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 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 and the Law

Shakespeare and the Law
Author: Gary Watt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2024-10-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198877099

Shakespeare and the Law appreciates Shakespeare and his works as expressions of an English early modern culture in which the shared rhetorical practices of dramatists and lawyers were informed by the renaissance of classical practice. It argues that Shakespeare was not primarily concerned with the technical accuracy of law, legal ideas, and legal performances, but with their capacity to generate dramatic interest through dispute, trial, the breaking of bonds, and the bending of rules. It follows that all Shakespeare's plays are in a sense “law plays”. Rhetorical practices can emerge as performances of power, but in Shakespeare's works they show more as instances of the human instinct to challenge power by playing with rules. Shakespeare employs the special magic of legal language, actions, and materials to conjure playgoers to act as a critical jury to events transacted on stage. This calls for close attention to Shakespeare's poetic sound effects and the ways they prompt audiences to confer a fair hearing.

Eternal Bonds, True Contracts

Eternal Bonds, True Contracts
Author: A. G. Harmon
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0791484920

In Eternal Bonds, True Contracts, A. G. Harmon closely analyzes Shakespeare's concentrated use of the law and its instruments in what have often been referred to as the problem plays: Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, The Merchant of Venice, and All's Well That Ends Well. Contracts, bonds, sureties, wills—all ensure a changed relationship between parties, and in Shakespeare the terms are nearly always reserved for use in the contexts of marriage and fellowship. Harmon explores the theory and practice of contractual obligations in Renaissance England, especially those involving marriage and property, in order to identify contractual elements and their formation, execution, and breach in the plays. Using both legal and literary resources, Harmon reveals the larger significance of these contractual concepts by illustrating how Shakespeare develops them both dramatically and thematically. Harmon's study ultimately enables the reader to perceive not only these plays but also all of Shakespeare's writing—including his poetry—as integral with, and implicated in, the proliferating legalism that was helping to define early modern English culture.

Shakespeare and the Lawyers

Shakespeare and the Lawyers
Author: O Hood Phillips
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2013-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1135032742

First published in 1972. Shakespeare's writing abounds with legal terms and allusions and in many of the plays the concept and working of the law is a significant theme. Shakespeare and the Lawyers gives a comprehensive survey of what Shakespeare wrote about the law and lawyers, and what has been written, particularly by lawyers, about Shakespeare's life and works in relation to the law. The book first reviews the recorded facts about Shakespeare's life and works, and his connection with the Inns of Court. It then discusses legal terms, allusions and plots in the plays; Shakespeare's treatment of the problems of law, justice and government; his description of lawyers and officers of the law; his references to actual legal personalities; and his trial scenes. Two further chapters consider the criticisms that have been made of Shakespeare's law, and the contribution to Shakespeare studies by lawyers.

The Dignity of Commerce

The Dignity of Commerce
Author: Nathan Oman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2016
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 022641552X

The Dignity of Commerce is a rigorous and novel exploration of moral justification of contract law through how it fosters well-functioning markets. Nathan B. Oman demonstrates how contract law deals overwhelmingly with the matters of commercial exchange, and how commerce in turn breeds habits of mind, or virtues, that support a liberal society. He also shows how markets provide a framework for peaceful cooperation across the fault lines of race, culture, religion, and politics that outdo even democratic political institutions. The Dignity of Commerce is ambitious in its aims and its conclusions and the implications are powerful. It is sure to elicit a serious discussion at the very heart of one of the most central areas of legal studies, and Nathan B. Oman has provided a clear, engaging, and comprehensive vehicle to get the discussion started.