Abstract
[...]when the Reformers denied the necessity of confession and rejected the coherency of absolution, they not only replaced one religious doctrine with another, but effected a crisis in the culture's broader understanding of forgiveness. [...]an approach will enable us to 'break with the conventional accounts of periodization, whether those are subsumed under the description of "The Renaissance" or "early modernity"' (p. 8). [...]because both theater and 'ordinary language philosophy' understand 'language as act, as event in the world,' they require us to 'extend our conception of the work of language beyond the work of representation, the chief focus of historicism old and new' (p. 8). [...]Beckwith's exploration of the history of 'acknowledgment,' whose verb form 'acknowe' is 'intimately bound up' with the traditional sacrament of penance, offers wonderful contextualization and support for Stanley Cavell's reliance upon the concept in his own investigations of Shakespearean ethics (p. 2). Though Beckwith interprets Giacomo's confession as instantiating the dictates of 'medieval confessional manuals,' in that he relates the 'occasion, the circumstances, the motivation of his actions,' the fact remains that his account of the wager between himself and Posthumus is false (p. 125). [...]Cymbeline's equivocal acknowledgment of his faulty faultlessness to Imogen, as well as his repeated retreat into his tyrannous disposition during the same scene, tell against Beckwith's assertion that, in Cymbeline, 'language returns as giftthrough the offerings of truthful speech, speech animated by the realizations, the making real of each to each in remorse' (p. 126).