Forensic Shakespeare by Quentin Skinner (review)

Professor Skinner is well known in his capacity as an intellectual historian, but his professional interest in classical rhetoric, as evidenced in his study Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (1996), is familiar to perhaps fewer readers. It may not be common knowledge either that the greatest practitioner of rhetoric in English literature is William Shakespeare, who studied it in the systematic humanist curriculum instituted in all Elizabethan secondary schools, from Eton and St. Paul’s to the King Edward VI grammar school in Stratford-upon-Avon. Most scholarship on the subject has concentrated on Shakespeare’s use of elocutio, the branch of rhetoric devoted to effective persuasion. Skinner breaks new ground by investigating the dramatist’s use of inventio, the process by which speakers would discover arguments, especially in a courtroom context. Skinner has studied in great detail the precise techniques, essentially adversarial, described in Roman rhetorical writings. He expounds these lucidly, both in the original Latin texts, helpfully cited in his footnotes (the publisher deserves thanks for placing them at the foot of the page), and in the sixteenth-century vernacular books that faithfully reproduced their teachings, though the English legal system was very different from the Roman. Skinner is not afraid to go into detail: I estimate that about a third of his book consists of citations from this material.

With this scholarly background, Skinner delivers close readings of Shakespeare’s “forensic” plays, most successfully for The Merchant of Venice and Othello. He shows how Shakespeare makes Shylock adopt a courtroom procedure that breaks all the rules, scornfully convinced of the rightness of his cause. Shakespeare’s Portia turns the tables on Shylock by rebutting his contention that his case against Antonio is juridical in character and then showing that it is a “legal issue, turning on the interpretation of a text.” The terms of Shylock’s contract, to receive a pound of his debtor’s flesh should the debt go unpaid, failed to consider that Antonio’s blood would be spilled, so the plaintiff’s case fails. Othello includes a short “trial scene” in which Shakespeare’s Moor rebuts the accusation that he won Desdemona’s love illicitly, but Skinner’s main focus is on Shakespeare’s brilliant creation of Iago as an evil advocate who can manipulate appearances and pervert argument. Ironically, it is the testimony of Iago’s wife, Emilia, as an independent witness that destroys his web of lies. (I repeatedly mention Shakespeare’s name in my description of this book, for Skinner has an unfortunate tendency to ascribe an intimate knowledge of Roman legal procedures to the characters themselves.) The book is less convincing on Hamlet and Timon of Athens than on Othello and The Merchant of Venice, but Skinner does find evidence of Shakespeare’s forensic skills in several unlikely places, such as The Rape of Lucrece and All’s Well That Ends Well. Forensic Shakespeare is, overall, a genuinely illuminating book and should be required reading for every serious student of the dramatist.