The Art of Law in Shakespeare

by Paul Raffield

Overview

Through an examination of five plays by Shakespeare, Paul Raffield analyses the contiguous development of common law and poetic drama during the first decade of Jacobean rule. The broad premise of The Art of Law in Shakespeare is that the 'artificial reason' of law was a complex art form that shared the same rhetorical strategy as the plays of Shakespeare.
Common law and Shakespearean drama of this period employed various aesthetic devices to capture the imagination and the emotional attachment of their respective audiences. Common law of the Jacobean era, as spoken in the law courts, learnt at the Inns of Court and recorded in the law reports, used imagery that would have been familiar to audiences of Shakespeare's plays. In its juridical form, English law was intrinsically dramatic, its adversarial mode of expression being founded on an agonistic model. Conversely, Shakespeare borrowed from the common law some of its most critical themes: justice, legitimacy, sovereignty, community, fairness, and (above all else) humanity.
Each chapter investigates a particular aspect of the common law, seen through the lens of a specific play by Shakespeare. Topics include the unprecedented significance of rhetorical skills to the practice and learning of common law (Love's Labour's Lost); the early modern treason trial as exemplar of the theatre of law (Macbeth); the art of law as the legitimate distillation of the law of nature (The Winter's Tale); the efforts of common lawyers to create an image of nationhood from both classical and Judeo-Christian mythography (Cymbeline); and the theatrical device of the island as microcosm of the Jacobean state and the project of imperial expansion (The Tempest).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781509905485
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	02/09/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Paul Raffield is Professor of Law at The University of Warwick, where he teaches Shakespeare and the Law, Origins of English Law, and Tort Law. He is the author of Shakespeare's Imaginary Constitution: Late Elizabethan Politics and the Theatre of Law (Oxford, Hart Publishing, 2010) and Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England: Justice and Political Power, 1558-1660 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004). He is co-founder and consultant editor of the journal Law and Humanities.

Table of Contents

Preface vii

Acknowledgements ix

List of Illustrations xiii

Introduction 1

1 'Fie, painted rhetoric!' Common Law, Satire and the Language of the Beast 17

I Oratory, Empire and Common Law 17

II Rhetoric, Method and the English Lawyer 18

III Our English Martiall: John Davies of the Middle Temple 34

IV Love's Labours Lost, the Inns of Court and the Sweet Smoke of Rhetoric 47

2 Princes Set Upon Stages: Macbeth, Treason and the Theatre of Law 66

I Compassing or Imagining Regicide 66

II Of Such Horror, and Monstrous Nature: The Juridical Enactment of Betrayal 71

III Royal Succession as Theatre of the Whole World 81

IV Treason and the King's Two Bodies 92

3 The Winter's Tale: An Art Lawful as Eating 108

I Law, Literature and Genealogy 108

II Horticulture, Transformation and the Artifice of Law 112

III The Nature of Law 118

IV Inheritance, Gender and the Common Law Tradition 127

V The Arts of Portraiture and Politics 138

4 Cymbeline: Empire, Nationhood and the Jacobean Aeneid 152

I Some Footsteps in the Law 152

II A Law Inscribed upon the Heart 154

III Postnati. Calvin's Case and the Journey of Jacobean Law 165

IV The Divine Purpose, Nature and the Equivocal Image 182

V The Nationalist Ends of Myth 191

5 The Tempest: The Island of Law in Jacobean England 194

I Cannibals, Colonies and the Brave New World 194

II Utopia and the Legal Imagination 203

III Enchanted Islands of Common Law 221

Afterword 236

Bibliography 239

Index 263