Shakespeare and Politics (review)
depends on the quality of mercy, that is the nature of charity and faith, so, I would add, religion and love affect the legal and dramatic representations of the bond. The self-conscious nature of debate is a key element in the problem plays. All’s Well is no exception. Harmon calls attention to the metaphysics in this play and how it is a summing up of the three plays he has discussed because it shares qualities with each. It is designed as a play to fulfill its contract. Merchant and All’s Well share similar imagery between the bond and the marriage contract. Harmon sees in the bed-trick a fusion of the ends of a contract and of marriage: Helena gets the ring to beget a child. Deficiencies in contracts in these four plays need to be rectified to restore social integrity. This has a comic aspect to it: the structural imperatives of comedy demand this kind of new order. In aiming the discussion beyond these plays Harmon draws his argument together clearly, discussing Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, Twelfth Night, King Lear, and The Tempest, which he refers to as “his most metaphysical poem” (161). Harmon also concentrates on the marriage contract as an ordering principle, which was as true for Elizabethan and Jacobean law and religion as it was for Renaissance comedy. The marriage at the end of comedy is generative socially and dramatically. Harmon’s book leads up to the epiphany that Shakespearean characters have at their wisest and most patient moments: a fulfillment in “contentment in a genuine existence” (163). The law in these plays helps to find quotidian resolutions to the imperfect and problematic worlds of these dramas — except for Troilus and Cressida — that allow for generative paths to better times. The exception of Troilus creates its own implications for a double bind to the double name of nature that Harmon discusses in his exploration of eternal bonds and true contracts. This book, a useful contribution to Shakespearean studies and to law and literature, is clear, able and generative despite whatever problems it faces and embodies. JONATHAN HART University of Alberta