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The sixteenth century was a turning point for both law and drama. Relentless professionalization of the common law set off a cascade of lawyerly self-fashioning – resulting in blunt attacks on lay judgment. English playwrights, including Shakespeare, resisted the forces of legal professionalization by casting legal expertise as a detriment to moral feeling. They celebrated the ability of individuals, guided by conscience and working alongside members of their community, to restore justice. Playwrights used the participatory nature of drama to deepen public understanding of and respect for communal justice. In plays such as King Lear and Macbeth , lay people accomplish the work of magistracy: conscience structures legal judgment, neighbourly care shapes the coroner’s inquest, and communal emotions give meaning to confession and repentance. An original and deeply sourced study of early modern literature and law, Communal Justice in Shakespeare’s England contributes to a growing body of scholarship devoted to the study of how drama creates and sustains community. Penelope Geng brings together a wealth of imaginative and documentary archives – including plays, sermons, conscience literature, Protestant hagiographies, legal manuals, and medieval and early modern chronicles – proving that literature never simply reacts to legal events but always actively invents legal questions, establishes legal expectations, and shapes legal norms.

In the late sixteenth century, the common law experienced a phenomenal growth, both in the number of practitioners and jurisdictional power. A comparison of popular and professional literature on legal administration or judicature reveals the complex and ambivalent cultural response to the “rise” of the common law. Despite the usual praise for the common law as that which distinguished England from France, Italy, and other countries using civil law, many questioned the law’s ability to deliver justice. Popular writing on justice, produced by preachers, moral essayists, and dramatists, centered on the law’s failure to protect the poor, weak, and otherwise marginalized members of society. While popular legal commentators lacked the power to reform legal practices, they attempted to shape the public’s perception of the law and lawyers through the writing of legal character. Authors of assize sermons and character books defined the character of a “good magistrate” as a “loving” father. In contrast, legal writing by lawyers suppressed the language of love and placed the emphasis on reason. This article investigates the resulting friction between professional and popular representations of judges and judicature and examines its impact on Shakespearean drama. In Henry IV, Part 2, Shakespeare explores the dissonance and irresolution within the cultural discourse on legal administration, and in so doing, expresses a tragic truth about the paucity of justice in a world consumed by law.

In recent years, Anne Askew has attained something of celebrity status among scholars of Tudor women's writing and, more generally, of Tudor Reformation history. In the course of privileging Askew's examinations above those of other female defendants (such as Elizabeth Young), scholars sometimes equate Askew's rhetorical expertise with legal expertise. Thus, it has been argued that Askew knew the latest developments in Tudor legislation and used this knowledge to her advantage during her examinations. Was Askew aware of legal reforms? How did she and other Protestant defendants formulate their responses? These issues and other questions are addressed by comparing Askew's defense to those of three other Protestants—Elizabeth Young, John Lambert, and William Thorpe. All four examinations appear in John Foxe's Book of Martyrs. All four defendants used the Bible to construct cogent arguments against, and critiques of, their examiners. From this, it is concluded that Protestant defendants such as Askew were highly skilled debaters, but not necessarily experts of Tudor law.

In early modern England, two equally powerful legal epistemologies existed. Leading lawyers viewed jurisprudence as the perfection of reason. In contrast, popular authors defined it as the epitome of moral feeling. According to the latter, jurisprudence—knowledge of justice—depended less on a subject's formal training in the law than on his or her conscience. By modeling for readers the \"proper\" emotional responses to specific legal situations, popular writers presented their literary fictions as essential tools for honing legal wisdom. This project seeks to show the crucial work of literary authors in resisting pressure from the legal profession to cede the practice of jurisprudence to the \"professors of the law.\" In preserving a place for emotion in law, and in highlighting the ability of laypeople to understand and conduct legal work, literary authors successfully undercut legal professionals' attempts to make law a field of pure reason.