Treason by Words: Literature, Law, and Rebellion in Shakespeare's England (review)

Rebecca Lemon's Treason by Words: Literature, Law and Rebellion in Shakespeare's England follows texts by John Barrell and Karen Cunningham concerning English treason laws,¹ but her approach is noticeably different. Barrell and Cunningham focus on the imaginative aspects of treason (and the startling fact that simply thinking about treason was a capital offense in England after the 1534 Treason Act), while Lemon centers her discussions around treason's linguistic features, effectively tracing how circulation patterns concerning the discourse of treason change during and after significant cultural events—especially times of crisis and war.

Lemon's approach is twofold. First, she points out the important, yet overlooked, fact that despite the enormous number of treason cases—including arrests, detentions, convictions, and executions—during the late Tudor and early Stuart periods, treason never succeeded; it never manifested itself in the killing of a monarch. Instead, Lemon posits, the contemporary discourse of treason develops as "subjects and monarchs report on and narrate the crime not as it materialized but as it might have been" (2). Early modern texts replay, again and again, the horror that might have happened, so that treason becomes, in Lemon's words, "doubly linguistic"—an event "created in the texts circulating after a plot" and a "form of speech that anticipates, or functions as, violence to the monarch" (3). The historical cornerstones of Lemon's analysis are the Essex rebellion and the Gunpowder Plot, two events, she asserts, "that are never studied together" (13). Considering these two events side by side, Lemon argues, "opens up these otherwise obscured connections, and thus reveals the increasing growth of moderate Protestant and Catholic subjects loyal to the state but critical of its policies on treason" (15).

Lemon begins with a discussion of John Hayward's prose history of Henry IV, dedicated to the earl of Essex, noting that it was not considered seditious or treasonous when it first appeared in 1599. In fact, she observes, because Hayward practiced civil law, a profession whose members were "overwhelmingly" royalist (44), the text may be read simply as a dialogic exploration of the "nature of sovereignty in order to determine its prerogatives" (40)—a literary form not uncommon for contemporary civil lawyers. Unfortunately for Hayward, events of 1600 with regard to the earl of Essex caused an interpretive shift, and he became the "victim of a retrospective reading in which the earl's 1600 fortunes were read back onto the lawyer's 1599 history" (34). Such "sudden, violent shift(s) in the queen's interpretive practices," Lemon argues, "exposed the radical potential in texts that had formerly circulated in support of the monarch" (51). In short, the national crisis caused by the Essex rebellion and shifting definitions of national identity caused Hayward, an otherwise-loyal subject, to be interrogated and detained as a traitor.

In the next chapter, a discussion of Shakespeare's Richard II continues this thread concerning the role of loyal subjects whom circumstances conspire to name as traitors. Lemon begins by reiterating some of the age-old questions in the commentary on the play: "how . . . can subjects respond to bad or tyrannical rule?" (54). "Where should we place our scholarly emphasis: on the culpable king who provokes and indeed justifies rebellion or on the anointed king who is martyred by traitors?" (60). Rather than tackle these questions head on, Lemon effectively argues that through nuanced representations of minor characters—Ross, Mow-bray, Gaunt, and york—Shakespeare shapes "an anatomy of resistance" (61), one that invites the audience "to recognize what Richard cannot: slavish loyalty and violent resistance are not our only political options" (66). In Lemon's reading, "it is through york, that, ultimately, the tragic effects of the chaotic political landscape become most evident, as a decent, moderate subject experiences increasing difficulties in a politically unstable commonwealth" (72).

One would expect the next chapter to continue with Shakespeare's Henriad, especially...