Ranging widely across law, aesthetics, religion, and philosophy, this book offers the first account of the place of judgment in Shakespearean drama Shakespeare and Judgmentgathers together an international group of scholars to address for the first time the place of judgment in Shakespearean drama. Contributors approach the topic from a variety of cultural and theoretical perspectives, covering plays from across Shakespeare's career and from each of the genres in which he wrote. Anchoring the volume are two critical contentions: first, that attending to Shakespeare's treatment of judgment leads to fresh insights about the imaginative relationship between law, theater, and aesthetics in early modern England; and second, that it offers new ways of putting the plays' historical and philosophical contexts into conversation. Taken together, the essays in Shakespeare and Judgmentoffer a genuinely new account of the historical and intellectual coordinates of Shakespeare's plays. Building on current work in legal studies, religious studies, theater history, and critical theory, the volume will be of interest to a wide range of scholars working on Shakespeare and early modern drama. Key Features Provides the first account of the place of judgment in Shakespearean drama Offers a fresh perspective on the imaginative relationship between law, religion, and aesthetics in Shakespeare's plays Models new ways of putting the plays' historical and philosophical contexts into conversation.

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.

Ranging widely across law, aesthetics, religion, and philosophy, this book offers the first account of the place of judgment in Shakespearean dramaShakespeare and Judgment gathers together an international group of scholars to address for the first time the place of judgment in Shakespearean drama. Contributors approach the topic from a variety of cultural and theoretical perspectives, covering plays from across Shakespeare's career and from each of the genres in which he wrote. Anchoring the volume are two critical contentions: first, that attending to Shakespeare's treatment of judgment leads to fresh insights about the imaginative relationship between law, theater, and aesthetics in early modern England; and second, that it offers new ways of putting the plays' historical and philosophical contexts into conversation. Taken together, the essays in Shakespeare and Judgment offer a genuinely new account of the historical and intellectual coordinates of Shakespeare's plays. Building on current work in legal studies, religious studies, theater history, and critical theory, the volume will be of interest to a wide range of scholars working on Shakespeare and early modern drama. Key FeaturesProvides the first account of the place of judgment in Shakespearean dramaOffers a fresh perspective on the imaginative relationship between law, religion, and aesthetics in Shakespeare's playsModels new ways of putting the plays' historical and philosophical contexts into conversation.

Celebrated legal scholar Kenji Yoshino's first book, Covering, was acclaimed—from the New York Times Book Review to O, The Oprah Magazine to the American Lawyer—for its elegant prose, its good humor, and its brilliant insights into civil rights and discrimination law. Now, in A Thousand Times More Fair, Yoshino turns his attention to the question of what makes a fair and just society, and delves deep into a surprising source to answer it: Shakespeare's greatest plays. Through fresh and insightful readings of Measure for Measure, Titus Andronicus, Othello, and others, he addresses the fundamental questions we ask about our world today and elucidates some of the most troubling issues in contemporary life. Enormously creative, engaging, and provocative, A Thousand Times More Fair is an altogether original book about Shakespeare and the law, and an ideal starting point to explore the nature of a just society–and our own.

Robert G. Hunter maintains that the impact of the Protestant Reformation on the Elizabethan mind was in great part responsible for the emergence of the outstanding tragedies of the age. Luther and Calvin caused men to ask how God can be just if man is not free, and Shakespeare's greatest tragedies confront the vexing problems posed by these altered conceptions of man's freedom of will and God's providential control of natural circumstance. Shakespeare's audiences were not single-minded. He wrote for semi-Pelagians, Augustinians, Calvinists, and men and women who did not know what to think. Confl icting certainties, doubts, and uncertainties were his raw material, both within his mind and the minds of the audience. Hunter shows how Shakespeare uses the major attitudes toward God's judgment in creating Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. He notes that Shakespeare's different viewpoints are the heart of the tragedies themselves. Even after Shakespeare's imaginative considerations of the mysteries, the tragedies seem to consistently provide questions rather than answers, and what they inspire in their beholders is more likely to be doubt than faith.

The sixteenth century was a turning point for both law and drama. Relentless professionalization of the common law set off a cascade of lawyerly self-fashioning – resulting in blunt attacks on lay judgment. English playwrights, including Shakespeare, resisted the forces of legal professionalization by casting legal expertise as a detriment to moral feeling. They celebrated the ability of individuals, guided by conscience and working alongside members of their community, to restore justice. Playwrights used the participatory nature of drama to deepen public understanding of and respect for communal justice. In plays such as King Lear and Macbeth, lay people accomplish the work of magistracy: conscience structures legal judgment, neighbourly care shapes the coroner’s inquest, and communal emotions give meaning to confession and repentance. An original and deeply sourced study of early modern literature and law, Communal Justice in Shakespeare’s England contributes to a growing body of scholarship devoted to the study of how drama creates and sustains community. Penelope Geng brings together a wealth of imaginative and documentary archives – including plays, sermons, conscience literature, Protestant hagiographies, legal manuals, and medieval and early modern chronicles – proving that literature never simply reacts to legal events but always actively invents legal questions, establishes legal expectations, and shapes legal norms.

The problem of justice seems to have haunted Shakespeare as it haunted Renaissance Christendom. In this book, first published in 1963, four aspects of the problems of justice in action in Shakespeare’s great tragedies are explored. This study is based on the lifetime’s research of Elizabethan habits of mind by one of the most distinguished Shakespearean scholars, and will be of interest to students of English Literature, Drama and Performance.