Michael D. Friedman. "The World Must be Peopled": Shakespeare's Comedies of Forgiveness.

Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002. 272 pp. b/w illus. index. bibl. $46.50. ISBN: 0-8386-3941-0.

In 1957, Northrop Frye published his groundbreaking and influential Anatomy of Criticism, which advanced the idea of the "standard comic resolution," i.e., marriage, as a useful and appropriate signal for generic classification of texts. Though Frye noted the problematic presence of "more ironic comedies" (183) in Shakespeare's corpus, namely All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure, he referred to both The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Much Ado About Nothing as typical comedies, in that their ends "include as many people as possible" (165) in a "redeemed society" (185).

Eight years later, recognizing the ambiguous nature of several of Shakespeare's "comedies," Robert Grams Hunter followed with Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965). Hunter's agenda is doubly recuperative, in that he highlights the regenerative power of these plays as a way of condoning the traditional comic classification of these texts, by now better known as "problem plays." Michael D. Friedman's recent book is a direct descendent of both Frye's and Hunter's work. The deployment of both feminist and performance theoretical perspectives, however, helps Friedman propose some original staging ideas useful for interpretive innovation--and vice versa. As such, Friedman's book represents an advance in the argument, rather than a review of it.

Friedman's thesis is clear: plays often wrenched into "romantic comedies" on the stage (Two Gentlemen, Much Ado, Measure for Measure, All's Well) in fact represent a subgenre of Shakespeare, namely, the "comedy of forgiveness." But where Hunter's argument focuses mainly on (usually tenuous) heterosexual forgiveness, Friedman emphasizes the "ways in which the drive to link men together shapes their attitude toward women and marriage" (111). According to Friedman, Frye's standard comic resolution, marriage, "represents, not the triumph of youthful romantic love over the elder generation, but the victory of society over the unruly sexual impulses of the Forgiven Comic Hero" (153). Not surprisingly, the hero's (and often the less heroic male characters') "unruly sexual impulses" are curbed through heterosexual marriages with women who have little or nothing to say about the (male) contribution of their tranquilizing bodies to the "victory of society." As Friedman notices, though, this traffic in women is doubly effective in cementing male bonds. First, the legitimate bond with the procreative female body ostensibly forecloses youthful indiscriminate male sexual behavior, insuring the hereditary links so prized by the older generation in early modern culture. Concurrently, rifts between the forgiven comic hero and his peers (also to be married) are healed. In other words, it is mainly the men who forgive each other.

Friedman's take on this dynamic is perhaps more generous than my own, though I admit his suggestive staging ideas for the troubling ends of these plays lend credence to his thesis without romanticizing (by mangling/bowdlerizing the plays beyond recognition), or subverting early modern "comic" intentions (by absolutely denying the healing potential). And this is just the diachronic performance history Friedman traces, after first offering a careful, if unremarkable, reading of each play text. Typically, Friedman tells us, performances of these plays from the Restoration to the advent of feminist criticism in the 1970s excise, amend, and/or rearrange the text in order to bully it into romantic comedy. In a prefeminist production of All's Well, for instance, Director Laird Williamson appended Shakespeare's sonnet 109 ("O, never say that I was false of heart") to Bertram's inadequate four-word "forgiveness" speech: "Both, both. O pardon!" The addition makes Helena's "forgiveness" of Bertram more akin to that found in romantic comedy. On the other hand, postfeminist productions of the final act of Two Gentlemen dramatize "the physical and sexual violence of Proteus' assault on Silvia ... as violently and explicitly as possible" (62). After witnessing this attack, viewers can hardly "endorse" the subsequent "forgiveness" preceding the marriage of this pair.

Each of Friedman's suggested stagings for the four troublesome endings of these plays synthesize the dualistic pre--and postfeminist interpretations cited above. At the same time, they preserve the integrity of the text. By carefully reading the nuances of early modern cultural bonds into each of these play texts, Friedman manages to refrain from romanticizing these plays' conclusions, while preserving the comic, if not somewhat ironic, elements of "forgiveness" probably evident to Shakespeare's contemporary audience. That's no mean feat.

MARLENE CLARK

Manhattan Community College, City University of New York