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  • Law and Empire in English Renaissance Literature
  • Peter Kanelos
Brian Christopher Lockey . Law and Empire in English Renaissance Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. x + 236 pp. index. $85. ISBN: 0-521-85861-5.

The subject of Law and Empire in English Renaissance Literature is much narrower than its title suggests: what Brian C. Lockey endeavors in this work is to reposition our understanding of the role that romance narratives, in particular, played in shaping and critiquing the legal and ethical foundations of the nascent British Empire. Lockey begins with David Quint's contention that whereas the epic form was associated in the Renaissance with imperial expansion, focusing on the victors, romance elements folded into that form often served to direct attention and empathy toward the victims of empire, thus establishing a countervailing narrative. While Quint asserts that this paradigm appertains to Continental, not English, literature, Lockey argues that a more attentive reading of romance fiction indicates that the model does indeed hold for the English tradition as well. Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Wroth, and others, Lockey contends, in probing matters of universal justice and transnational law through the genre of romance, drew the English into a complex conversation on the ethics of empire.

How and why the genre of romance was especially positioned to articulate and interrogate colonial aspirations is Lockey's first concern. He identifies a triad of components that characterizes Elizabethan romances: the chivalric code, the pastoral mode, and the "mirror for princes" tradition. The chivalric code, and more pointedly the call of the knight-errant, laid the foundation for the law of nations, [End Page 1026] in which the prerogative of a natural law permitted the pursuit of a just war. The pastoral mode, which traditionally set the corruption of the city against the integrity of the country, in the context of English colonialism, placed a profligate England against the green world of its colonies, allowing the colonized to be seen as backwards and primitive, but also ingenuous and sympathetic. Finally, the "mirror for princes" tradition saw literature as prescribing action for rulers and, more critically, holding rulers accountable to a standard higher than their own inclinations. This mix of components, Lockey suggests, ultimately served the project of English expansionism: "English writers of romance attempt to theorize (paternalistically) the rules of conquest in such a way that the conquerors act according to what they see as the interests of the vanquished, either by punishing barbarous people, reforming them, or defending a kingdom or legitimate sovereign from an unjust conqueror or usurper" (18). Romances represented a transnational view of law and ethics that was malleable enough to justify under most circumstances intervention, conquest, and colonization. Yet, Lockey asserts, the deep deliberations within romance narratives on questions of natural law and universal justice also provided opportunities to turn a critical eye back on the enterprise of empire.

Law and Empire investigates the relationship between romance and international justice deftly and from many angles. Lockey reads Sir Philip Sidney's Old Arcadia as following Francisco Vitoria's arguments for "charitable intervention," conquest carried out for the benefit of the conquered, which was, at least nominally, Spanish imperial policy. Yet like Vitoria's philosophical successor, Bartolomé de las Casas, Sidney's work challenges the motives of those who intervene, questioning whether or not purely charitable intervention is ever a possibility. In the English context, according to Lockey, Edmund Spenser's work elucidates the tensions between the common-law inheritance, which held that a people produced over time a body of law that best reflected, and therefore best served, their character, and natural-law doctrine, with its universal standards for civil and civilized behavior. In his political tract A View of the Present State of Ireland, Spenser argues that the Brehon law, the native customary law of Ireland, must be superseded by English jurisprudence for the benefit of the Irish: yet, Spenser realizes, this argument itself is untenable, as it suggests that native English legal forms are appropriate for universal application. It is only through the medium of romance, Lockey insists, that Spenser can mediate between the principles of common and civil law, by allowing in book 6 of The...

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