By Paul Raffield
ISBN-10: 1841139211
ISBN-13: 9781841139210
Via an exam of six performs by way of Shakespeare, the writer offers an leading edge research of political advancements within the final decade of Elizabethan rule and their illustration in poetic drama of the interval. The playhouses of London within the 1590s supplied a particular discussion board for discourse and dissemination of nascent political principles. Shakespeare exploited the original potential of theatre to humanise modern debate in regards to the powers of the crown and the level to which those have been constrained through legislations. The independent topic of legislation is represented within the performs thought of the following as a sentient political being whose usual rights and liberties stumbled on an analogue within the narratives of universal legislation, as recorded in juristic texts and legislations reviews of the early sleek period. each one bankruptcy displays a specific point of constitutional improvement within the late-Elizabethan nation. those comprise abuse of the royal prerogative through the crown and its brokers; the emergence of a politicised heart type citizenry, empowered through the ascendancy of agreement legislations; the constraints imposed via the courts at the lawful volume of divinely ordained kingship; the traditional and rational authority of unwritten lex terrae; the poetic mind's eye of the judiciary and its function in shaping the structure; and the fusion of temporal and religious jurisdiction within the individual of the monarch. The publication advances unique insights into the advanced and agonistic courting among theatre, politics, and legislation. The performs mentioned provide persuasive pictures either one of the crown's absolutist traits and of different polities predicated upon classical and humanist ideas of justice, fairness, and community.
'It is now canon in revolutionary U.S. criminal scholarship that to concentration exclusively at the textual content of our structure is myopic. we glance in addition for "constitutional moments", moments while the zeitgeist is so reworked that our primary felony constitution alterations with it. during this breathtakingly erudite e-book, Paul Raffield argues that the late-Elizabethan interval was once one of these "constitutional second" in England, a second actually "played out" for the polity via the best dramatist of all time. A attorney and a thespian, Raffield handles either criminal and literary resources with beautiful care. As with the works of the outdated Masters, one dwells pleasurably on each one element till their cumulative strength presses one backward to determine the canvas in its unexpected, excellent entirety. a massive achievement.'
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Extra resources for Shakespeare’s Imaginary Constitution: Late-Elizabethan Politics and the Theatre of Law
Sample text
56 On law as a narrative representation of human behaviour, see B S Jackson, Law, Fact and Narrative Coherence (Roby, Deborah Charles, 1988) 91. 57 Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero’s Brutus or History of Famous Orators, (tr) G L Hendrickson (London, William Heinemann, 1962) 290. 58 Waterhous, above n 27, at 136. 59 Sir William Dugdale, Origines Juridiciales or Historical Memorials of the English Laws (London, F & T Warren, 1666) 110; see P Brand, The Origins of the English Legal Profession (Oxford, Blackwell, 1992) 48, 94; J H Baker, The Order of Serjeants at Law (London, Selden Society, 1984).
All references to the text of the play are from this edition. 2 The Rose Playhouse was built in 1587 by Philip Henslowe and John Cholmley, and became home to the Admiral’s Men. The remains of the Rose are now entombed in the basement of the headquarters of the Health and Safety Executive. On the Rose Playhouse, and the legal struggle to preserve its remains, see C Eccles, The Rose Theatre (London, Nick Hern, 1990). 3 R v Secretary of State for the Environment, ex p Rose Theatre Trust Ltd [1990] 1 QB 504.
In this respect, the frenzied plot of The Comedy of Errors mirrors the shift from a vertical model of society (determined by immutable social hierarchy) to a horizontal model, in which freedom of contract is the primary determinant of social status. In chapter three I consider the art of kingship in relation to Richard II. The description of the king as a representational image was central to the Tudor enactment of monarchic government as a form of theatre. The patriarchal model of kingship, in which the king is the earthly manifestation of divine will, is depicted to powerful theatrical effect in Richard II, Shakespeare’s poetic actor-king.