The Law in Shakespeare

The Law in Shakespeare

Author: C. Jordan

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2006-12-12

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0230626343

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Leading scholars in the field analyze Shakespeare's plays to show how their dramatic content shapes issues debated in conflicts arising from the creation and application of law. Individual essays focus on such topics such as slander, revenge, and royal prerogative; these studies reveal the problems confronting early modern English men and women.


Shakespeare's Legal Language

Shakespeare's Legal Language

Author: B. J. Sokol

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2004-12-15

Total Pages: 510

ISBN-13: 0826492193

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This encyclopedia-style dicitonary explores early modern social life, legal thought, and the interactions within Shakespearean drama.


Playhouse Law in Shakespeare's World

Playhouse Law in Shakespeare's World

Author: Brian Jay Corrigan

Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 9780838640227

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There is a human face to Shakespeare's theatrical world. It has been captured and preserved in the amber of litigious activity. Contracts for playhouses represent human aspiration: an avaricious hope for profit or an altruistic desire to provide for a family. Lawsuits have preserved the declarations of rights and the righteous indignations as well as the fictions and half-truths under which the Renaissance theater flourished. Leases and agreements preserve the intentions, honest or dishonest, of the men who wrote, performed, and bankrolled the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The period 1590-1623, the limits of the original Shakespearean enterprise, resemble nothing so much as a third of a century of the sort of squabbling, shoving, and place-seeking familiar to every modern theatrical professional.


Shakespeare and the Lawyers

Shakespeare and the Lawyers

Author: O Hood Phillips

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-04-15

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1135032742

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First published in 1972. Shakespeare's writing abounds with legal terms and allusions and in many of the plays the concept and working of the law is a significant theme. Shakespeare and the Lawyers gives a comprehensive survey of what Shakespeare wrote about the law and lawyers, and what has been written, particularly by lawyers, about Shakespeare's life and works in relation to the law. The book first reviews the recorded facts about Shakespeare's life and works, and his connection with the Inns of Court. It then discusses legal terms, allusions and plots in the plays; Shakespeare's treatment of the problems of law, justice and government; his description of lawyers and officers of the law; his references to actual legal personalities; and his trial scenes. Two further chapters consider the criticisms that have been made of Shakespeare's law, and the contribution to Shakespeare studies by lawyers.


The Art of Law in Shakespeare

The Art of Law in Shakespeare

Author: Paul Raffield

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-02-09

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 1509905499

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Through an examination of five plays by Shakespeare, Paul Raffield analyses the contiguous development of common law and poetic drama during the first decade of Jacobean rule. The broad premise of The Art of Law in Shakespeare is that the 'artificial reason' of law was a complex art form that shared the same rhetorical strategy as the plays of Shakespeare. Common law and Shakespearean drama of this period employed various aesthetic devices to capture the imagination and the emotional attachment of their respective audiences. Common law of the Jacobean era, as spoken in the law courts, learnt at the Inns of Court and recorded in the law reports, used imagery that would have been familiar to audiences of Shakespeare's plays. In its juridical form, English law was intrinsically dramatic, its adversarial mode of expression being founded on an agonistic model. Conversely, Shakespeare borrowed from the common law some of its most critical themes: justice, legitimacy, sovereignty, community, fairness, and (above all else) humanity. Each chapter investigates a particular aspect of the common law, seen through the lens of a specific play by Shakespeare. Topics include the unprecedented significance of rhetorical skills to the practice and learning of common law (Love's Labour's Lost); the early modern treason trial as exemplar of the theatre of law (Macbeth); the art of law as the legitimate distillation of the law of nature (The Winter's Tale); the efforts of common lawyers to create an image of nationhood from both classical and Judeo-Christian mythography (Cymbeline); and the theatrical device of the island as microcosm of the Jacobean state and the project of imperial expansion (The Tempest).


Shakespearean Genealogies of Power

Shakespearean Genealogies of Power

Author: Anselm Haverkamp

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2010-10-18

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1136890505

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Shakespearean Genealogies of Power proposes a new view on Shakespeare’s involvement with the legal sphere: as a visible space between the spheres of politics and law and well able to negotiate legal and political, even constitutional concerns, Shakespeare’s theatre opened up a new perspective on normativity. His plays reflect, even create, "history" in a new sense on the premises of the older conceptions of historical and legal exemplarity: examples, cases, and instances are to be reflected rather than treated as straightforwardly didactic or salvific. Thus, what comes to be recognized, reflected and acknowledged has a disowning, alienating effect, whose enduring aftermath rather than its theatrical immediacy counts and remains effective. In Shakespeare, the law gets hold of its normativity as the problematic efficacy of unsolved – or rarely ever completely solved – problems: on the stage of the theatre, the law has to cope with a mortgage of history rather than with its own success story. The exemplary interplay of critical cultural and legal theory in the twentieth-century – between Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsen, Walter Benjamin and Ernst Kantorowicz, Hans Blumenberg and Giorgio Agamben, Robert Cover and Niklas Luhmann – found in Shakespeare’s plays its speculative instruments.


Commentaries on the Law in Shakespeare

Commentaries on the Law in Shakespeare

Author: Edw; J. White

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2015-06-16

Total Pages: 586

ISBN-13: 9781330329993

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Excerpt from Commentaries on the Law in Shakespeare: With Explanations of the Legal Terms Used in the Plays, Poems and Sonnets, and Discussions of the Criminal Types Presented Confiscation of property - Doing homage; Witness' oath; The marriage contract; Judgment unreversed - Tendered; Setting up a new plea - Repealing former; Contempt of Court - Star Chamber; Compromising slanders; Right of Egress and Regress; Fee-Simple, Fine and Recovery - Waste; Exceptions - Improper conduct; Proof - Admission against interest; Misprison; Sheriff's post; Misdemeanors; Grand-jury; Windy side of the Law; Action of battery; Party plaintiff About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.


Marriage and Land Law in Shakespeare and Middleton

Marriage and Land Law in Shakespeare and Middleton

Author: Nancy Mohrlock Bunker

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2014-07-30

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1611476674

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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.