Impersonating the Law: The Dramaturgy of Legal Action in the York Corpus Christi Pageant and John Bale’s Three Laws

As the theatre and the law emerged as separate institutions with distinct discursive practices in early modern England, the efficacy of law was understood to be dependent on the extent to which “legal action” could be distinguished from “dramatic action.” existing scholarship has shown how dramatists of this period responded to a legal discourse evolving outside the theatre, but it has not yet demonstrated how representations of the law on early modern stages also arose from the nuanced accounts of law that were already developing in late medieval and Henrician performance. this theatre, the essay argues, generated its own institutional history of legal thinking, revealing that theatrical representations of law abide by their own attendant “laws” of dramaturgy. Here, the essay examines the strategies for describing legal action at work in the trial plays of the York corpus christi Pageant and in John bale’s Three Laws. in these plays, representations of the law rely upon the manner of law’s impersonation in the theatre—the process through which the abstraction of “the law” is instantiated in and revealed through particular figures endowed with the capacity for legal action—in order to supply an account of the efficacy of the law and the agency of its human representatives. in the trial plays of the York cycle dramatic action in the theatre is shown to confirm and legitimate legal action; in Three Laws, by contrast, bale attempts to discretize legal and dramatic action, yet cannot achieve this separation without diminishing the potency of his representations of the law. the dramaturgical dilemmas confronted by these dramatists reveal their understanding that legal action is inevitably subtended by the conventions of the theatre.