Justice, Women, and Power in English Renaissance Drama (review)

Justice, Women, and Power in English Renaissance Drama announces its membership in what is broadly termed the law and literature movement. Instead of focusing on specific legal theories, practices, and procedures, however, this volume gathers its contributions under the wide umbrella of "justice." In an illuminating introduction, editors Andrew Majeske and Emily Detmer-Goebel trace changing concepts of justice in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; the eight essays that follow exemplify some of the shifting meanings. Because these changes appear first in representational art, the editors argue, we must expand our examination of documents to include those that reflect justice in action—most prominently, dramatic representations, which capture and record the transformations. The editors' resident muse is Lady Justice, offered up in a fascinating discussion of the multiple and often-irreconcilable depictions of the figure from its early origins, when she was invariably depicted as clear sighted, to the emergence of a blindfolded Justice, variously interpreted in the popular imagination as erring or impartial. The project stakes its modern relevance on a vexed relationship between specifically female judicial concerns and a Machiavellian view of political stability. In a reading that recruits both political writings and the play Mandragola, Majeske and Detmer-Goebel contend that Machiavelli idealizes predictable politics; where men can be counted on to pursue pleasure, women cannot. Thus to achieve a settled political state, women must be subjected to male patterns of behavior. This submerged subjection has serious implications for modern political stability: Machiavelli's thought, a "keystone" for many modern Western legal and political systems, relies on a "more or usually less apparent subjection of women by men" (16-17).

The collection opens with Kathryn R. Finin's analysis of Portia's transgressive, hyperliteral verbal performance in The Merchant of Venice, where Portia discovers a subversive potential in linguistic and sexual indeterminacy that critiques both gender and legal norms. In one of two essays on The Winter's Tale, Cristina Leon Alfar builds on feminist theorists such as Judith Butler to suggest that Paulina and Hermoine redirect conventional narratives on law and gender to craft a compelling story that calls not only Leontes, but the entire masculinist system of political authority, into question. Catherine E. Thomas, also writing on The Winter's Tale, examines early modern concerns about leadership in light of the damage that unruly passions seem to do to the justice system, finding that although Leontes reacts to personal provocations and produces public devastation, Paulina directs her equally emotional response toward the public good and political healing. Turning to the intersection of the plays of John Webster and social anxieties about Mary Stuart, Carol Blessing reads the popular attacks on Mary for violating conventional religious and sexual boundaries as animating the trial scenes in The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Devil's Law-Case. For Cheryl Dudgeon, domestic tragedies from actual cases like those dramatized in Arden of Faversham showcase forensic inquiry and the instability of evidentiary categories, reinforcing the point that evidence is a matter of construction, gendering, and interpretation. In a particularly rich essay, Emily Detmer-Goebel focuses on Shakespearean bed-tricks in All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure to consider the doubleness of such ruses: although these tricks seem to give women power to heal unruly men such as Bertram and Angelo, Detmer-Goebel asks if this female power is entirely positive, since it is centered in women's lying about sex. David Evett, on the other hand, identifies moral interdependency in Measure for Measure, to argue that women, especially Mariana, provide necessary social balance and demonstrate an equally necessary willingness to forgive and forge new "sacramental" unions (143). The collection concludes with a return to The Merchant of Venice. Andrew Majeske offers a provocative reading of Portia's legal strategy. He asserts that the duke's appeal to mercy at the start of the trial scene is...