Abstract
In the opening moments of The Spanish Tragedy, Kyd presents his audience with an image of judicial uncertainty that is almost emblematic in its starkness. As the ghost of Don Andrea wanders in the underworld, he is faced with three judges: Minos, Aeacus and Rhadamanth. After discussing the matter among themselves, the judges fail to decide on an appropriate fate for Don Andrea, and resolve to pass the matter on to ‘our infernal king’, Pluto (1.1.52).2 The image of three judges unable to reach a verdict sets a worrying trend for what is to come: from the inaugural moment of early modern revenge tragedy, the law is in crisis. Yet the possibility that revenge tragedy as a genre is capable of serious legal engagement has hitherto been given no systematic attention. Bearing in mind Lambarde’s suggestion that in order to learn about the law it can be illuminating to seek out law’s ‘contraries and differents’, this book reveals the ways in which early modern revenge tragedy evinces an ongoing and thorough interrogation of the legal system of its time. This significantly alters our perception of both revenge tragedy and early modern legal history, by overturning critical commonplaces such as the lone stage revenger, while challenging the dominant narrative of early modern English law as inclusive and participatory.
[I]t is the receiued manner of teaching in our law, To shew things by their contraries and differents: and seeing that great lighte commeth to the matter thereby, I may neyther condemne it as unapt, nor reiect it as vnseruiceable.
William Lambarde, Eiranarcha1
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Notes
This is typified by Fredson Thayer Bowers’ Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587–1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940). For the lasting impact of Bowers’ work, see Chapter 1.
For example, Victoria Kahn and Lorna Hutson, eds, Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Erica Sheen and Lorna Hutson, eds, Literature, Politics and Law in Renaissance England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Subha Mukherji, Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Constance Jordan and Karen Cunningham, eds, The Law in Shakespeare (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Paul Raffield and Gary Watt, eds, Shakespeare and the Law (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2008); Andrew Zurcher, Shakespeare and Law, Arden Critical Companions (London: Methuen, 2010). The predeliction for Shakespeare’s work is evident from the titles even in this small sample.
For an overview, see C. W. Brooks, ‘Litigants and Attorneys in the King’s Bench and Common Pleas, 1560–1640’, in Legal Records and the Historian, ed. J. H. Baker (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978), pp. 41–59. This is treated in depth in Chapter 1.
The participatory nature of early modern justice is well documented by legal and social historians. See Thomas Green, Verdict According to Conscience: Perspectives on the English Criminal Trial Jury 1200–1800 (London: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Cynthia B. Herrup, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, 1550–1640 (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000).
For the vengeful roots of common law practices, see Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, The Common Law (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 38 (first publ. in 1881).
See for example Bradley J. Irish’s survey article, ‘Vengeance, Variously: Revenge before Kyd in Early Elizabethan Drama’, Early Theatre, 12 (2009), 117–34. On the idea of revenge in the genre of comedy, see Anne Rosalind Jones, ‘Revenge Comedy: Writing, Law and the Punishing Heroine in Twelfth Night, Merry Wives of Windsor, and Swetnam the Woman-Hater’, in Shakespearean Power and Punishment: A Volume of Essays, ed. Gillian Murray Kendall (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), pp. 23–38.
English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 6. The exception here is Hamlet, who is very much a part of a ruling elite.
John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 204.
Charles A. Hallett and Elaine S. Hallett, ‘Antonio’s Revenge and the Integrity of the Revenge Tragedy Motifs’, Studies in Philology, 76 (1979), 366–86 (p. 380); Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
‘These Were Spectacles to Please My Soul’: Inventive Violence in the Renaissance Revenge Tragedy’, in Staging Pain, 1580–1800: Violence and Trauma in British Theater, ed. James Robert Allard and Mathew R. Martin (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 49–56 (p. 49).
Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation, 3rd edn (London: Harvard University Press, 2009) (first publ. 1988), p. 106.
‘The Ghost of History: Hamlet and the Politics of Paternity’, Law and Literature, 18 (2006), 171–97 (p. 192, n. 10).
Robert N. Watson, ‘Tragedies of Revenge and Ambition’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. Claire McEachern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 160–81 (p. 160).
Gregory M. Colón Semenza, ‘The Spanish Tragedy and Revenge’, in Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion, ed. Garrett A. Sullivan Jr, Patrick Cheney, and Andrew Hadfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 50–60 (p. 54).
I. G., A Refutation of the Apology for Actors (London, 1615) (STC no. 12214), p. 57.
James Boyd White, The Legal Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Posner, Law and Literature; Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); Richard Weisberg, Poethics: And Other Strategies of Law and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
A Critical Introduction to Law and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 8.
See also Jacques Derrida’s explication of Kafka’s story, in an article also called ‘Before the Law’, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 181–220.
‘“Understood Relations”: Law and Literature in Early Modern Studies’, Literature Compass, 6 (2009), 706–25 (p. 710). For a more in-depth analysis of the need to surpass such ‘sterile polarity’ in relation to early modern drama and law, see Mukherji’s ‘Jonson’s The New Inn and a Revisiting of the “Amorous Jurisdiction”’, Law and Literature, 18 (2006), 149–69 (p. 154).
From Lawrence M. Friedman, The Republic of Choice: Law, Authority, and Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 4.
Cf. E. J. Hobsbawm, Bandits (London: Abacus, 2001): ‘Indeed the original (Italian) meaning of bandito is a man “placed outside the law”’, p. 12.
See Kathy Eden’s introduction to Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 5ff.
Kill All the Lawyers?: Shakespeare’s Legal Appeal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 4.
Theaters of Intention: Drama and the Law in Early Modern England (California: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 21.
Peter Goodrich’s entry on ‘Law’ in The Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, ed. Thomas O. Sloane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 425. This antagonism is arguably more prominent in modern-day legal theory, but it still has relevance for the early modern period. See also Barbara Shapiro, ‘Classical Rhetoric and the English Law of Evidence’, in Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe, pp. 54–72.
‘The Law Wishes to have a Formal Existence’, in Closure or Critique: New Directions in Legal Theory, ed. Alan Norrie (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), pp. 157–74 (p. 170).
Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. Donald A. Russell, Loeb Classical Library Series (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001) 4.2.21.
Philip J. Finkelpearl discusses the many connections between legal and literary circles, going so far as to say: ‘For a brief space of time — roughly from 1550 to 1575 — [the Inns of Court] were the literary center of England’, John Marston of the Middle Temple: an Elizabethan Dramatist in his Social Setting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 24.
Seneca His Tenne Tragedies, ed. Thomas Newton (London, 1581) (STC no. 22221). Jessica Winston sees this translation project as part of ‘the domestication of tragedy as a genre for cultivating political consciousness in Elizabethan England’, in ‘Seneca in Early Elizabethan England’, Renaissance Quarterly, 59 (2006), 29–58 (p. 55). Such ‘political consciousness’ is by no means confined within the walls of the Inns of Court in the period.
William Baldwin, A Myrroure for Magistrates (London, 1559) (STC no. 1247) and The Last Parte of the Mirour for Magistrates (London, 1574) (STC no. 1250); Thomas Blenerhassett, The Seconde Part of the Mirrour for Magistrates (London, 1578) (STC no. 3131).
Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, The Tragedie of Gorboduc (London, 1565) (STC no. 18684). For criticism see Franco Moretti, ‘“A Huge Eclipse”: Tragic Form and the Deconsecration of Sovereignty’, in The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1982); Henry James and Greg Walker, ‘The Politics of Gorboduc’, English Historical Review, 110 (1995), 109–21; Cunningham, ‘“So Many Books, So Many Rolls of Ancient Time”: The Inns of Court and Gorboduc’.
The most recent contributions to the study of Inns of Court culture include Records of Early English Drama: Inns of Court, ed. Alan H. Nelson and John R. Elliott Jr (Cambridge: Brewer, 2010); Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring, Sarah Knight, eds, The Intellectual and Cultural World of the Early Modern Inns of Court (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).
Holger Schott Syme, ‘(Mis)representing Justice on the Early Modern Stage’, Studies in Philology, 109 (2012), 63–85 (p. 72). It is noteworthy that not until Syme’s article from 2012 is it underlined that the frequent staging of justice in early modern drama does not include the representation of a single trial by jury. As I see it, this makes the collective pursuit of justice in the revenge genre all the more relevant to English legal procedure.
B. J. Sokol, and Mary Sokol, Shakespeare’s Legal Language: A Dictionary (London: Athlone, 2000); Zurcher, Shakespeare and Law; Luke Wilson, ‘Drama and Marine Insurance in Shakespeare’s London’, in The Law in Shakespeare.
‘Of Revenge’, in The Essays, ed. John Pitcher (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), pp. 72–3 (p. 72).
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© 2016 Derek Dunne
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Dunne, D. (2016). Introduction: Staging Justice. In: Shakespeare, Revenge Tragedy and Early Modern Law. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-57287-5_1
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