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Though the links between early modern literature
and the law have long been a topic of historical and critical
interest, recent years have seen such studies advance at an
increasingly rapid and sophisticated pace. The past several
years have brought forth work on topics as diverse as treason
(Lemon) and the intricacies of debtor-creditor relationships
in the late sixteenth century (Ross). Though the timing of their
publication was perhaps coincidental, the arrival of three new
books demonstrates again the variety and fruitfulness of this
growing field of inquiry.
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Of the three volumes surveyed here, Dennis
Kezar's Solon and Thespis: Law and Theater in the English
Renaissance offers perhaps the most varied set of reflections
on the "law" in early modern England. This is in part the inevitable
result of an essay collection rather than a single-author monograph,
and it is certainly not a detriment to its contribution. Eschewing
a literal and narrowly focused examination of "law" and "theatre"-there
are no investigations, for example, of the specific laws that
governed playhouses-the book's essays instead favor a more expansive
understanding of their topic that draws its inspiration from
New Historicist considerations of the theatricality of power
and the means by which formal legal structures simultaneously
compete with and rely upon more fluid and protean understandings
of authority.
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Organized thematically rather than chronologically,
the assembled essays address a wide range of playwrights, including
Chapman, Dekker, Jonson, and Shakespeare, as well as members
of the Inns of Court. In each instance the essays' authors set
these writers alongside considerations of the social, political,
and economic practices that both inform their work and are elucidated
by it. Luke Wilson, for example, juxtaposes Chapman's Chabot
with the trial and eventual dismissal of Francis Bacon from
the Lord Chancellorship for bribery, resulting in a consideration
of the dynamics of gift-giving and patronage that is sensitive
to both Derridean critical theory and the sophisticatedly subtle
ways in which the early moderns themselves understood the complex
relationship between law and community. Similarly, Karen Cunningham
demonstrates how the practice of mooting-the debating of imaginary
cases meant to train and sharpen the lawyers of the Inns of
Court-provided those same lawyers with not only potential subjects
for plays such as Gorboduc but also an understanding
of how the practice of playing might "secure the realm in acts
of imagination" (215).
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While the volume as a whole merits attention,
several of its features deserve particular praise. After a general
introduction by Kezar the collection begins with a cluster of
three articles on Ben Jonson, the combined result of which is
to reaffirm the playwright's work as a viable alternative to
the tendency of many critics (particularly those in faculties
of law) to turn first to Shakespeare for their source texts.
Heather Dubrow's essay on land law and King Lear demonstrates
not only a careful analytical summary of a tangled and often
presumptively prosaic area of early modern law but also the
way in which such knowledge can, through careful historical
exposition, reveal how concerns more commonly studied on a national
level-colonial expansion, the fear of the "Other"-might also
animate more local relationships. Finally, Debra Shuger challenges
us to see early modern censorship as driven not by the fear
of subversive ideas per se but by the profound anxiety
over the danger that slander and falsehood posed to a political
community still reliant upon notions of charity and honour.
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Like Kezar's collection, Subha Mukherji's Law
and Representation in Early Modern Drama focuses on the
relationship between theatre and the law, specifically how drama
alternately interrogates, enhances, or otherwise illumines the
nature of early modern legal discourse and institutions. Mukherji
begins from an implicitly New Historicist standpoint, focusing
on the processes of "representation" as a means to explore the
links between "the disciplines and cultural practices of the
stage and court in early modern England" (2). Distinctive about
Mukherji's approach, however, is her extensive use of archival
and manuscript resources-legal documents, case histories, and
contemporary treatises-as a means of entry into and commentary
upon an expansive collection of early modern dramas, including
a range of obscure and critically neglected plays and pamphlets
that shared the stage (and here the page) with more familiar
works by Shakespeare, Webster, and Haywood. In turn these dramas
not only undergo fresh interpretation but also offer valuable
and otherwise elusive testimony to the "lived culture of litigation"
that remains so difficult to extract from extant legal documents
and commentaries (16).
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The potential benefits of Mukerhji's approach
are perhaps best illustrated by the book's initial chapter on
marriage law and the material tokens of marital commitment.
It begins with a detailed exposition of the marriage law and
in particular its application to the notoriously knotted matter
of espousals, in which canon courts were often called upon to
enforce a promise of marriage that had floundered upon differing
interpretations of the commitment each party had previously
expressed. Drawing heavily upon Henry Swinburne's A Treatise
of Spousals and its incomplete manuscript sequel (a copy
of which is usefully included in the text as an appendix), Mukerhji
details how conflicts over verbal promises expose the interpretative
difficulty inherent in words and how the law must construct
a stable interpretation from evidence that is often incomplete
or contingent upon an individual speaker or context. Such difficulties
made the existence of rings and other love tokens particularly
valuable, as they materially and synecdochally represent more
inscrutable human intentions. At the same time, however, these
material items are subject to the same interpretative difficulties
as the promises they supposedly secure, ultimately demonstrating
the difficulty the law encounters in stabilizing representation.
Along with court records Mukherji illustrates her analysis with
not only the natural choice of Shakespeare's Merchant of
Venice but with a host of other dramas-at least 17 other
plays come into view. Some of these are simply gestured to,
but the tally as a whole helps illustrate not only the wealth
of material present but also the challenge Mukherji faces in
its presentation, as scholars (particularly those unfamiliar
with these issues) may find the chapter's prose and its evidence
at times somewhat turgid and overly complex.
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This is, however, a small complaint for an
otherwise fine volume, and it generally does not reoccur in
the chapters that follow, which handle such topics as the legal
status of women, the physical and conceptual geographies of
stage and court in early modern London, and the intersection
between the period's domestic tragedies and its Protestant moralizers.
Combining an intense focus on specific legal and theatrical
moments with an expansive and ambitious set of claims, this
is a book that will repay repeated reading.
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In contrast to the previous two volumes, Brian
Lockey's Law and Empire in English Renaissance Literature
approaches the law on a grander-scale, that of nations and political
philosophy. During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,
Lockey argues, England's increasingly imperialistic ambitions
demanded at least theoretically (if not practically) a legal
justification that native traditions of common law were incapable
of providing. More amenable to this project were elements of
continental and natural law which, despite their problematic
associations with Catholicism, offered a more expansive and
universal set of standards that eschewed the "legal chauvinism"
of the common-law courts (9). While he is attentive to the institutional
structures of English law, Lockey's interest lies not with the
law per se but with its influence on the structures of
literature, specifically the romance genre. Beginning with Spanish
chivalric tradition and then moving into the English reception
of that tradition in Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Wroth,
Lockey contends that romance writers drew directly from the
struggle between common and continental law as they attempted
to articulate a more sophisticated justification for the process
and human costs of imperial conquest.
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To his credit Lockey's reading of the early
modern romance tradition avoids any simplified narrative of
literary development. Instead each writer is presented as balancing
the potentially deep contradictions between nationalism, sovereignty,
and the basic human rights possessed by both conqueror and conquered-as
the English empire grew, so too did the complexity of its literary
responses. This approach yields fresh readings of often somewhat
neglected texts. Focusing on the Old Arcadia (rather
than its later revision), Lockey brings forward a Sidney whose
Protestant militantism is tempered by a reliance upon Catholic
values as a foundation for his notion of "charitable conquest,"
in which imperialism is deemed acceptable when driven by virtue
rather than self-interest. Turning to Spenser, Lockey examines
not only the author's A View of the Present State of Ireland
but also The Fairie Queene, emphasizing not Book
Five and its focus on justice but the portrayal of salvage man
in Book Six. As the salvage man encounters first Calepine and
then Arthur and his squire Timias, becoming increasingly civilized
in the process, we see Spenser imagining a space for the English
conquest of Ireland in which the expansion of English law at
once immunizes English settlers from Irish barbarity and enables
the transformation of the "good" Irish-that is, those whose
natural inclination to civility renders them amenable to acceding
to the English conquest. A similar concern with arguments for
the civilizing effects of imperialism animates the book's readings
of Cymbeline and Wroth's Urania.
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The book is thus as much about the romance
as it is the law, a fact somewhat belied by its title. (Presumably
"law" and "empire" are more striking keywords than "romance,"
at least for contemporary literary critics.) As such its readings
at times seem somewhat abstracted from the specific and often
devilishly complex political and jurisprudential moments they
share, though the chapter on Wroth is a well-done exception
in this regard. Lockey's term for what these texts do in regards
to the legal debates he identifies is "engagements," a word
that at once signals both investiture and a potential lack of
recognizable influence over outcomes. The desire for such direct
political influence, as Julie Stone Peters recently recognized,
has animated the field of law and literature since its conception.
Lockey's book demonstrates just how extensively this desire
was shared by early modern writers of romance, and perhaps also
just how unrealized that desire could be.
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Together these texts not only attest to the
continuing vitality of law and literature studies in the early
modern period but they also point the way toward future research.
Though Lockey in particular is rightfully interested in some
of the theological underpinnings of law, and Mukerhji ably details
the influence of church courts over moral offenses and institutions
such as adultery and marriage, the field as a whole tends to
emphasize the common law and civil court system. Although the
power of church courts declined in the seventeenth century,
their connections to an institution struggling to come to terms
with its own ritual heritage still makes this area of English
legal and social history ideal for the sort of inquiries exemplified
in Kezar's volume. Similarly, while Mukherji's use of archival
resources suggests the wealth of manuscript information that
remains to be brought to bear on familiar literary texts, both
dramatic and non-dramatic, these same resources might themselves
be fruitfully examined themselves as narratives rather than
simply transcripts or depositions. Such potential suggests the
extent to which the best work in "law and literature," at least
in the early modern period, possesses a truly interdisciplinary
bent, attentive to texts by cultural historians (Cynthia Herrup
and J.A. Sharpe, for example) and legal scholars. What the books
reviewed here ably demonstrate, however, is that these same
historians and legal scholars would have much to learn from
literary critics as well.
