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"Law and literature England History 17th century."
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Lines of Equity
The late seventeenth century was a period of major crises in science, politics, and economics in England. Confronted by a public that seemed to be sunk in barbarism and violence, English writers including John Milton, John Dryden, and Aphra Behn imagined serious literature as an instrument for change. InLines of Equity, Elliott Visconsi reveals how these writers fictionalized the original utterance of laws, the foundation of states, and the many vivid contemporary transitions from archaic savagery to civil modernity.
In their writings, they considered the nature of government, the extent of the rule of law, and the duties of sovereign and subject. They asked their audience to think like kings and judges: through the literary education of the individual conscience, the barbarous tendencies of the English people might be effectively banished. Visconsi calls this fictionalizing program \"imaginative originalism,\" and demonstrates the often unintended consequences of this literary enterprise.
By inviting the English people to practice equity as a habit of thought, a work such as Milton'sParadise Losthelped bring into being a mode of individual conduct-the rights-bearing deliberative subject-at the heart of political liberalism. Visconsi offers an original view of this transitional moment that will appeal to anyone interested in the cultural history of law and citizenship, the idea of legal origins in the early modern period, and the literary history of later Stuart England.
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Marriage and Land Law in Shakespeare and Middleton
Marriage and Land Law in Shakespeare and Middleton examines the dynamics of early modern marriage-making, a time-honored practice that was evolving, often surreptitiously, from patriarchal control based on money and inheritance, to a companionate union in which love and the couple’s own agency played a role. Among early modern playwrights, the marriage plays of Shakespeare and Middleton are particularly, though not uniquely, concerned with this evolution, observing the movement towards spousal choice determined by the couple themselves. Through the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, the role of the patriarch, though often compromised, remained intact: the father or guardian negotiated the financial terms. And, in a culture that was still tied to feudal practices, land law held a primary place in the bargain. This book, while following the arc of changing marriage practices, focuses on the ways in which the oldest determination of status, land, affects marital decisions. Land is not a constant topic of conversation in the twenty-one theatrical marriages scrutinized here, but it is a persistent and omnipresent truth of family and economic life. In paired discussions of marriage plays by Shakespeare and Middleton—The Taming of the Shrew/A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, All’s Well That Ends Well/A Trick To Catch the Old One, Measure for Measure/A Mad World, My Masters, The Merchant of Venice/The Roaring Girl, and Much Ado About Nothing/No Wit, No Help Like A Woman’s—this book explores the attempts, maneuvers, intrigues, ruses, and schemes that marriageable characters deploy in order to control spousal choice and secure land. Special attention is given to patriarchal figures whose poor judgment exploits inheritance law weaknesses and to the lack of legal protection and hence the vulnerability of women—and men—who engage the system in unconventional ways. Investigation into the milieu of early modern patriarchal influence in marriage-making and the laws governing inheritance practices enables a fresh reading of Shakespeare’s and Middleton’s marriage comedies.
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Taking Exception to the Law
Taking Exception to the Law explores how a range of early modern English writings responded to injustices perpetrated by legal procedures, discourses, and institutions. From canonical poems and plays to crime pamphlets and educational treatises, the essays engage with the relevance and wide appeal of legal questions in order to understand how literature operated in the early modern period.
Justice in its many forms – legal, poetic, divine, natural, and customary – is examined through insightful and innovative analyses of a number of texts, including The Merchant of Venice , The Faerie Queene , and Paradise Lost . A major contribution to the growing field of law and literature, this collection offers cultural contexts, interpretive insights, and formal implications for the entire field of English Renaissance culture.
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Theaters of Pardoning
From Gerald Ford's preemptive pardon of Richard Nixon and Donald Trump's claims that as president he could pardon himself to the posthumous royal pardon of Alan Turing, the power of the pardon has a powerful hold on the political and cultural imagination. InTheaters of Pardoning, Bernadette Meyler traces the roots of contemporary understandings of pardoning to tragicomic \"theaters of pardoning\" in the drama and politics of seventeenth-century England. Shifts in how pardoning was represented on the stage and discussed in political tracts and in Parliament reflected the transition from a more monarchical and judgment-focused form of the concept to an increasingly parliamentary and legislative vision of sovereignty.
Meyler shows that on the English stage, individual pardons of revenge subtly transformed into more sweeping pardons of revolution, from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, where a series of final pardons interrupts what might otherwise have been a cycle of revenge, to later works like John Ford'sThe Laws of Candy and Philip Massinger's The Bondman, in which the exercise of mercy prevents the overturn of the state itself. In the political arena, the pardon as a right of kingship evolved into a legal concept, culminating in the idea of a general amnesty, the \"Act of Oblivion,\" for actions taken during the English Civil War. Reconceiving pardoning as law-giving effectively displaced sovereignty from king to legislature, a shift that continues to attract suspicion about the exercise of pardoning. Only by breaking the connection between pardoning and sovereignty that was cemented in seventeenth-century England, Meyler concludes, can we reinvigorate the pardon as a democratic practice.
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Shakespeare and the law
In July 2007, the School of Law at the University of Warwick hosted an international conference on 'Shakespeare and the Law'. This was a truly interdisciplinary event, which included contributions from eminent speakers in the fields of English, history, theatre and law. The intention was to provide a congenial forum for the exploration, dissemination and discussion of Shakespeare's evident fascination with and knowledge of law, and its manifestation in his works.
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Political Communication and Political Culture in England, 1558-1688
This book surveys the channels through which political ideas and knowledge were conveyed to the English people from the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth I to the Revolution of 1688. Shapiro argues that an assessment of English political culture requires an examination of all means by which this culture was expressed and communicated. While the discussion focuses primarily on genres such as the sermon, newsbook, poetry, and drama, it also considers the role of events and institutions. Shapiro is the first to explore and elucidate the entire web of communication in early modern English political life.
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The Trouble with Ownership
Copyright and intellectual property issues are intricately woven into any written work, but the precise nature of this relationship has plagued authors, printers, and booksellers for centuries. What does it mean to own the products of our intellectual labors in our own time? And what was the meaning three centuries ago, when copyright laws were first put into place? Jody Greene argues that while \"owning\" one's book is critical to the development of modern notions of authorship, studies of authorial property rights have in fact lost sight of the most critical valence of owning in early modern England: that is, owning up to or taking responsibility for one's work. Greene puts forth what she calls a \"paranoid theory of copyright,\" under which literary property rights are a means of state regulation to assign responsibility for printed works, to identify one person who will step forward and claim the work in exchange for the right to reap the benefits of the literary marketplace. Blending research from legal, historical, and literary archives and drawing on the troubled authorial careers of figures such as Roger L'Estrange, Elizabeth Cellier, Daniel Defoe, John Gay, and Alexander Pope,The Trouble with Ownershiplooks to the literary culture of early modern England to reveal the intimate relationship between proprietary authorship and authorial liability.
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Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England
Censorship profoundly affected early modern writing.
Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England
offers a detailed picture of early modern censorship and
investigates the pressures that censorship exerted on
seventeenth-century authors, printers, and publishers. In the
1600s, Britain witnessed a civil war, the judicial execution of a
king, the restoration of his son, and an unremitting struggle among
crown, parliament, and people for sovereignty and the right to
define \"liberty and property.\" This battle, sometimes subtle,
sometimes bloody, entailed a struggle for the control of language
and representation. Robertson offers a richly detailed study of
this \"censorship contest\" and of the craft that writers employed to
outflank the licensers. He argues that for most parties, victory,
not diplomacy or consensus, was the ultimate goal. This book
differs from most recent works in analyzing both the mechanics of
early modern censorship and the poetics that the licensing system
produced-the forms and pressures of self-censorship. Among the
issues that Robertson addresses in this book are the workings of
the licensing machinery, the designs of art and obliquity under a
regime of censorship, and the involutions of authorship attendant
on anonymity.
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