Shakespeare's Acts of Will: Law, Testament and the Properties of Performance by Gary Watt (review)

Probing the analogy between the conditions of performance and the structure of testamentary action, Gary Watt's book offers an original, minutely researched, and provocative thesis. Tracing 'testament' to its Latin etymology—suggesting the presence of a witness to the mind—Watt offers a new way of understanding the exchange between performers and audience that defines the theatrical event. What is more, he suggests that exchange leads to change—transformations of abiding social significance. In the process, Watt steers us into thinking about the affinity between law and theatre in a novel way: in terms of an expression of will that amounts to a social contract. While readers and viewers of Shakespeare's plays have affectively registered the notion of audience as witness for some time—often through meditations on the epilogues inviting audience judgement, approval or pardon, or on self-reflexive inset plays—Watt's work is the first to connect this notion with such sustained rigour to theatre's engagement of the imaginative work of law, and to the 'understood' nature of this relation in early modern English culture which made the intimacy and impact of this dialogue possible. Watt delves deep into the rhetoricity of the law, at the heart of what he calls the 'creative construct' (2) of English common law—at once expressing and moving wills.

Watt establishes his thesis through readings of six Elizabethan plays—Richard II, King John, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet—though these plays are not his horizon. His reason for concentrating on Elizabethan Shakespeare is the belief that these plays focus Shakespeare's engagement with testament, using it as a plot-making device, a prop, and the basis of a semantic field. This notion is a premise that could bear further examination, as 'inheritance and succession' (3), concerns that Watt attributes to the Elizabethan works, seem to be quite as germane in, say, the emphatically Jacobean play, Macbeth, where will, witnessing, success, and succession are all hopelessly and tragically entangled, along with the language of execution. It is not insignificant that Watt uses the Jacobean Timon of Athens as his point of entry in the introductory first chapter— and rightly so. The way in which Timon connects a deferral of the performance of promissory words with imagining a future, signalled in Watt's sensitive analysis, is also operative in the Macbeths' blasting of their future in trying to secure it through a will whose agency is obscure; or in the King's contractual promise to Helena in the Jacobean comedy All's Well that Ends Well: 'Thy will by my performance shall be served' (2.1.207), or the dynamic between tradition and trade (to borrow Watt's terms) in the same play. The context of land ownership in which the major shifts in testamentary law occurred—the replacement of the traditional feudal or familial inheritance with a more modern model of disposal of private property by will through the Henrician Statute of Wills (1540)—surely begs the question of how this shift inflected the division of kingdom in King Lear and its emotional, moral, and political ramifications (only fleetingly glanced at on page 82). There is an entire web of connections entwining promissory words, testamentary action, temporal negotiation, and theatrical transaction, which spreads beyond the Elizabethan plays: a probing analysis of what changes between periods might have been more illuminating than a speculative premise that there was a shift in Shakespeare's interest in testamentary issues for one of several possible reasons. Such an analysis would also have allowed a consideration of the generic implications of testamentary structures of feeling as the law evolved. But this does not detract from the suggestiveness of Watt's discussion of the playtexts he chooses: rather, it comes out of a desire to extend the discussion to the rest of Shakespeare's work, and indeed to ask...