Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness

Sarah Beckwith

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780801461101
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Shakespeare lived at a time when England was undergoing the revolution in ritual theory and practice we know as the English Reformation. With it came an unprecedented transformation in the language of religious life. Whereas priests had once acted as mediators between God and men through sacramental rites, Reformed theology declared the priesthood of all believers. What ensued was not the tidy replacement of one doctrine by another but a long and messy conversation about the conventions of religious life and practice. In this brilliant and strikingly original book, Sarah Beckwith traces the fortunes of this conversation in Shakespeare's theater.

Beckwith focuses on the sacrament of penance, which in the Middle Ages stood as the very basis of Christian community and human relations. With the elimination of this sacrament, the words of penance and repentance—"confess, " "forgive, " "absolve" —no longer meant (no longer could mean) what they once did. In tracing the changing speech patterns of confession and absolution, both in Shakespeare's work and Elizabethan and Jacobean culture more broadly, Beckwith reveals Shakespeare's profound understanding of the importance of language as the fragile basis of our relations with others. In particular, she shows that the post-tragic plays, especially Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, are explorations of the new regimes and communities of forgiveness. Drawing on the work of J. L. Austin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Stanley Cavell, Beckwith enables us to see these plays in an entirely new light, skillfully guiding us through some of the deepest questions that Shakespeare poses to his audiences.

Part One

Penance to Repentance

It is difficult to say where conventions begin and end.

J. L. Austin

1

The Mind’s Retreat from the Face

I take the title of my chapter, “The Mind’s Retreat from the Face,” from Fergus Kerr’s classic, Theology after Wittgenstein. 1 The phrase is a haunting, alarming way of picturing a pervasive notion of the face as a mask obscuring the mind’s inaccessible internal objects. In this picture, “the mind retreats from the face, just as the immaterial soul once disappeared behind the body.” 2 This picture of the relation of mind and body is most famously associated with Descartes’ description in the Second Meditation.3 It is not, however, merely a philosophical idea but a common experience of self, one intrinsic to solipsism and narcissism for sure, but prevalent too in quite common experiences of miscommunication or misunderstanding and of grief, retreat, and loneliness. Shakespeare’s theater, as has often been noticed, is intensely preoccupied with what happens when the mind and soul can no longer be found in the face.4

The split between inner mind or soul and outer face and the fundamental denigration of expression that accompanies this split is one given point not only by the state policies of Reformation England but also by the persistent debates over ceremony that are endemic to the so-called English settlement. It is my sense that the picture still holds sway in contemporary criticism and that we will fail to understand Shakespeare’s diagnosis of it as long as we remain in its grip.

I know not ‘seems.’

Let’s begin with some of Hamlet’s most famous words:

Seems, madam? nay, it is, I know not ‘seems.’

’Tis not alone my inky cloak, (good) mother,

Nor customary suits of solemn black,

Nor windy suspiration of forc’d breath,

No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,

Nor the dejected haviour of the visage,

Together with all forms, moods, (shapes) of grief,

That can (denote) me truly. These indeed seem,

For they are actions that a man might play,

But I have that within which passes show,

These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

(1.2. 76–86)

Hamlet is describing his own sensed predicament. Though he could not have known this, it turns out that this is a locus classicus for a pervasive picture of the human mind, one which philosophy names as the problem of other minds. But how does it give voice to those problems and questions? What fantasies are released and expressed in them? What is the situation in which it seems necessary to voice them?

It is the second scene of the first act. Hamlet, back in the Danish court after his father’s death, is in black and with the clouds still upon him is seeking for his “noble father in the dust” (1.2.71). According to Gertrude and Claudius, he has more than fulfilled the necessary mourning duties of filial obligation. Of his grief, Gertrude asks, “Why seems it so particular with thee?” (1.2.75).

In response Hamlet fastens on his mother’s word, “seems.”5 What does he mean by “I know not ‘seems’”? That he doesn’t know how to seem? That he doesn’t know what it means? That he will be who he is or no one? That he will not participate in her world of seeming? That he insists on his authenticity and cannot comprehend or countenance a split between appearance and reality?

Hamlet is observing that his mother is reading him from his moody demeanor and mourning clothes, his “inky cloak” and “windy suspirations.” There is a hint in his allusion to the “customary suits of black” that precisely because such suits are customary, conventionally assumed in the time of bereavement (though of course, rapidly relinquished by the Danish court), they can therefore not say anything “particular” about him. If everyone customarily wears them, how can they be understood to say anything about particular people or particular emotions? The common custom wipes out the expression of individuality, at least his in particular.

But perhaps we might see him as taking up his mother’s use of the word “particular” here, and turning it around on her. Why are you so special? she seems to imply. For “all that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity” (1.2.72–73). Yes, Hamlet has said in his reply to this observation, “it is common,” (1.2.73) that is, this is the case for everyone, this is common to everyone (and perhaps with the implication that this is therefore a commonplace). Her question, which prompts his famous outburst, is in response to this sardonic assent. Well, in that case, she says, why do you single yourself out in this way, make yourself so particular, count yourself out of the commonality? It is now that Hamlet fixes on her “seems.” It doesn’t “seem” particular, he might be understood as saying. It is particular to me because he is my father (and, implied, your husband) and so my response is indeed particular. One of the implications of his comments might be that though he is not seeming, though he does not know what it means to “seem,” though his clothes actually do denote his mourning, she wishes to discard them as expressing his grief. So we might track the sheer comprehensiveness of his list, the sarcasm intensified in the hiss and precision of “suspirations,” the quadruple negative that reverses the iambic rhythm of four sequential lines, the helplessness and increasingly hopeless vagueness of “all forms, moods, and shapes of grief,” as the discovery that nothing can touch in this woman a response to his grief. Then his comments might be understood to say: if you can’t know me from my expressions, my appearance, if you can’t see my grief for my father, and if you, my mother, can’t sympathize with it, then who can? If customary suits of solemn black, and fruitful rivers in the eye, and all the very forms, moods, and shapes of grief can’t in your eyes denote me truly, then nothing will “denote me truly.” I will be unknowable, theatricalized by you; you will have made an actor of me, hollowed me out. He might then be taken to be saying that if this is the case, then everything I have tried to communicate about my sadness to you, my tears, my dejection, the very habit of my mourning is useless, and what else do I have to convince you? What else can I show if this does not convince you? Of course a man might indeed play these actions and only your sympathy with me, your trust in me, your response to me will tell you the difference between such an actor and me, your only son. If his mother discounts his behavior and his expressions as show, all Hamlet can do is feel bereft and unknowable—and somehow, too, betrayed by the suits and trappings of woe.

Gertrude’s invocation of the “commonality” of a shared finitude comes then as an utterly false comfort, one that has the effect of divorcing Hamlet from the whole of humankind, and certainly from the one who should be for him both kin and kind. Gertrude will not read, will not see, and apparently will not comfort or respond to the Hamlet before her. (In not seeing him, she will also miss something about herself.)6 The court that Hamlet inhabits is one in which every ritual has become theatricalized. The sham rituals at Claudius’s court alienate rather than give voice to the participants included in them, and in a world in which no one can see themselves in the public forms, no one can be him- or herself. In such a world of seeming, Hamlet feels himself to be unknowable, but he also has no grounds for knowing anyone else.

I’ve tried to motivate this famous passage in such a way as to suggest that Hamlet’s insistence is not initially a statement about a metaphysically unbridgeable gap between an inaccessible mind and merely outward conventions that will never capture the utter depths of that grief, but crucially a response to a felt abandonment by the mother who has theatricalized his deepest feelings. He has lost his father, and now apparently his mother too is vanishing from him. In this plight he will leap from the possibility that his actions are potentially indistinguishable from what a man “might play” to the “necessary inexpressiveness” of “that within,” its status as passing show, beyond expression.

If Hamlet’s grief is constitutively beyond show—if he cannot give voice to it, not because the circumstances all conspire against it now, but because it is simply impossible that his outer behavior can reveal the “inner” workings of his mind, he will be spared both the difficulty of giving voice to that grief and the response of others to his expressions. Under some circumstances the desperate aloneness of this predicament might seem preferable to the terrible responsibility for having to account for yourself and the relentless exposure to others this entails, especially when that exposure is (mis)read as theatrical.

An alternative way of understanding the epistemological implications of the embodiment of self is provided by Stanley Cavell who has suggested that as embodied creatures, we are “condemned to expression, to meaning.”7 The picture of inner and outer is, then, also a picture of language that shields human beings from exposure to each other’s responses and the endless responsibility that follows. We are “perpetually expressive.” We cannot stop being expressive, and even the concealing of our expressiveness will reveal itself in the stifled yawn; in the catch in the voice when I say your name, though I don’t at this stage want or need you to know that I care for you much more than I should; in the wince when, you, you bully, pinch me though I’m damned if I want to give you the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve hurt me; in the excessive concentration as I walk up the stairs to let you know how very sober I am; in the greater attentiveness with which I hope to distract you into not noticing that you are boring me half to death; in all the familiar, frequent ways in which we say: “I could barely contain myself.” Here we cannot indeed “help ourselves.” We are here, as Cavell says, “victims of expression.”8

The hold of this picture of privacy is so pervasive that it is no wonder that Hamlet has become the icon for it. When Stanley Cavell explores the sheer grip of this picture, he suggests that the “convulsion in sensibility” of the Reformation is one factor that requires an account.9

The picture of inner and outer that takes hold in Hamlet is also one that evolves through the languages of reformed Christianity. It is this aspect that I intend to explore briefly here in order to frame my discussion of confession, absolution, and forgiveness in chapter 2. The transformations in these languages cannot be understood without a consideration of the arguments about the significance and practice of rite and sacrament in sixteenth-century England. It is not my aim to provide a comprehensive account of the complex transformation of the Reformation in England as a whole; rather I mean to shed light on how certain state policies and implementations, polemical practices, and a revolution in ritual theory and practice resulting from a changed picture of sacramental action had a massive impact on the perception of a gap between behavior and thought—or in the split vocabulary becoming more and more current, “outward” behavior” and “inward” thought.

Passing Show: Reformed Versions of Inner and Outer

Christian subjects living in the aftermath of the Reformation might have had very good reason to have recourse to a language that splits the inner from the outer. Here I isolate four interrelated factors that I regard as important. First, the use of oaths of allegiance to exact commitment and allegiance became a regular part of English state policy. For those compelled to speak words that betrayed their religious beliefs and convictions, the metaphorical language of inner and outer offered a desperately needed protection from the demand for conformity. The inner here became a place of protection, a vital retreat from coercion and constraint and a way of saving some integrity, some small sanctuary in the face of overwhelming pressure. Second, the enforcement of uniformity of religion and worship mandated in the Book of Common Prayer meant that once more several groups of people felt there to be an impassable obstacle between their convictions and their public expression.

Third, the polemical tradition by which the Catholic rite was derided as theatricalized ceremony re-created the language of rite as just so much empty formalism. Here inner and outer were cast in a language of doubleness and disguise, of appearance and reality; the attempt was to render Catholic ceremony incapable of saying anything at all, describing it as dumb while simultaneously rendering it dumb: both silent and stupid. Dumb, hollow, empty, vain: these were the favorite adjectives of polemical attack. Both the utterance of compulsory words at odds with religious conviction and the attempt to empty out the words of others produce an exile from words. The utterance of compulsory words that do not belong to the self-understanding of the speaker, that feel like ash in his mouth, is a terrible form of alienation not just from the enforcing state but also from the self that is forced to betray itself out of its own mouth. And the theatricalization of the words and actions of another also gives his words no carry and deprives him of so much as the ability to mean anything at all; this too is a kind of exile from words and gestures. This latter maneuver was part of a more widespread revolution in ...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Promising, Forgiving
• Part One: Penance to Repentance
• Part Two: Promising
• Part Three: Forgiving
• Notes
• Bibliography