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Reviewed by:
  • Shakespeare and the Law: A Conversation among Disciplines and Professions ed. by Bradin Cormack, Martha C. Nussbaum, Richard Strier
  • Joseph S. Jenkins (bio)
Shakespeare and the Law: A Conversation among Disciplines and Professions. Edited by Bradin Cormack, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Richard Strier. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. vi + 336. $41.00 cloth, $21.00 paper.

A title such as Shakespeare and the Law: A Conversation among Disciplines and Professions can mean many things. This collection developed from a 2009 event at the University of Chicago entitled “Shakespeare and the Law” (6). Contributors include Daniel Brudney, Lorna Hutson, Constance Jordan, Richard H. McAdams, Richard A. Posner, Charles Fried, David Bevington, Kathy Eden, Stanley Cavell, Marie Theresa O’Connor, Diane P. Wood, and the editors. The volume concludes with an edited transcript of a roundtable featuring Posner, Richard Strier, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Justice Stephen G. Breyer. The volume includes so many moments of interest that it is impossible to do justice to them all. This review will survey some highlights, while reserving comments on the scope and aims of the volume until the conclusion.

Bradin Cormack’s essay, “Decision, Possession: The Time of Law in The Winter’s Tale and the Sonnets,” works to broaden typical conceptions of “Shakespeare and the Law.” Cormack concentrates on the “microanalytical force” of Shakespeare’s language, the playwright’s “turning and testing words for their potential” (45), which reveal “the productive capacity of language for testing categories and norms” (46). Citing Walter Benjamin, Samuel Weber, and Giorgio Agamben, Cormack argues that focus on such temporal overlaps undercuts the kind of “metaphysical decisionism” (53) that Carl Schmitt posits as the role of the sovereign.

Brudney, in “Two Differences between Law and Literature,” makes efforts to stabilize various oppositions. Here are some examples: “literary authority” versus “morally legitimate political authority” (25); “direct authority” versus “derivative authority” (28); and literary interpretations, which grip us and make us temporarily unable to consider competing interpretations, versus legal interpretation, which should “keep competing interpretations in mind” (34). For Brudney, the authority of an aesthetic text is “direct”; that is, it derives from nothing but itself, from a “specific arrangement of words” (29). This is “some intrinsic quality of the thing” (28), which Brudney illustrates by citing the charisma of the “leader,” as described by Max Weber (28). Brudney opposes this direct aesthetic authority with what he calls “the authority of the legal text,” which derives from “something external to the text, say, from the fact that it was duly enacted in a particular way” (29).

Another excellent essay is Eden’s “Liquid Fortification and the Law in King Lear.” Eden traces the play’s use of the terms “royal” and “loyal” to their linguistic [End Page 259] and philosophical antecedents. Eden credits Shakespeare’s King Lear with the use of the term “loyal” in ways that tease out prior linguistic connections with legality, especially regarding the treacherous Edmund (208). Likewise, the word “royal,” mostly in regard to Lear, presses ideas of kingship away from positive law and legalism toward a kind of Senecan natural-law nobility. Hutson’s contribution deserves similar praise. “‘Lively Evidence’: Legal Inquiry and the Evidentia of Shakespearean Drama” distances itself from the trope of performance, instead foregrounding narrative and the gaps in it that make it compelling—the “‘unscene’” (72). Hutson attributes this theatrical innovation to a cultural conjunction at the turn of the seventeenth century between rhetoric manuals teaching narrative strategies that allow hearers to engage in inferential “imaginative visualization” and “the rise of a vernacular literature and culture of evidential inquiry in English common law” (74). This popular forensic culture encouraged hearers to make inferences concerning the desires and motivations of persons about whom only limited facts were known.

This volume abounds in insights owing to more familiar critical practice. These are both enjoyable and instructive. In the roundtable, Breyer recalls the many times he has relied, as a Supreme Court justice, on Angelo’s reasoning in Measure for Measure (“‘I show it [pity] most of all when I show justice, / For then I pity those I do not know’”) and then expresses his confusion that these words...

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