The central claim of Tom MacFaul's new book is that male friendship offered late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English dramatists an ethical model for exploring the formation of character in a world of contingency and flux. While humanist models of male friendship emphasize the equality of friends and the permanence of the bonds between them, early modern English drama stages friendship as exactly the opposite. Male characters bond with one another as socially dependent individuals, MacFaul argues, in order to assert themselves and fashion a sense of character in a shifting and unstable social and political world. One of the most interesting consequences of this thesis is that friendship exists alongside other social forms but cannot be reduced to them. Six of MacFaul's nine chapters consider social relations against which ethical friendship is measured: relationships between brothers, romantic love between men and women, master-servant relationships, politically motivated friendship, social fellowship, and false friendship. Because male friendship is based on symbiosis (a term MacFaul leans on several times in the introduction to define and develop his understanding of male friendship), it is always open to instrumentalization. Nevertheless, MacFaul argues, the instrumentalization of male friendship does not fully explain relationships we see developing between dramatic characters, relationships based on “a desire for the other's well-being and an assurance that this feeling is reciprocated” (26). Not surprisingly, MacFaul's favorite way to begin thesis and topic sentences is with the word “whilst.” Whilst social forms suggest we read male friendship in this or that way, MacFaul argues, there is something irreducible in the staging of ethical male friendship that deserves closer inspection.

MacFaul's historical assessment of early modern male friendship depends largely on Alan Bray's posthumous work, The Friend, in which Bray argues that loving male friendship was a central aspect of social life before modernity but became something suspicious with the advent of modern civil society. MacFaul argues that early modern English drama stages that transition, as ideals of male friendship rang hollow against emerging concepts of the individual and society. In this way, ethical male friendship becomes a reparative gesture that attempts to reclaim ideals while recognizing their impossibility. MacFaul positions his thesis as a continuation of work on early modern male friendship produced in the last fifteen years by critics such as Lorna Hutson, Alan Stewart, and Lauri Shannon, and he only points out differences between himself and other critics as they emerge locally, in readings of particular plays. This is too bad because MacFaul's focus on ethics reads more like a challenge to past criticism than a continuation of it. For MacFaul, ethical concerns replace the explicit focus on gender and sexuality that characterizes earlier works on male friendship. While MacFaul acknowledges that male friendship often implies a homosocial structure, he turns his attention away from the role that women play in mediating relations between men in order to focus on intensely affective relations between men. At the same time, MacFaul is also overly cautious about the erotic nature of those relations between men. For MacFaul, sexual desire is superseded by the (always unfulfilled) desire to be a true friend, to achieve the kind of friendship that transcends social mobility and hierarchy. Alan Bloom, who shows up in neither the bibliography nor the index but does appear at a key moment in the introduction, seems to be a strong enough influence on MacFaul's conceptualization of male friendship to join the ranks of Hutson, Steward, and Shannon and, if included, would have given MacFaul the opportunity to develop the stakes of his thesis much more fully and provocatively.

Despite the book's understated relation to its thesis, Male Friendship in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries deserves and rewards close attention. Certainly, Male Friendship will be of great interest to Shakespeareans and scholars of early modern English drama. The readings, which are perceptive and finely developed, range across William Shakespeare's works and include discussions of dramatic works by Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, John Marston, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster, as well as nondramatic works by John Donne, John Lyly, and Edmund Spenser. The book begins with a fascinating chapter on Shakespeare's Sonnets, which shows how theological discourse legitimates and complicates the class dynamics of male friendship. Subsequent chapters show how ethical male friendship emerges with and against the backdrop of other familial and romantic relations in Shakespeare's comedies and romances and against the backdrop of political relations in the tragedies and history plays. The last two chapters, which are the most innovative and suggestive, read a series of plays—including Timon of Athens, Love's Labour's Lost, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello—in order to show how Shakespeare's concept of fellowship empties social bonds of their affective content and, in unexpected ways, sanctions antisocial relations between friends. It is in these final chapters that MacFaul's emphasis on ethics really pays off, as characters are increasingly constrained by a hollow staging of ideal male friendship that they are then driven to subvert.