Solon and Thespis: Law and Theater in the English Renaissance (review)

An ambivalent attitude to the law and to theater has occurred since antiquity. The Platonic Socrates explored the fraught relation between law and justice and between the poet and the republic. How could human laws be just and representation embody wisdom and knowledge? Theatrical and legal representation posed problems for the philosopher, who loved truth, and not the seductive ways of forensic argument or illusory role-playing.

Like Plato, Isocrates and Aristophanes commented on the theater. Aristophanes attacked the theater and philosophy in his Old Comedy satire, taking Socrates to task in The Clouds and taking a run at Euripides in The Archanians and Peace. In The Frogs, Aristophanes set up a debate between Aeschylus and Euripides, the one defending the poet as a teacher of morals and the other saying that the poet represents reality. Plato takes up this question in book 10 of Republic in the quarrel between philosophy and poetry. Plays have a specific power: "Dramatic poetry has a most formidable power of corrupting even men of high character, with a few exception" (605c, Cornford trans. 337). Such performance moves people in the audience to give themselves up to sympathy for actions that in life would be scorned, so that feeling overwhelms reason. Passion, language, and role-playing can, in drama or in law, obscure reality and the path to truth, knowledge, and wisdom. Although being more favorable to poetry and drama than Plato is, Aristotle still places philosophy above poetry, which is above history, because of its universal nature. In the Renaissance, however, Philip Sidney placed poetry over philosophy. And so the ancient world and its revision framed the debate of law and theater in the Renaissance.

This is one of the contexts for the volume Dennis Kezar has edited. The collection explores the relation between law and drama in the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, Marston, and others. The title of the collection comes from a meeting between Solon, an Athenian lawmaker, and Thespis, a Greek poet and actor, over whether lies in a play lead to falsehood in society. Role-playing and the relation between art and life are central in this debate. Why is the law real and drama a fiction? Why the friction between law and drama in early modern England when they shared spaces and rhetoric and both interpreted the social and the imaginary? Both involve fictions, so why are legal fictions of any more worth than dramatic ones?

The three parts of the Kezar's collection help approach some of these problems. In the first part, "Jonson and the Tribe of Law," Matthew Greenfield notes that the War of the Poets shows the tension between Roman law (Jonson) and common law (Dekker's use of a jury). Dekker trusted juries and the audience while Jonson did not. Paul Cantor argues that the seeming artlessness in form of Bartholomew Fair actually allows it to develop characters and content. The tension between law and spontaneity in this representation of the marketplace is one important manifestation of the relation between law and theatre. According to Frances Teague, setting Volpone in Venice rather than in London freed it from topicality, especially of the recent investigation and prosecution of those involved in the Gunpowder Plot. The law could be errant and assinine, badly conceived and full of perjury, and the consideration of the relations among law and lawlessness, nation and providence, is something that Teague draws out in drawing comparisons between the Gunpowder Plot and the plot of Volpone.

The second part, "Legal Rhetoric and Theatrical Pressure," begins with Heather Dubrow's discussion of land law in Shakespeare's King Lear and in his culture. Arguing for more notice of workaday law, such as land law, and in particular rules surrounding property disputes, Dubrow seeks to interpret the lawless world of this great play, invoking tensions over property as illuminations of anxieties over housing and being dislodged, as well...