Introduction

Promising, Forgiving

Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

This is a book about the grammar of forgiveness in Shakespeare’s late, post-tragic plays, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. In it I explore the conditions of possibility of this grammar, its historical contours in the abandoned sacrament of penance, and the changes to it entailed in the revolution of ritual theory and practice we know as the English Reformation. I draw out the implications and consequences of this grammar in the new post-tragic forms of theater that Shakespeare develops in these astonishing experimental plays.

Each of these plays ends with a public spectacle, event, or ceremony, one in which private fantasy, isolation, grief, self-immolation, or despair is overcome, and the protagonists return to what is common and shared as the ground of their relations and as a place where their expressions of themselves can have a local habitation and a name. They heal the terrible, world- and soul-destroying split between a self that “passeth show” and a face and body that can only betray a mind too lonely and inaccessible to be expressed. In this way the plays pioneer a theater of embodiment; they return the protagonists to themselves and to each other all at once. They affirm the priority of peace before violence, of the social before the individual, of trust before doubt. But they do this after the tragedies, which have diagnosed the relentless costs of imagining that language can be a private property of the mind. The protagonists of those plays define a world from their single perspective—and lose it and everyone they love.

Hannah Arendt has said: “without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we would never recover.”1 Shakespearean tragedy is a world without such possibilities, where its central protagonists are utterly exposed to the consequences of their own passions and actions. Forgiving holds out the possibility of redemption from the predicament of irreversibility.2 That is why in the creation of a post-tragic theater Shakespeare turns with a renewed intensity to the structures, histories, and practices of penitence and repentance, and their available languages, languages of forgiveness and acknowledgment. To this extent Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest are all reworkings of King Lear.3.

The medieval home of the language of acknowledgment is the sacrament of penance, and the earliest usages of the word “acknowe” are intimately bound up with the histories of this sacrament, especially in the act of confession. (The first definition given for confession in the OED is “to acknowledge”; the second “to make oneself known.”) What acknowledgment comes to be in the late plays is bound up with the investigation there of the languages of penitence. The late romances explore the vulnerabilities, exposures, and commitments of forgiving and being forgiven in new forms of theater charged with finding the pathways and possibilities of forgiveness in the absence of auricular confession and priestly absolution. For just over three hundred years the language of forgiveness had been adjudicated by priests in the cure of souls and linked to a compulsory annual confession to a local parish priest at Easter. Forgiveness was declared on God’s behalf by his authorized officers. The priest’s absolution declared the sinner relieved of the “culpa” and the “poena” of sin.4 But the reformations in Europe began, almost accidentally, as David Steinmetz suggests, as a debate about the word for “penitence.”5 Penance was to be not so much a set of actions (the agite poenitentiam of the Vulgate) but repentance, translating metanoia, the turning or returning of the whole mind and soul and life to God. “There is therefore, none other use of these outward ceremonies, but as far forth as we are stirred up by them, and (they) do serve the glory of God” (my italics), says the Elizabethan homily on “Repentance and True Reconciliation unto God.”6 All life, says, Luther, is a baptism declaring that we are not initiated once and for all but rather that we are always beginning.7 What ensued was not the tidy replacement of one doctrine or practice by another, but a long conversation and conflict about the conventions of forgiveness. This book traces the fortunes of the component parts of the sacrament of penance—contrition, confession, and absolution in the Church of England’s liturgy and theology (Catholic and Reformed), and in Shakespeare’s late plays.

In Shakespeare’s theater there are almost countless instances of the word “confession” and its cognates, yet only three instances in the entire corpus of the word “absolution,” even though both terms were once an intrinsic part of the sacrament of penance. Consider some of the following uses of “confession”:

“Dear daughter, I confess that I am old” (Lear to Regan, King Lear, 2.4.154)

“Therefore confess thee freely of thy sin” (Othello to Desdemona, Othello, 5.2.53)

“I will hereupon confess I am in love” (Armado, Love’s Labors Lost, 1.2.57)

“I confess nothing, nor I deny nothing” (Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, 4.1.273)

“…scarce confesses / That his blood flows” (Angelo in Measure for Measure. 1.3.50–51)

To hear these words in these circumstances (to take a bare few examples) is to be exposed to: Lear’s ironizing of the rites of confession in the face of Regan’s demands for amends; the grim usurpations of the role of confessor trying to enforce the admittance of truths Othello can hardly bear to hear; the inevitable coming to awareness of truths the rest of us had known long ago, and long awaited, all the more delicious in being uttered by the one who has, in denying them, denied his nature; the jocular denial of a woman outed in her emergent, despite-herself love; the wedding of a mind to its own fierce purity here seen as a denial of a human capacity to feel. In short, to confess is to begin to chart paths to self-knowledge, commitments made to different futures, and claims, callings out in the light of these avowals, and admittances which risk and require response, and in kind. Consider, by contrast, the three instances of absolution.

The first instance is the jocular black humor by which Cardinal Wolsey’s execution of Buckingham is referred to as an absolution with an axe in Henry VIII. The second is in the same play when Katherine of Aragon interrupts the same Cardinal’s Latin to declare “the willing’st sin I ever yet committed/May be absolved in English” (3.1.48–49), thereby depriving him of his Latinate authority and restoring the task of absolution to the common vernacular. The third instance is in Romeo and Juliet when Juliet asks her nurse to tell her mother that she’s going to Friar Laurence’s cell to confess and be absolved of the sin of having displeased her father (3.5.231–33). And here it is a ruse to put them off the scent of her real mission to the friar to find a remedy for the consummation of her forbidden love for Romeo. So the putative confession and absolution are a disguise to ward off discovery. In Shakespeare’s corpus, then, absolution is either punishment, joke, or disguise. The post-tragic plays I examine here on the other hand chart the paths to forgiveness, paths that seem essential to the ability of the communities therein to find their feet with each other, to go on at all.8.

The transformation of the languages of penance and repentance were at the very center of an unprecedented, astonishing revolution in the forms and conventions of speaking, hence of modes of human relating. Confessing, forgiving, absolving, initiating, swearing, blessing, baptizing, ordaining—these are a mere few of the speech acts so transformed in the English Reformation. We might say that it is not clear any longer how any of these speech acts count as performative utterances at all, how, to use the scholastic jargon, they are to count as efficacious signs. It is not just that the conventional procedures were altered in the careful revisions of the Book of Common Prayer (1549, 1552, 1560), but that the question of what is effected by means of such acts, and who has the authority to say and so perform them, remained fundamentally uncertain, and always open to judgment. Shakespeare’s theater, I want to argue, charts from first to last, with extraordinary clarity and remorselessness, the transformed work of language in human relating that follows from this revolution in language. When authority is no longer assumed in the speech acts of a sacramental priesthood, it must be found, and refound, in the claims, calls, judgments of every person who must single themselves and others out in these calls, grant them the authority in each particular instance. So Shakespeare’s theater is a search for community, a community neither given nor possessed but in constant formation and deformation. This puts him in powerful continuity, of course, with a theater he is often thought to have entirely superseded and overturned.

The result in Shakespeare’s writing is an extraordinary, unprecedented expansion in the expressive range, precision, and flexibility of language as it takes up this terrible burden and gift of human relating when nothing but language secures or grounds human relations. His plays explore the finding, losing, and refinding of community through the path from performative to passionate utterance, finding and seizing words unmoored from their conventions and open to the “disorders of desire” rather than “the order of law.”9 Given the new vulnerability of certain ways of speaking, hence relating, to the improvisations of desire, the late, post-tragic plays seem particularly overcome by a consequent sense of both the depth and the fragility of human bonds.10 Such bonds seem to rest on nothing at all but mutual intelligibility, and this seems too insecure a foundation, too liable to breakage, fracture, betrayal, and rejection. They must be forged anew and through each conversation. That is the miracle in an age where all miracles are past.

This is a picture of language which insists on the dependence of reference on expression.11 The risks involved in the acknowledgment of this dependence may feel overwhelming, for it is a picture that makes mutual reliance in a world of unreliable others unavoidable. It is no wonder that there are concerted, serious, utterly well-meaning attempts to bypass the necessity of such voicing. If the relation of word and world could only depend on anything more reliable than our voicing, our expression of that relation, we might feel more secure in the world and we might be released from the frightening contingency and variability, the unpredictability of the actions of the others in our lives, of their fearful autonomy. But if the relation of word to world has to be established and re-established through our own voicing of it, then our responsibility in meaning might threaten to overwhelm us completely. Early moderns inherited and espoused at least two ways of evading this responsibility, both of which Shakespeare rejects. Language might operate magically outside of my particular contribution to it: this formula was precisely the object of much Reformation polemic, which attacked Catholic versions of a language that worked ex opere operato, the core delusion here being the “hocus pocus” of the mass itself. But Protestant polemic had its own way of bypassing human expression: this emerged in the disdain and suspicion of all forms of human mediation. Some Reformation theology, for example, insisted that it was only by eradicating all human mediations that we could be sure of the God-sidedness of grace; all human interventions stain and contaminate and infringe the sovereignty of God. The theological warrant comes along with the eradication of the human—and human acknowledgment. Forgiveness was not the province of priesthood; rather it was a speech act that had already happened. Luther’s assurance was quickly undermined by the disastrous pastoral implications of the Calvinist understanding of double predestination; and Protestant “practical divinity” had to find ways of dealing with the epistemological fallout of this doctrine, one that rapidly became intellectualized as a problem of knowledge: how will we know if we are saved? The epistemological anxieties notoriously focused on this unknown but quite fundamental aspect of an unmediated relation with God. Shakespeare inherits these massive quandaries and questions and attends to them in terms of human speech as what makes or breaks the bonds between people. For Shakespeare, forgiveness is acknowledgment.

I use the term “post-tragic” here because the romances do not supersede the tragedies, but rather work through the failures of acknowledgment that form Shakespearean tragic action. Shakespeare’s post-tragic plays cannot forgo what they have acknowledged: our ceaseless, relentless exposure to the consequences of our own passions and actions. But the group of post-tragic plays we have come to know as romances stage the recovery from tragedy in the renewed possibility of mutual acknowledgment. It is Stanley Cavell who has made acknowledgment central to a conception of Shakespearean tragedy. Shakespearean tragedy results from avoiding love, from failures in acknowledgment. Cavell’s tragic heroes come to grief because they have substituted flattery’s beguiling echoes for love’s fearful mutualities and exposures (Lear) or the certainty of faithlessness for the terrifying risk of being known and loved in being known (Othello), or because of the unutterable difficulty and loneliness of taking up an identity that is yours alone to inhabit (“This is I, / Hamlet, the Dane,” 5.1.256–57).12 Acknowledgment is the ground of our relation to other minds, which skepticism intellectualizes as metaphysical lack. It is always particular; it is always of someone for something; it is not so much what we choose to do as what we cannot avoid doing. It is not a substitute for knowledge, for it includes and assumes knowledge, but it is a medium through which both response and responsibility are unendingly exacted through the commitments of human speech and action. It might include—it usually does include—self-knowledge and the ways we avoid it, recognition and the ways we avoid it, responsiveness and responsibility, and the ways we evade and avoid them. I am proposing here that the history of acknowledgment and therefore its fortunes in Shakespearean tragedy and post-tragedy can be best told in relation to the sacrament of penance and its complex afterlives.13.

A word about method. The epigraph to this introduction from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations suggests a critical practice.14 It is a practice that J. L. Austin called fieldwork in philosophy, or linguistic phenomenology.15 To explore the grammar of forgiveness will entail thinking about the family of words connected with it: trespass, sin, offense, contrition, confession, absolution, reconciliation, restitution, acknowledgment—all of which are linked in their original home of the sacrament of penance. This critical practice takes as its assumption that the differences among these words will tell us about the differences we have sought to make about our cares and commitments. “Our common stock of words,” says Austin, “embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found worth making.”16 When we examine these distinctions and differences we are looking at the world as well as the words, for they are inseparable. We will begin to see that forgiveness is distinct from absolution, but also from pardon, exculpation, remittance; that it is linked to apology and acknowledgment as one of its possible preconditions; to forms of penalty and punishment; to a theology of grace; and to self-examination, restitution, reparation, restoration, and so to practices fully social, not just individual; to the world of harm done; finally to forms of responsibility and response. Against skeptical pictures of a gap between mind and world, Wittgenstein’s remark in the Philosophical Investigations assumes a radical, fundamental harmony of word and world. When we pursue a grammatical investigation of forgiveness we will be reminding ourselves about how we learned to forgive and of the related practices associated with it. We will be reminding ourselves how we learned such a word and how we actually use it, and in the process—because word and world are inseparable—we will learn about the histories of our cares and commitments and the differences we have tried to make in our language and in our world.17 The notion of grammar at work in ordinary language philosophy is not the grammar of the rule-book. On the contrary, it takes it as axiomatic that meaning and use are inseparable. What words say depends on what words do, and they will lose all intelligibility if we fail to see the point of utterance on any particular occasion.18.

For this very reason, I see a natural affinity between the practices of theater and the practices of ordinary language philosophy because each practice is committed to examining particular words used by particular speakers in particular situations.19 Each practice understands language as situation, which is different from “context” because sometimes we understand the context only when we understand what it is that is being said.20 Ordinary language philosophy makes the very radical claim that we will fail to understand what something means until we understand what it does, until we understand the force of the words used on any particular occasion as, say, entreaty, command, order, suggestion, permission, request, prayer. It affords us a nuanced and precise account, therefore, of the relation between the inherited ritual languages of the Middle Ages and their transformation in post-Reformation England, an account we sorely need if we want to break with the conventional accounts of periodization, whether those are subsumed under the description of “the Renaissance” or of “early modernity.” Furthermore, each practice, of theater and of ordinary language philosophy, understands language as act, as event in the world, and so asks us to extend our conception of the work of language beyond the work of representation, the chief focus of historicism old and new.

In her philosophical contemplation of the nature of human action that I previously cited, Hannah Arendt talks about the boundlessness, the irreversibility of action. We do things in the world utterly unsure of their effects; they are taken up by others in ways we can neither determine nor predict. Such effects, stemming from our actions, are nevertheless uncertain and quite uncontainable. In her attempt to develop democratic and politically sustainable and just frames for action, Arendt suggested that there are two speech acts that make the boundlessness and irreversibility of action bearable: promising and forgiving. In an unpredictable world the promise is the foundation of trust, of dependability. In a world of harm the act of forgiveness allows a way of going on to new futures. It is through such acts of speech that the risk and uncertainty of action can be addressed. Both speech acts, as I will show in subsequent chapters, go through different conceptualizations in the course of the Reformation.

This book is divided into three parts. The second and third parts work as readings of particular plays in which I explore promising and forgiving as acts of making community. The first part examines the transformations in the grammar of forgiveness which follow from the abolition of penance as a sacrament.

In the first chapter, “The Mind’s Retreat from the Face,” I begin with a reading of one of Hamlet’s most famous speeches and show Shakespeare’s deep preoccupations with the split between inner and outer. “There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face” (1.4.12–13). These words from Macbeth are chilling.21 They can stand for a whole set of preoccupations in Shakespeare’s theater. They suggest that there is no craft, no technique or received wisdom that might help us read from someone’s face what it is they are thinking. The face and the mind are adrift in Shakespeare’s image, the effort to join them daunting and uncharted. The world they communicate would be unbearable to live in, perhaps even uninhabitable. The picture of an inaccessible mind trapped in a body whose expressions cannot express that mind or soul is a picture of the human in exile from his own body and expression, and hence from all means of the knowledge of self and others. When the body stops being granted the capacity to express the mind and the soul, in Shakespeare’s understanding, we don’t so much protect that “inner” space (even if that’s what we think we are doing): instead we lose touch with it all together. Part of the crisis and difficulty in this understanding is that we lose sense of ourselves and our communities together, in one and the same movement of self-exile from shared words and shared expressions. Once we see those words and expressions not as showing but as hiding us, we lose touch with our only means of self-knowledge and contact with others. It is this chapter that motivates the predicament that gives rise to the sense of this split. It is my belief that much contemporary criticism inhabits this very split, and so the therapeutic and diagnostic power of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy is unavailable to it.

In the second chapter I flesh out my claim that the home of “acknowledgment” is the sacrament of penance, and explore some of the paths from penance to repentance.

Part 2 of the book, “Promising,” looks at the language of promising by considering a play in which marriage contracts and the relation between intent and consent are particularly at issue. This play, Measure for Measure, has at its center a marriage contract which, with much engineering, is fulfilled, but in ways that appear to end the comic tradition in Shakespeare.

The four post-tragic plays I examine in the third and longest part of this book, “Forgiving,” share certain forms, certain ways of exploring their subject matter. They survive tragic impasses by modifying the form of romance as well as the form of tragedy. I identify some of their shared patterns in the following ways:

1. In each of the plays the act of forgiving (active and passive—for the forgiver and the forgiven) must go through the circuit of self-understanding.
(This is why we are in the realm of forgiveness—and forgiveness as acknowledgment—and not absolution). Self-understanding, then, is a mode of conversion, one in which past actions are seen in a transformed light, and one whose authorizing vision will necessitate and enable a change in the whole person. The change will be something whose definition and description are solely open to the one experiencing it, and its description will be a symptom of the change.

2. The forgiveness in question usually comes about by a giving over to the risks and uncertainties of relationship. This is the means and mechanism of forgiveness, and this too might distinguish it from absolution where forgiveness is granted by virtue of an office. Forgiveness in these plays is never unilateral, and so it is carefully distinguished from pardon, exoneration, and absolution. The authority of the forgiver and the forgiven must be found and granted by each to each.

3. Forgiveness must involve faith and hope in the future. In these plays forgiveness is an exchange of love, and coterminous with the growth and possibility of that love.

4. Such an exchange is usually made possible by the viewing of one’s life as a gift—and so forgiveness is both an acknowledgment of separateness and a relinquishment of autonomy. The giftedness of life can be understood theologically; the idea is chiefly that we can come to receive ourselves and understand ourselves at the hands of others only by means of the conversation and friendship of others. The plays then move away from isolation or tyrannous self-enclosure (Leontes: “I have said / She’s an adult’ress” (2.1.87), or Prospero’s belated ability to express himself rather than assert himself in the language of imperatives, orders, and commands).

5. It is for this reason that forgiveness can only be effected linguistically. The society so arrived at is thus infinitely precious and fragile because nothing grounds or assures it beyond these exchanges.

6. Romances of forgiveness are intergenerational. The focus is never exclusively between the parental generation, but between the older generation and the younger one. The old are reborn in themselves through their recovery of the young.

Outlining the structure of the book makes clear that in parts 2 and 3 I prefer to work through the afterlives of the sacrament of penance play by play. That is because each play creates its own world and asks us to enter it. I felt that I needed to work with the logic of that created world in all its integrity, rather than picking out bits and pieces from different plays. However, my chapters on the romances should not be taken as exhaustive readings of the plays in their entirety. They tend to concentrate around the endings of the plays in particular, for two reasons. The first reason is that this is a book about the dramaturgy of forgiveness as acknowledgment and recognition, and recognitions are the last things in these plays. The second reason is related to the first: Shakespeare, I think, meant his endings; he took responsibility for them. They cannot therefore be subsumed under the conventions of endings, of closure, to carry their significance.

Finally, though this book explores the legacies of the Catholic sacrament of penance, I have not speculated about Shakespeare’s religious identity.22 That will always exert a fascination for all those interested in Shakespeare, but such speculation can short-circuit and even preempt the density of the embodied world of the plays and the sheer complexity of that historical, social, and linguistic inheritance. Indeed the push to the confessionalization of religious identity in the nation-state’s monopoly of religion was one of the more brutal, consequential, and reductive aspects of the time in which he lived, one that extracted appalling costs and sacrifices. The legacies of the transformation from penance to repentance cannot be reduced to a question of religious identity.

I hope that this book will be read by people interested in the difficult practice of forgiveness as well as those interested in the plays of Shakespeare. It is an attempt to enact a critical practice that engages with the ethical and aesthetic as much as the historical and political dimensions that have been the preoccupation and the doxa of recent criticism. As such, its vision of language is one dedicated to the common and the shared as prior to any failure in sharing, any lapse in commonalty. Shakespeare, I believe, from first to last, was interested in charity as a relation between people, as a bond that was never dependent on any one individual’s consent, and that worked as a relation, not a possession. This, one might say, is what he evolved his theater—the art of our shared embodiment—to restore. Such a project of recovery was never the retrieval of a static past but always a transformation of that past’s deepest legacy. And it is a mode of mutual habituation, a form of participation, not a doctrine or a content—and thus fragile to, existent only in conversation, bodied forth in the gorgeous complicity of theater.