspects,” in which something is read as an instance of something else. To know yourself as a member of the species mankind in the Christian anthropology of this play is to know yourself as a creature in need of Mercy. It is in this way that the recognition of Mercy depends on the self-awareness of Mankind. The recognition of Mercy is not so much a naming of him as a call to him. This means that there is a history of theatrical recognition, of acknowledgment in the morality play tradition, and that it almost invariably involves the sacrament of penance.54 This history has been submerged because critics have substituted naming for calling and in so doing underestimate both the difficulties of learning and the seriousness of speaking. But in successfully banishing the particularity of voice they fail to see that the point of uttering words and the circumstances in which they get uttered are an intrinsic, indispensable part of the significance of those words.55 When we are tempted to speak outside of language games in this way, we lose not what the words mean in our saying them, but what we mean in saying them.

I have been suggesting that the work of the play is to bring Mankind to contrition so that he might confess his need for mercy. So confession and the recognition of mercy are coterminous. I have also been insisting that our analysis of Mankind must work at the level of the utterance, which is irreducibly social and circumstantial, and not at the grammatical abstraction of the sentence, suggesting that this is the burden of the ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein and Austin as well as the insight and idiom of the play itself.56

Now Mankind and The Castle can confidently allude to a penitential ritual that is still available, though it might be under heretical and reformist attack. Confession is still a component part of the sacrament of penance; there are authorized agents who can hear confession and make absolution for individual sins. That is what these plays stake themselves on as they explore the efficacy of that sacramental act. They seek, in short, to bring their spectators to confession, and to see the need for its utterance.

In my chapter on Measure for Measure I have already had reason to look at the disappearance of the friar from Shakespeare’s stage. After Measure for Measure, which annexes the confessional either to ducal/monarchical surveillance or to a purely juridical function, there are no more priests or friars to hear confessions. “Let my trial be mine own confession,” says Angelo, thereby substituting a judgment descending on him from on high for the humbling, contrite acknowledgment of need and humility that are central to any confessional act of speech. He thereby obviates the central requirement of a confession that it needs acknowledgment in the response of another, an understanding central to the play Mankind. It is beyond my scope here to give a full theatrical history of confession, but it is worth revisiting another crucial scene, one from Shakespeare’s own work, because the tragedies seem intent on exploring a world where confession is unavailable, and that absence informs the ethical world of these plays.

In chapter 2, I explored the famous closet scene in which Hamlet catechizes Gertrude, as a confession scene. But Hamlet, I stressed, has never been initiated into the office of confession. He takes up this position in relation to his mother who is invited to acknowledge her behavior under the name of sin. It is precisely because Hamlet is not a priest that he reveals himself in this action. (The friars who have performed confession have all disappeared from Shakespearean tragedy.) His judgment of his mother is in this instance inevitably a revelation of himself to her. In the tragedies, marked as they are by stifled speech, as I explored in my previous chapter, Shakespeare seems to give us instances of failed confession in which the confessor is precisely seen to be taking on a position where his authority in so speaking is constantly in question, and as Stanley Cavell has suggested, what is constantly at stake is whether a “we” is or is not in effect now, and the terrifying ways we are exposed to each other in our acts of speech.

Shakespeare gives us a further instance of “tragic” confession in Othello’s deathbed confession of Desdemona in the play’s last act. Acting as a demonic agency of justice, Othello believes that it is Desdemona’s acknowledgment of guilt in confession that will make his killing an act of sacrifice and not murder. Confession is what links truth to reconciliation, and yet here we are given a scene in which it is impossible for Othello to hear any truth because he has convicted Desdemona in his mind. Only her admittance of guilt will count as a confession for him, and so Desdemona is rendered dumb. There is nothing she can say that might count as a confession except that which would be a lie. So the scene appears as a hideous quasi-blasphemous travesty of confession, in which Othello is a usurper of the role of priest. If you confess someone, you must grant them authority in their own speech act—that is the whole point of confession, and it is why confession is seen to be so necessary in the travesties of justice we call show trials and also why we feel the terrible injustice in such attempts. Othello will accept as confession only what we already know is blatantly untrue. There is simply nothing Desdemona can say—her words are rendered utterly impotent because she has been granted no authority in their saying. And before she is stifled, her speech is. Desdemona might here say with Hermione: “My life stands in the level of your dreams” (3.2.81) as Othello might say with Leontes: “I have said / She’s an adult’ress, I have said with whom” (2.1.87–88). Both have turned language itself into a private possession.57 Embedded within this confession scene is another one: Desdemona imagines that Cassio’s confession will reveal the truth and show her innocence, but Othello stifles this avenue of escape too:

Othello: He hath confess’d.

Desdemona: What, my lord?

Othello: That he hath us’d thee.

(5.1.68–71)

Desdemona’s dying confession is the most merciful, saving of lies. To Emilia’s question, “O, who hath done this deed?” she responds: “Nobody, I myself. Farewell” (5.1.123–24).

Infectious Confessions: The Gift of Speech

So let me now turn finally to the last scene of Cymbeline. The people collected together in that scene are unknown to each other in a variety of ways. Some are in a literal disguise: Posthumus as a Briton peasant, Imogen as Fidele, Belarius as Morgan. Some do not know their own identity and in this sense are unknown to themselves. This is true for Guiderius and Arviragus, but it is also true for Posthumus, who thinks he is a murderer, though he is not one. All, in any case, have mistaken or confused views of each other. It is a situation ripe for exposure and discovery. And it reworks some of the most romancey forms of recognition where the “fair unknowns” of medieval romance turn out to be gentle after all, where the creation by kingly knighting is confirmation, not creation, of prior identities that reconcile virtue with honorific status. All these delights inform part of the sense of playful recognition on the part of the audience, as Shakespeare revives his “mouldy old tales.” Yet what informs the sense of fragility and wonder in this last scene, and its extraordinary investigation of response and responsibility, is that this particular community is restored through the speech act of confession. The scene is structured by means of five confessions, the deathbed confession of the queen, the long, cluttered, self-interrupting confession of Giacomo, the confession of Pisanio completed by the outburst of Guiderius, and the confession of Belarius.

The reported confession of the queen is central to begin to un-poison the speech of the community, and the fact that it is a deathbed confession means that there can be no question at all of its veracity. “She alone knew this,” says Cymbeline, “And but she spoke it dying, I would not / Believe her lips in opening it”(5.5.40–2). This confession, whose truthfulness is guaranteed only by virtue of the fact that there is nothing at all to be gained for the queen by virtue of it, begins the un-poisoning of the court through further truthful speech.

It is the ring that motivates the second confession, the one by Giacomo. The ring, metonomy of Imogen, is just one of the complex signs in the play, and it is embedded in the central narrative turn of the plot because it is the ring that is transformed from a token of fidelity to the sordid, competitive marketplace of Giacomo and Posthumus’s degrading fantasies. The ring is not only the pledge of Imogen’s fidelity but the sign and pledge of their clandestine marriage, a marriage that is the only instance of truth and value in the entire corrupt court where all have to mimic the displeasure of the king in her choice of husband. But it is also “the jewel,” made the subject of a hideous barter with Giacomo in act 1, scene 4. The suddenness of this overturning is precisely an indication of the extreme fragility of even the deepest human bonds, bonds that rest alone on mutual intelligibility and trust, both of which can turn with remarkable rapidity to pervasive misunderstanding and deep suspicion.58 The ring, like the bloody cloth, changes its meaning. The bloody cloth, like a relic, is first of all the (spurious) sign of Pisanio’s murder of Imogen at Posthumus’s bequest. It is therefore also the sign of Pisanio’s fidelity. It is certainly not what it seems to Posthumus, for whom it becomes first of all the sign of his desired revenge, then the very sign of his repentance. It is not until the end of the play with the revelations by truthful speech that its real meaning can be established. The signs need to be placed in a community of trust for the new, true significations to become clear. For Imogen has been understood by Posthumus up to this point as the gift of the gods. When Imogen gave him the ring she had said:

Take it heart,

But keep it till you woo another wife,

When Imogen is dead.

(1.1.112–15)

And his response to this was: “How, how? Another? / You gentle gods, give me but this I have / And cere up my embracements from a next / With bonds of death!” (1.1.114–17). This same language of gift is repeated when he at first perceives that Giacomo has made his wife and his jewel equivalent: “The one may be sold or given, or if there were wealth enough for the [purchase] or merit for the gift; the other is not a thing for sale, and only the gift of the gods” (1.4.82–85). Giacomo’s scornful response—“Which the gods have given you?” (1.4.86)—points to his shrewd perception of Posthumus’s sense of his lack of desert. Gifts may be hard to receive. Giacomo has no difficulty with the next devilish plant: Imogen may be only his in title. It is in the doubt about his desert, not the doubt about Imogen’s merits, that Giacomo finds rich soil for his new covenant. Imogen is reduced from gift to title in that fissure, and then even that title is shown to be unstable, perhaps ill-founded. As soon as Posthumus’s anxieties get to work in this direction he—and Imogen—are lost. I mean by this the following: if one sees life as a gift, that is not because one first sees life as a gift and then speaks in accents of gratitude. Rather “a sense of life as a gift comes from speech and action which are in the key of a certain kind of gratitude.” 59 The value of gift and gratitude are seen only in the way they deepen the lives of the people who live in this idiom, in this accent. Indeed as Lewis Hyde has said: “true gifts only constrain us as long as we do not pass them along—only, I mean, if we fail to respond to them with an act or an expression of gratitude.” 60 The suddenness of Posthumus’s reversal is a terrifying instance of how easily and subtly that spirit may be debased, how seemingly casual, yet utterly destructive, that degradation is. The new covenant, the new wager is a hideous parody. The reversal of the first exchange of tokens, and the sacred bond between Posthumus and Imogen, posited on the giving of their words to each other, has “turned” swiftly to this. Each will find cause bitterly to renounce not only the other, but the whole of femininity, or the whole of masculinity for which they have stood in. When the bonds, the troths of their exchanged vows have been traduced, betrayed in this way, it is as if language itself is lost. The dense pun on bonds in Posthumus’s penitent declamation in prison now opens out to another use of the term “bond.” Our word is our bond: to speak at all is to commit ourselves in our words. That is why linguistic competence is essentially an ethical matter.61 To redeem language itself: this is the burden of confession in the last scene.

Giacomo’s confession is in every sense what a confession should be in the medieval confessional manuals: bitter, self-accusing, complete, particular.62 Though Cymbeline compels his confession and thus enacts one of the incoherences of coerced confession—confess freely or else—he is “glad to be constrained to utter that / Torments me to conceal” (5.5.141–42). He leaves out nothing. He gives the occasion, the circumstances, the motivation of his actions. He is so self-accusing that it is hard to understand the grammar of his speech at times. The consequent revelation of Imogen’s innocence to Posthumus prompts Posthumus’s own bitter outburst and self-accusation, which in turn outs Fidele as Imogen. Then, in the absence of the fear released by the Queen’s confession, Pisanio can now speak truthfully about the whereabouts of Cloten. “Let me end the story” (5.5.287,) says Guiderius, and confesses his killing of Cloten. This is itself a confession that in putting him under threat of execution prompts the confession of Belarius’s true identity, and thus the restoration of the kingdom’s heirs and the reuniting of the family. But Guiderius’s words, “Let me end the story,” are testimony to the fact that their individual confessions are part of a shared story, a story which can only be told together. No individual confession in itself makes sense, but all in all, and all prompting all, they tell a story in which each understands his or her individual role. Guiderius’s mole comes like Odysseus’ scar, as the “donation of nature,” but the stock mark of romance recognition is gently and delightfully superfluous. The “donation” has been the speech of each to each.

And speech as donation was exactly how Augustine had defined confession. Confession, for Augustine, is the exact opposite of a lie. A liar seeks to own language as a possession, but confession is speech that in abjuring and disowning itself returns itself to the giver who is God. So confession instantiates language as gift, according to Augustine, because it is only in saying what confession says that one is rightly related to God.63 Or one might say, as Cymbeline does: “See, / Posthumus anchors on Imogen; / And she (like harmless lightning) throws her eye / On him, her brothers, me, her master, hitting / Each object with a joy; the counterchange / Is severally in all” (5.5.393–97). It is this shared joy that frees “all those in bonds,” as all the prisoners are released and “pardon” becomes the word to all (5.5.424). This counterchange, this reciprocation, is the new economy; it is gift, not wager. For Posthumus once saw Imogen as “the gift of the gods,” but was deeply susceptible to Giacomo’s piercingly scornful question: “Which the gods have given you?” So language returns as gift through the offerings of truthful speech, speech animated by the realizations, the making real of each to each in remorse.64 This is Shakespeare’s real presence, his re-membrance which finds its own complex fidelity, and its own peace, with a discarded and vilified past, a past whose rejection has seemed structural to the thought of so many of his contemporaries.