Shakespeare's Law

Shakespeare's Law
Author: Mark Fortier
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2022-05-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000577384

Shakespeare's Law is a critical overview of law and legal issues within the life, career, and works of William Shakespeare as well as those that arise from the endless array of activities that happen today in the name of Shakespeare. Mark Fortier argues that Shakespeare’s attitudes to law are complex and not always sanguine, that there exists a deep and perhaps ultimate move beyond law very different from what a lawyer or legal scholar might recognize. Fortier looks in detail at the legal issues most prominent across Shakespeare’s work: status, inheritance, fraud, property, contract, tort (especially slander), evidence, crime, political authority, trials, and the relative value of law and justice. He also includes two detailed case studies, of The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure, as well as a chapter looking at law in works by Shakespeare's contemporaries. The book concludes with a chapter on the law as it relates to Shakespeare today. The book shows that the legal issues in Shakespeare are often relevant to issues we face now, and the exploration of law in Shakespeare is as germane today, though in sometimes new ways, as in the past.

Shakespeare's Legal Language

Shakespeare's Legal Language
Author: B. J. Sokol
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 510
Release: 2000-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0485115492

This encyclopedia-style dicitonary explores early modern social life, legal thought, and the interactions within Shakespearean drama.

Shakespeare and the Law

Shakespeare and the Law
Author: Bradin Cormack
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2016-07-11
Genre: Law
ISBN: 022637856X

"William Shakespeare is inextricably linked with the law. Legal documents make up most of the records we have of his life; trials, lawsuits, and legal terms permeate his plays. Gathering an extraordinary team of literary and legal scholars, philosophers, and even sitting judges, Shakespeare and the Law demonstrates that Shakespeare's thinking about legal concepts and legal practice points to a deep and sometimes vexed engagement with the law's technical workings, its underlying premises, and its social effects. Shakespeare and the Law opens with three essays that provide useful frameworks for approaching the topic, offering perspectives on law and literature that emphasize both the continuities and the contrasts between the two fields. In its second section, the book considers Shakespeare's awareness of common-law thinking and practice through examinations of Measure for Measure and Othello. Building and expanding on this question, the third part inquires into Shakespeare's general attitudes toward legal systems. A judge and former solicitor general rule on Shylock's demand for enforcement of his odd contract; and two essays by literary scholars take contrasting views on whether Shakespeare could imagine a functioning legal system. The fourth section looks at how law enters into conversation with issues of politics and community, both in the plays and in our own world. The volume concludes with a freewheeling colloquy among Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Judge Richard A. Posner, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Richard Strier that covers everything from the ghost in Hamlet to the nature of judicial discretion"--Jacket.

Shakespeare's Legal Language

Shakespeare's Legal Language
Author: B. J. Sokol
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 510
Release: 2004-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0826492193

This encyclopedia-style dicitonary explores early modern social life, legal thought, and the interactions within Shakespearean drama.

Shakespeare and the Legal Imagination

Shakespeare and the Legal Imagination
Author: Ian Ward
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 1999-07
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780406988034

This work offers an analysis of constitutional law, examining Shakespeare's plays as legal texts. Professor Ward uses the plays as a starting point to investigate the development of constitutional ideas such as sovereignty, commonwealth, conscience and moral law, and the art of government. In the developing area of law and literature, this book examines how Shakespeare's work offers a rich source of textual material on legal subjects.

Kill All the Lawyers?

Kill All the Lawyers?
Author: Daniel Kornstein
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2005-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780803278219

Two-thirds of Shakespeare?s plays have trial scenes, and many deal specifically with lawyers, courts, judges, and points of law. Daniel Kornstein, a practicing attorney, looks at the legal issues and aspects of Shakespeare?s plays and finds fascinating parallels with many legal and social questions of the present day. The Elizabethan age was as litigious as our own, and Shakespeare was very familiar with the language and procedures of the courts. Kill All the Lawyers? examines the ways in which Shakespeare used the law for dramatic effect and incorporated the passion for justice into his great tragedies and comedies and considers the modern legal relevance of his work. ø This is a ground-breaking study in the field of literature and the law, ambitious and suggestive of the value of both our literary and our legal inheritance.

Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies

Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies
Author: Kevin Curran
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2017-05-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810135183

Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies offers the first sustained examination of the relationship between law and selfhood in Shakespeare’s work. Taking five plays and the sonnets as case studies, Kevin Curran argues that law provided Shakespeare with the conceptual resources to imagine selfhood in social and distributed terms, as a product of interpersonal exchange or as a gathering of various material forces. In the course of these discussions, Curran reveals Shakespeare’s distinctly communitarian vision of personal and political experience, the way he regarded living, thinking, and acting in the world as materially and socially embedded practices. At the center of the book is Shakespeare’s fascination with questions that are fundamental to both law and philosophy: What are the sources of agency? What counts as a person? For whom am I responsible, and how far does that responsibility extend? What is truly mine? Curran guides readers through Shakespeare’s responses to these questions, paying careful attention to both historical and intellectual contexts. The result is a book that advances a new theory of Shakespeare’s imaginative relationship to law and an original account of law’s role in the ethical work of his plays and sonnets. Readers interested in Shakespeare, theater and philosophy, law, and the history of ideas will find Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies to be an essential resource.

The Law in Shakespeare

The Law in Shakespeare
Author: C. Jordan
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2006-12-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0230626343

Leading scholars in the field analyze Shakespeare's plays to show how their dramatic content shapes issues debated in conflicts arising from the creation and application of law. Individual essays focus on such topics such as slander, revenge, and royal prerogative; these studies reveal the problems confronting early modern English men and women.

Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language

Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language
Author: Sister Miriam Joseph
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
Total Pages: 437
Release: 2008-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 158988048X

Grammar-school students in Shakespeare's time were taught to recognise the two hundred figures of speech that Renaissance scholars had derived from Latin and Greek sources (from amphibologia through onomatopoeia to zeugma). This knowledge was one element in their thorough grounding in the liberal arts of logic, grammar, and rhetoric, known as the trivium. In Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language Sister Miriam Joseph writes: "The extraordinary power, vitality, and richness of Shakespeare's language are due in part to his genius, in part to the fact that the unsettled linguistic forms of his age promoted to an unusual degree the spirit of creativeness, and in part to the theory of composition then prevailing . . . The purpose of this study is to present to the modern reader the general theory of composition current in Shakespeare's England." The author then lays out those figures of speech in simple, understandable patterns and explains each one with examples from Shakespeare. Her analysis of his plays and poems illustrates that the Bard knew more about rhetoric than perhaps anyone else. Originally published in 1947, this book is a classic.