Abstract
It is surely well accepted that Shakespeare’s plays offer visions of law and justice for politically aware audiences, and a wealth of material for academic writers, in departments of English Literature, of course, but also in more enlightened schools of law. And although students may be increasingly predicted to pursue degrees such as law that are traditionally associated with corporate conformity, the prospect of a return to a legal education syllabus dominated by narrowly ‘black letter’ approaches may be averted if there are enough such law schools prepared to embrace the inter-textual and interdisciplinary values represented by Paul Raffield’s Shakespeare’s Imaginary Constitution.
In this book, Raffield wants to show how Shakespeare’s plays offer us a number of juristic and legal visions, using fictional settings (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titus Andronicus and Measure for Measure) and also representations of former English rulers (Richard II and Henry IV Parts I and II) dramatically to explore political debates and controversies of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean age. A theme that runs through each of the chapters of the book is the power struggle between prominent common lawyers and law reporters such as Sir Edward Coke and royal prerogative power. Coke and others associated with the common law tradition (notably Bracton, Fortescue and Plowden) come through in the text vividly as tireless warriors in the name of law and legal process, leaving it clear whose side Raffield is on, and on whose side we are supposed to believe Shakespeare was on. In tying these juristic writings to theatre, Raffield makes a number of suppositions about what political tracts and treatises, events and legal judgments might have influenced Shakespeare’s writing. While there is often little evidence for drawing such connections (leaving aside the facile ‘question’ of Shakespeare’s authorship of course – which Raffield thankfully does not dignify with a mention), they make for a highly interesting discussion about contemporary anxieties about the relationships between the state and the individual, law and theatre, and legal and spiritual authority. In any case, although this is in part a work of history (Raffield does engage in a detailed assessment of characters and events of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries), by focusing on the symbolic and representational work of Shakespeare’s imagination, it tends to be the discussion of ideas rather than facts that carries the book.
The chapters of the book present a number of instances of the struggle to assert the authority of time-honoured traditions of the common law in order to contain the power and influence of royal prerogative, and the irrationality, caprice and instability that it represented. In Chapter 1, cruel Saturninus and the trail of dismembered and broken bodies of both the guilty and the innocent represents the consequences of the exercise of royal power by a whimsical ruler; Titus on the other hand, the weary, wronged father and heroic general who bears the provocations of Saturninus is ‘a dramatic antecedent to Sir Edward Coke’ (p.29).
Chapter 2 riffs on the metaphorical significance of the golden chain – the subject of a contract dispute in A Comedy of Errors – as a ‘juristic link which is traceable at least to The Laws of Plato’ (p.64). Connecting the contemporary (i.e. Elizabethan) legal landscape to a past of custom and evolving principles, the ‘golden and holy chord’ that Plato referred to provides an apt visualization of the sort of imaginary constitution that Raffield argues Shakespeare has in mind.
Chapter 3 discusses a more familiar connection between law and literature, at least in academic legal and literary circles, in the character of Richard II and his personal belief in the divinity of the kingly office. This chapter discusses the notion of the king’s ‘two bodies’, as referred to by Kantorowicz (borrowing from Fortescue and Plowden): that in addition to a body of flesh and blood, the king is also possessed of a mystical body of divine authority, ‘incapable of sin, aging or sickness’ (p.90). Raffield once more picks up the themes of the previous chapters and develops them in light of the implications for legal and political theory and practice regarding the king’s belief in his own divine right to rule. Raffield claims that Shakespeare reflects Fortescue’s worries that a king that relies too heavily on his ‘mystical’ body, and rules thus ‘by royal dominium alone’ rather than by ‘political dominium’ in accordance with the ‘body’ of common law and custom, is in danger of falling into tyranny (p.91). Indeed, this falling into tyranny is exactly what we find in Shakespeare’s characterization of the unfortunate Richard II, whose unbending belief that he is God’s deputy on earth rather than a king in parliament, leads English politics and law into insecurity, instability and rebellion.
Chapter 4 focuses on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the ‘mythographical’ allusions that it shares with the legal and political culture of the sixteenth century. Connections are drawn in this chapter between the mischievous character of Puck – wise fool, satirist, trickster – and popular characters and events in Elizabethan England, which further emphasize the importance of tradition in the English legal imagination. We learn of the summer festivals in which were celebrated the law of nature and its primacy over the laws of the land, represented also in A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Lysander and Hermia’s preference for natural over lawful authority. We are introduced to the popular cultural character of the satyr – a satirical commentator on humanity ‘in general’ (p.130), whose drunkenness and licentiousness made him a stranger to civilized manners, but who, like Fortescue’s characterization of the common law tradition and its practitioners, was ‘wise, equable and humane’ (p.131). On the other hand, however, there is a darker undertone to the play. Raffield considers classical and contemporary stories of sexual violence between animals and women that led to monstrous offspring, and that may have influenced Shakespeare’s own comic creation, Bottom with his donkey’s head. Chapter 4 is notable for the way in which it describes the role of tradition and custom in the common law as more problematic and more complex than portrayed in previous chapters.
Chapter 5 returns to the role of metaphor in the legal and theatrical imaginings of law, and the metaphors under scrutiny here are those of horticulture and fatherhood. In various ways, Justice Shallow of Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Sir Edward Coke and also Lord Denning all refer to horticulture or some similar use of land in their judicial rhetoric. The combination of the natural and the man-made for horticultural ends speaks to the common law conceit of customs and rules as authoritative because they have been recognized as such since ‘time immemorial’ (p.160). Fatherhood may similarly be understood to be a metaphor about time and the continuation or slow evolution of law and customs. In Henry IV the new king Henry V arguably expresses this when he ‘casts himself as both symbolic Father and Son of the Law’ (p.181), and in this way distinguishes himself from the absolutist Richard II (p.181).
Finally, in Chapter 6, the book tries one last way to describe the struggle between the ‘due process’ of the common law and the dangerous unpredictability of the royal prerogative. In this instance it is through an evaluation of the tendency of King James I to place himself outside of the ordinary law, whether it was by observing his subjects unnoticed (the ‘eye of the law’), or by overriding the strictures of the common law through his power to grant mercy. As in the other chapters, the relationships between common law and royal power that this engenders is examined in the light of Shakespeare’s treatment of the themes. Here it is through the mercy that the Duke in Measure for Measure shows towards the harsh and unbending Angelo that these themes are addressed. The discussion in this chapter will resonate with anyone familiar with the historical struggles over jurisdiction and influence between the courts of common law and the court of chancery. Indeed many of the issues relevant there find their way into this chapter: what if the Duke had not been so minded to exercise mercy?
It is often a banal truism to say that different readers will get different things from a book. However, it seems a particularly apt judgement to make about this work of Raffield’s, due to the impressive range and depth of its scholarship. The work as a whole is concerned above all else with the lines of battle between the common law tradition and the exercise of prerogative powers, and for this reason ought to reach a wide readership. Similarly, the concern about the power of the imagination to satirize and criticize existing ‘constitutions’ and to imagine new ones is further evidence (if any were still needed) that the intersections of law and literature provide fruitful avenues of critique. On the other hand, Raffield does not shy away from the minutiae of detail on a huge number of particular issues relating to Shakespeare’s possible influences, and to the peculiarities of English law and custom in the Elizabethan and early Jacobean ages. Raffield here demonstrates a remarkable range of knowledge of the contemporary sources, whether legal, religious, political, theatrical or philosophical. For this reason, this book is a highly useful resource for scholars of a number of disciplines within history, law, literature and theatre studies, and deserves to be read and used within all of those fields. There is an obvious criticism on this point also however: that such detailed forays into so many different sorts of enquiry will inevitably seem (for one sort of reader or another) to be distracting and detracting asides. I suspect that there will be readers who, like me, will consider that sections on the detail of Tudor contract law in Chapter 2, or on disputes over estates of land in Chapter 3, might have benefitted from some judicious chopping at the editing stage in order to ensure that the very interesting (and often beautifully expressed) grander themes remain at the fore.