Male Friendship in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

MacFaul' s decision to associate Iago with "respecting human difference" will certainly raise some eyebrows, but on the whole his thesis offers a very interesting complement to Laurie Shannon's work on friendship in Sovereign Amity.2 Her work presents Renaissance friendship as a factor in the long-term development of political equality and social autonomy. [...]MacFaul fails to take up the extratextual implications of his often illuminating work on character. [...]they at times feel rather tangential to the book's main thesis, particularly when they take up relationships that do not "com[e] out on the other side" of ideal friendship so much as simply have nothing to do with it.