William Kerrigan. Shakespeare's Promises. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. xviii+243pp. ISBN 0801861632.

Danielle Clarke
University College Dublin
Danielle.Clarke@ucd.ie

Clarke, Danielle. "Review of William Kerrigan, Shakespeare's Promises". Early Modern Literary Studies 9.3 / Special Issue 12 (January, 2004): 11.1-5 <URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/09-3/revclar.htm>

1. It is a well-known, but insufficiently explored, truism that early modern societies were steeped in various forms of oral contract, including promise, oath, honour and shame. More broadly, early modern culture could be viewed anthropologically as cementing notions of order in place by means of these linguistic, legal and social ligatures, against a background of repeatedly impending breakdown. While Shakespeare's Promises ostensibly belongs in this territory, its scope and purpose is really quite different.
   
   
2. Rather than providing us with either a theoretical or a cultural history of the promise, Kerrigan's book sets out to tease out the meanings of promising, and its various cognates, through detailed readings of three Shakespearean plays. His choice of Richard III , The Merchant of Venice and Othello might appear a little eclectic, not to say eccentric, to the reader thinking of ideas of promising in Shakespeare more generally, and coming to rest on Measure for Measure or The Taming of the Shrew as pre-eminent examples. Nevertheless, with the possible exception of Richard III Kerrigan does manage to pull the reader in and engage her with a series of cruxes relating to notions of bonds, oaths and promises. In this sense, the book really falls into two parts; the former (including the very useful historical overview) looking at the relationship between the self and what it utters, and the latter concentrating on the conflicting obligations of marriage and friendship. Kerrigan is deeply aware of the messy territory that he is trying to inhabit, but his honestly professed avoidance of the legal contexts which structure early modern promises seems a strange decision, given that this is the cultural milieu in which Shakespeare's dramatic usage of the promise was forged and would have been understood.
   
   
3. In many ways, Shakespeare's Promises is a rather old-fashioned book, depending as it does on the role of the critic as interpreter, producing close textual analysis predicated on character, theme, and the autonomy of the author. For example, he writes 'the play will remember this proferred vow' (80) or of Desdemona '[f]inally appreciating an irony, she seems to understand that Shakespeare is foreshadowing her end' (178). Whilst by no means being a committed deconstructionist, I have difficulty making sense of these statements. Behind Kerrigan's often suggestive readings lurks a larger argument about the inadequacies of recent Shakespearean criticism. On one of the rare occasions on which this is made explicit, Kerrigan writes '[a]s quickly as the productive system of modern literary theory can emit naiveties, they are cast into the word-processed seethe of contemporary Othello criticism' (153). His critical giants are T.S. Eliot, A.C.Bradley and A.P. Rossiter, all readers with much to recommend them, but the book would have been less disorienting had this potentially fascinating critical argument been made in the open. Kerrigan's zeal sometimes leads him to overstate the case, or to miss what is truly interesting about Shakespeare's engagement with the promise. By asserting the agency of characters, Kerrigan sometimes neglects the wider contexts, in particular the crucial question of how promises work in relation to performance and to the audience, or how the verbal promise in drama is often predicated on the (absent) written. Again, the deliberate avoidance of the legal context means that a complex, but crucial, structure into which Shakespeare's treatment of the promise fits is absent. He is excellent, however, on the broken promise as plot device, and on the ways in which promises of various kinds illuminate relationships between characters.
   
   
4. Given that the issue of promises is essentially verbal, and that Kerrigan's strengths lie in nuanced readings, it is a little surprising to find some evidential problems here and there throughout Shakespeare's Promises . For example, the claim that Shakespeare's 'verbs of willing must teem with precedence' (23) because the Oxford English Dictionary 'repeatedly' cites him in its entries on 'shall' and 'will' cannot be allowed to go unchallenged in the light of recent thinking about the authority of the OED; the OED's own heavy emphasis on the writings of Shakespeare makes this a circular argument. Similarly, the assertion that Nashe 'was probably alluding to Richard III ' in Pierce Penilesse is made without adducing any further evidence. Kerrigan's commitment to the autonomy of both author and interpreter occasionally leads him to readings that lack authority; nowhere, for example, can I find support for his idea that '[t]he word bury carries the double sense of a ritual of interment and a sexual entrance' (81). I assume that the persistent misspelling of Cyprus as Cypress (151, 152, 153, 163, 164, 196 etc.) is a copy-editor's error. If not, the decision to use this reading requires brief explanation; the quarto, for example, uses 'Cipres', 'Cipress' and 'Cypresse'.
   
   
5. The question of promising in Shakespeare specifically, and in early modern culture more generally, is a complex matter, and Kerrigan's book lays out some parameters and makes some suggestive readings. However, in the light of his gentle dismissal of J. L. Austin, the promise would seem to demand stronger contextualisation, and needs to be read in relation to the social practices outlined by critics and historians like David Cressy, Adam Fox, Laura Gowing and Bernard Capp. Shakespeare's Promises is a book of considerable interest, with many thought-provoking readings of specific speeches and dramatic moments, and sketches the scope of this vast subject with admirable brevity and clarity.

Works Cited