Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama (review)

Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama investigates the similarities and differences between actual legal cases and procedure and the portrayal of legal cases and procedure in early modern English drama. The author presents accounts of cases, depositions, and trials that she found in court archives including those at Canterbury Cathedral, Norfolk and Norwich Record Office, the Chancellor's Court Papers at the Bodleian, and the archives at the Public Record Office. The author then places these accounts in the context of several early modern studies of English law. When the editions of the dramas she studies are included, her bibliography of primary sources covers twelve tightly printed pages. Finally, the author places this comparative analysis in the context of postmodern theory — sociological, historical, and literary-critical. In short, this is an extremely ambitious book that aims to focus an immense amount of data and theory. Its strongest point is the immense research that links legal and dramatic texts to produce fruitful, sometimes startling, insights. Its weakest point is a sometimes opaque writing that seeks to foreground everything.

The author states her purpose in the introduction: "The aim of this book is to illuminate the nature and the extent of the engagement between the disciplines and cultural practices of the stage and the court in early modern England" (2). She points out some important facts: that the majority of Renaissance English dramatists had studied law at the Inns of Court, that many of the theaters were in close proximity to the Inns, and, finally, that lawyers and dramatists shared an extensive and intensive education in rhetoric. Commenting on rhetoric and drama's preeminent concern with intention and motive, she focuses her concern more sharply: the present study shows especially how legal plots in drama bring together the affective and discursive, concerns that can easily suffer an unfortunate separation in critical studies. Ideas such as probability and uncertainty, emerging in the legal and philosophical traditions of the period, are given a human face in the plays. Finally, the author indicates the range of plays that she will consider, and it extends from the familiar, like Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and Webster's The White Devil, to the nearly forgotten, like Barry's Ram Alley or the anonymous A Warning for Fair Women — and many in between.

The chapters follow a triangulation format: first, a review of a problematic legal theory and practice illuminated by dramatic plots; then a survey of plays that involve the particular legal problem; and, finally, a discussion of the historical, literary, or social issues raised, or illuminated, by the interplay of drama and the law. The chapters, in order, discuss marriage law in a variety of plays; adultery and Heywood's A Woman killed with Kindness; law and religion in the anonymous A Warning for Fair Women; rhetoric and image making in Webster's The White Devil; spatial relations between the theater, the court, and the Inns of Court revealed in Lording Barry's Ram Alley; and, in the final chapter, women in law courts and women in dramas involving legal cases. Here the key play is Webster's The Devil's Law Case.

Mukherji concludes the book with an epilogue, "The Hydra Head, the Labyrinth and the Waxen Nose: Discursive Metaphors for Law." Mukherji analyzes each of these metaphors in turn, showing how each reveals a paradoxical quality of the law. The Hydra represents the law's "bewildering, even dangerous multiplicity," evidenced in the plurality of marriage laws discussed in the first chapter (233). The waxen nose refers to the law's pliability, a pliability that is both concealed and revealed in its rhetoric, discussed in chapter 4. Finally, the labyrinth represents spatial metaphors for law (a temple of justice as well as a "dark place") discussed in chapter 5 (240). In this epilogue Mukherji also ventures into later, and even modern, literature to reveal the staying power of these figures...