Taking Exception to the Law: Materializing Injustice in Early Modern English Literature ed. by Donald Beecher, Travis DeCook, Andrew Wallace, and Grant Williams (review)

The eleven essays in Taking Exception to the Law effectively demonstrate how early modern English literature registers confusion, competition, and improvisation in the legal principles and procedures to which it was intricately knit. The volume thus makes a valuable contribution to recent studies that present, as Grant Williams writes in the introduction, "a complication, if not a wholesale rejection, of the assumption that the law exerts a homogenous top-down force on society" (17). Williams offers a useful review of Law and Literature (sic) as an interdisciplinary subfield with origins in U.S. law schools in the 1970s and of recent scholarship that sorts through the untidy relationship between juridical and literary histories. Of particular interest to scholars focused on the immanence of law specifically in early modern literature is Williams's discussion of the legal discourses, institutions, and agents essential to literary production in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. At the same time as literature and law share value and function, Williams explains, literature remains a distinct discipline, and in the early modern period it persistently critiqued the law. This claim underlies the titular phrase "taking exception to the law."

The volume's subtitle directs attention to the "four specific legal materializations" (23) that organize, but do not formally divide, the essays: textual instruments, juridical administration, educational discourses, and tyrannical abuses of the law. Anchoring the volume is Bradin Cormack's examination of legal documents in Shakespearean drama. Through inspiring readings of the indictment in Richard iii, the bond and map in 1 Henry iv, and the inventory in Henry viii, followed by an extended analysis of letters of writ and commission in Hamlet, Cormack shows how papers on stage function as linguistic "emblems" for narrative, political, and legal processes of substitution. The names of legal documents show Shakespeare "explor[ing] the character of justice inside a legal system whose ongoing effect was to change the order of the real by offering a set of textual and technical substitutions for the real" (47). Tim Stretton's essay focuses on the bond as materializing promises and the difficulty of keeping them in early modern England. Stretton argues that The Merchant of Venice calls for individual compassion in the face of institutional rigour. Virginia Lee Strain turns our attention to the general pardon, which like other parliamentary writings has suffered from critical neglect. Through readings of Francis Bacon's writings, John Donne's Satyres, and Christmas revels at the Inns of Court, Strain reveals a pervasive awareness of the general pardon as failing to release English subjects from the ever-present snare of statute law.

In another essay that highlights the volume's effort to rectify the "over-privileging of canonical voices" in Law and Literature (15), Deborah Shuger presents a fascinating analysis of Archbishop Laud's prison diaries, "one of the unacknowledged masterpieces of English prose" (120). In a persuasive corrective to celebrations of English exceptionalism, Shuger examines Laud's narrative as a potent critique of common law as not interested in discovering legal truth but in allowing for protection of (guilty) consciences. David Stymeist considers the sensationalist, profit-driven news reports as an unwitting agent of legal change. In the criminal biographies included in many news reports, Stymeist discerns neither moral corruption nor evil-mindedness but social economy as "formative of criminal subjectivity and the basis for criminal acts" (138). In this way, criminal biography unintentionally but "clearly influenced early modern habits of forensic evaluation" (153), as evident in the increasing number of mitigated sentences handed down by juries in the seventeenth century. Barbara Kreps considers the rhetorical proficiencies developed in grammar schools and practised in moot courts, in particular the abilities to debate different sides of a question and to play with language, that underlie the representation of slander and evidence in Much Ado About Nothing...