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C H A P T E R I The Semblance of Virtue Law, Nature, and Shakespeare It is a fair generalization of our times to say that the law figures into literature as some type of ordeal the characters must battle through. If it takes the form of a trial, their plight is often unjust; heroes persevere against judicial badgering until they are exonerated. If the law takes the form of rules or imperatives, it often becomes a prohibition the characters labor under, an institutional hindrance they must get past to achieve freedom and happiness. In drama, the law has always provided a certain theatrical tension, but is in itself rather deadly. Few would watch a staged trial for the trial’s sake alone. Rather, the dramatic payoff comes in seeing whether the characters will endure. We have come to think that, in art, freedom lies outside the law; indeed, that nature itself lies outside the law. It is a dramatic gauntlet to be run, or a psychological mechanism to be shed. That this should be so is not without justification in human experience. As Frank Kermode has explained, the discord between what is just and what is real harkens back to one of the first things we learn about the world as children , when we cry that something “isn’t fair.”1 When we grow up and experience the law in its more institutional sense, it plagues us with its seeming obtuseness, its capriciousness, its inability to redress the very evils it is supposed to guard against. No wonder then, Kermode continues, the law and the legal profession should be so frequently excoriated in drama: The animus against the legal profession arose partly . . . because of its habit of obscuring its operations in jargon unintelligible to nonlawyers, but more because of a natural fear of men who, though visibly merely men and theologically sinners, could, by wearing furred gowns and  1  other insignia, exercise dreadful powers as the representatives of the great judge, God himself.2 To the common man, it frequently seems the lawyer, the judge, and the educated —all those who pronounce the law’s shibboleths and make use of its labyrinths—can escape its clutches, while the rest are left to hang. What a relief it is, then, to escape from the “law,” if only for a while. The antihero, the confidence man, the rebel without a cause, are only some of the modern protagonists who must (and often do) outwit the law’s representative. As modern as this line of thought may be, there is a long history behind it, at least insofar as law is cast in opposition to pleasure. By the Renaissance, the idea was already old, and Shakespeare made good use of it: revelry in the forest, the midnight carryings-on of confused lovers, the shenanigans of agreeable fools, lost in their cups—all far from the staid and stultifying court. As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream are chief examples. At the heart of these familiar themes is the whole tradition of topsy-turvy Maytime, boy bishops, and carts put before horses. It is an old, old story. But it is not the whole story, especially not when it comes to Shakespeare. For alongside the tradition to which I have alluded is another, equally old, and no less dramatic story. It is one in which law is used to actually bring about freedom, happiness, community, and, most important, the dignity of persons and things that comes with sheer, simple integrity. “Integrity” here is meant not only in the sense of honor, but also in the more fundamental and existential sense of something actually being what it says it is, consistent with its nature. In the primary plays under analysis in this book—Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, The Merchant of Venice, and All’s Well That Ends Well—that is precisely the problem: a disjunction of essential proportions ; and in these plays, that is a problem the law can help mend. In fact, Shakespeare uses the law and its various instruments as a device to help us through these plays, to bring the events to resolution. Here, law not only “is” something, it also “does” something. It is what makes these works the playwright’s most philosophical and most fascinating. Historically, of course, all except The Merchant of Venice have been unpopular works. And all four, from time to time, have been included in a category known as...

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