The “Amending Hand”: Hales v. Petit, Eyston v. Studd, and Equitable Action in Hamlet

Abstract

The Clown’s reference in Hamlet (1599) to the “three branches” of action,¹ arguably the most famous legal allusion in the Shakespearean canon, has long been understood as an allusion to a case heard in the Common Pleas in 1562, Hales v. Petit. There has, however, been little attempt to make sense of the relationship of the case to the play.² I am interested in the case as a property suit brought by a woman, and thus in what it permits in terms of feminist legal historiography. I read the case’s notorious judgment in situ — that is, in the context of the case’s extensive argumentation as furnished to us by Edmund Plowden’s report — to trace the ideological investments that shape the legal rationale and judgment. I also read Plowden’s report in relation to Chief Justice Sir James Dyer’s, to show how the case reifies certain disabling constructions of the relationship of women and property.³ The property aspects of the case make it one of a trio of sixteenth-century cases reported by Plowden important to the law of married women and property in the period. The second case, Wimbish v. Tailbois, lays bare the misogynistic tendencies of much sixteenth-century jurisprudence, and the third case, Eyston v. Studd, gave rise to Plowden’s famous commentary on equity. I offer analysis of all three cases in order to suggest how the law’s narrative control of a dead man’s actions, its constructions of the relationship of women to property, and one of the difficulties at the heart of Plowden’s conception of equity converge in Shakespeare’s play.