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The End of Satisfaction: Drama and Repentance in the Age of Shakespeare by Heather Hirschfeld (review)

Heather Hirschfeld’s excellent new book explores the cultural and dramatic resonances of a central but often overlooked aspect of the Reformation in England: the impossibility of expiatory atonement in Reformed theology. Whereas other literary scholars and historians have discussed “more spectacular points of religious conflict, such as purgatory, iconoclasm, or the Eucharist,” Hirschfeld makes a convincing case for the significance of the redefinition of “repentance, atonement, and satisfaction,” which gave rise to considerable psychological anxiety and structural vicissitudes across a range of cultural practices and institutions (29). Hirschfeld explores the theological implications of the impossibility of doing or making “enough” in penitential satisfaction for several such practices and institutions— ecclesiastical debate, revenge, finance, and marriage— which she pairs with refreshing and nuanced readings of some of the period’s most important plays: Doctor Faustus, The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello. She examines the ways these plays work through questions of “enough” in repentance, and in her “PostScript” she suggests that the theater offered the possibility and the pleasure of satisfaction no longer available in Reformed theology. Hirschfeld situates her work squarely in the socalled turn to religion in early modern literary studies. Such work assumes that the early modern secular and theological realms were inseparably intertwined, and that religious practice and doctrine cannot be reduced to or subsumed under the heading of “politics,” “economics,” or “power.” Like Sarah Beckwith, Huston Diehl, Bryan Crockett, Elizabeth Mazzola, Michael O’Connell, John Stachniewski, and Adrian Streete, Hirschfeld’s primary interest is the way early modern English drama acted as both an arena and an archive for the public exploration of radi-