Shakespeare's Binding Language

8vo, 465pp. It might be tempting to write that this well-packed, erudite volume offers the last word on oaths, vows and related matters in Shakespeares plays and sonnets, also in much other early modern drama, some more recent plays, and some ancient. But John Kerrigan protests in his Epilogue that there remains much more to be said about plays such as Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and 1 and 2 Henry IV; also that he has not comprehensively investigated early modern drama. All of that is undoubtedly true, but this book does nevertheless constitute a major study, the ambition of which is matched by its success. Major isnt a big enough word there, but I will refrain from adding by my troth, 'by Jupiter' (both relatively harmless), or a much riskier zounds. After the passage of the 1606 Act to Restrain Abuses, which made it an offence 'in any Stage-play, Interlude, Shew, Maygame, or Pageant, iestingly, and prophanely [to] speake, or vse the holy Name of God, or of Christ Iesus, or of the holy Ghost, or of the Trinitie', it was necessary to be careful. We see in this book that the Act represents a watershed: characters in plays written before 1606 were likely to invoke the Trinity or one or more of its elements; in plays written afterwards the language was liable to be toned down, or at the very least modified to steer clear of the Trinity. The Act may even have played a part in moving Shakespeare away from contemporary material to classical plays and romances where characters could swear by Jupiter and Apollo. There may also have been some softening of the oaths in the earlier plays as published in the 1623 Folio. Othello, written in 1603, provides an example of that. Full-strength oaths were in any case generally disapproved of when uttered by women. Again Othello provides an example: Desdemona would have be-whored herself if she had sworn her truth with Othellos vehemence, an arguably fatal disadvantage, through her not being able adequately to protest her fidelity to the Moor. But the law was not difficult to work around. The witches in Macbeth (quite possibly written in 1606, the year of the Act) stage a blasphemous subversion of the Trinity without speaking the word. Shakespeare was perhaps cynical when it came to lovers vows, or he expected his audiences to be at least sceptical. Lovers vows are often made to be broken. Loves Labours Lost, however, distinguishes itself in that it focuses on the breaking of vows in order to bring love about. Most early modern moralists, Kerrigan tells us, held that your word should always be your bond, even to robbers and pirates. But Cicero argued for an exception in the case of pirates: For a pirate is not counted in the noumber of enemies to ones country, but a common enemie to all men. This has relevance to Hamlet, who apparently goes along with the view of the early moderns, notwithstanding his patchy achievement in keeping his word with the ghost and his vows of love to Ophelia. It was a point of dispute how binding a coerced oath was. Meanwhile, it was a generally agreed principle that an oath to perform a sin is not a valid oath. In Alls Well that Ends Well, Diana notably says to Bertram: Tis not the many oaths that makes the truth, | But the plain single vow that is vowd true. These few gems are but a tiny proportion of all that is on offer in this book. The inside front flap makes the claim, Scholarly but accessible. As a non-scholar, I had to work at it (especially as I previously knew nothing of most of the plays referenced outside the main Shakespeare canon), but accessible it is.