Shakespeare S Strangers And English Law

Through analysis of 5 plays by Shakespeare, Paul Raffield examines what it meant to be a 'stranger' to English law in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period. The numbers of strangers increased dramatically in the late sixteenth century, as refugees fled religious persecution in continental Europe and sought sanctuary in Protestant England. In the context of this book, strangers are not only persons ethnically or racially different from their English counterparts, be they immigrants, refugees, or visitors. The term also includes those who transgress or are simply excluded by their status from established legal norms by virtue of their faith, sexuality, or mode of employment. Each chapter investigates a particular category of 'stranger'. Topics include the treatment of actors in late Elizabethan England and the punishment of 'counterfeits' (Measure for Measure); the standing of refugees under English law and the reception of these people by the indigenous population (The Comedy of Errors); the establishment of 'Troynovant' as an international trading centre on the banks of the Thames (Troilus and Cressida); the role of law and the state in determining the rights of citizens and aliens (The Merchant of Venice); and the disenfranchised, estranged position of the citizen in a dysfunctional society and an acephalous realm (King Lear). This is the third sole-authored book by Paul Raffield on the subject of Shakespeare and the Law. The others are Shakespeare's Imaginary Constitution: Late Elizabethan Politics and the Theatre of Law (2010) and The Art of Law in Shakespeare (2017), both published by Hart/Bloomsbury.

The interdisciplinary series “Law & Literature” takes a systematic look at the correlation between literature and the law. The studies presented in this series analyze the complex interrelation between two cultural spheres which are not only at the basis of Western Culture and Society, but share in a common focus on texts. Bringing together contributions by jurists, historians of law, legal philosophers, and specialists in literary and cultural studies, this series reflects a trend in current inter- and transdisciplinary research which has recently shown rapid growth both in Europe and the United States.

Through analysis of 5 plays by Shakespeare, Paul Raffield examines what it meant to be a 'stranger' to English law in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period. The numbers of strangers increased dramatically in the late sixteenth century, as refugees fled religious persecution in continental Europe and sought sanctuary in Protestant England. In the context of this book, strangers are not only persons ethnically or racially different from their English counterparts, be they immigrants, refugees, or visitors. The term also includes those who transgress or are simply excluded by their status from established legal norms by virtue of their faith, sexuality, or mode of employment. Each chapter investigates a particular category of 'stranger'. Topics include the treatment of actors in late Elizabethan England and the punishment of 'counterfeits' (Measure for Measure); the standing of refugees under English law and the reception of these people by the indigenous population (The Comedy of Errors); the establishment of 'Troynovant' as an international trading centre on the banks of the Thames (Troilus and Cressida); the role of law and the state in determining the rights of citizens and aliens (The Merchant of Venice); and the disenfranchised, estranged position of the citizen in a dysfunctional society and an acephalous realm (King Lear). This is the third sole-authored book by Paul Raffield on the subject of Shakespeare and the Law. The others are Shakespeare's Imaginary Constitution: Late Elizabethan Politics and the Theatre of Law (2010) and The Art of Law in Shakespeare (2017), both published by Hart/Bloomsbury.

Using the tools of theatre history in their investigation into the phenomenology of the performance experience, the essays here also consider the social, ideological and institutional contingencies that determine the production and reception of the living spectacle. The contributors strive to bring better understanding to Shakespeare's imaginative investment in the relationship between theatrical production and the emotional, intellectual and cultural effects of performance broadly defined in social terms.

This book analyses early modern attitudes to tolerance, including religion, race, humour and sexuality, as they occur in Shakespeare's poems and plays.

Shuger's study of Measure to Measure offers a sweeping reinterpretation of English political thought in the aftermath of the Reformation, one that focuses not on the tension between Crown and Parliament but on the relation of the sacred to the state.

This book investigates the origins, impact, and outcome of the Elizabethan obsession with fraudulent conveyancing, the part of debtor-creditor law that determines when a court can void a transfer of assets. Focusing on the years between the passage of a key statute in 1571 and the court case that clarified the statute in 1601, Charles Ross convincingly argues that what might seem a minor matter in the law was in fact part of a wide-spread cultural practice. The legal and literary responses to fraudulent conveyancing expose ethical, practical, and jurisprudential contradictions in sixteenth-century English, as well as modern, society. At least in English Common Law, debt was more pervasive than sex. Ross brings to this discussion a dazzling knowledge of early modern legal practice that takes the conversation out of the universities and Inns of Court and brings it into the early modern courtroom, the site where it had most relevance to Renaissance poets and playwrights. Ross here examines how during the thirty years in which the law developed, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare wrote works that reflect the moral ambiguity of fraudulent conveyancing, which was practiced by unscrupulous debtors but also by those unfairly oppressed by power. The book starts by showing that the language and plot of Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor continually refers to this cultural practice that English society came to grips with during the period 1571-1601. The second chapter looks at the social, political, and economic climate in which Parliament in 1571 passed 13 Eliz. 5, and argues that the law, which may have been used to oppress Catholics, was probably passed to promote business. The Sidney chapter shows that Henry Sidney, as governor of Ireland (a site of religious oppression), and his son Philip were, surprisingly, on the side of the fraudulent conveyors, both in practice and imaginatively (Sidney's Arcadia is the first of several works to associate fraudulent conveyancing with the abduction of women). The fourth chapter shows that Edmund Spenser, who as an official in Ireland rails against fraudulent conveyors, nonetheless includes a balanced assessment of several forms of the practice in The Faerie Queene. Chapter five shows how Sir Edward Coke's use of narrative in Twyne's Case (1601) helped settle the issue of intentionality left open by the parliamentary statute. The final chapter reveals how the penalty clause of the Elizabethan law accounts for the punishment Portia imposes on Shylock at the end of The Merchant of Venice. The real strength of the book lies in Ross's provocative readings of individual cases, which will be of great use to literary critics wrestling with the applications of legal theory to the interpretation of individual texts. This study connects a major development in the law to the literature of the period, one that makes a contribution not only to the law but also to literary studies and political and social history.

Shakespeare and Immigration critically examines the vital role of immigrants and aliens in Shakespeare's drama and culture. On the one hand, the essays in this collection interrogate how the massive influx of immigrants during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I influenced perceptions of English identity and gave rise to anxieties about homeland security in early modern England. On the other, they shed light on how our current concerns surrounding immigration shape our perception of the role of the alien in Shakespeare's work and expand the texts in new and relevant directions for a contemporary audience. The essays consider the immigrant experience; strangers and strangeness; values of hospitality in relationship to the foreigner; the idea of a host society; religious refuge and refugees; legal views of inclusion and exclusion; structures of xenophobia; and early modern homeland security. In doing so, this volume offers a variety of perspectives on the immigrant experience in Shakespearean drama and how the influential nature of the foreigner affects perceptions of community and identity; and, collection questions what is at stake in staging the anxieties and opportunities associated with foreigners. Ultimately, Shakespeare and Immigration offers the first sustained study of the significance of the immigrant and alien experience to our understanding of Shakespeare's work. By presenting a compilation of views that address Shakespeare's attention to the role of the foreigner, the volume constitutes a timely and relevant addition to studies of race, ethics, and identity in Shakespeare.

Shakespeare was not a citizen of London. But the language of his plays is shot through with the concerns of London 'freemen' and their wives, the diverse commercial class that nevertheless excluded adult immigrants from country towns and northern Europe alike. This book combines London historiography, close reading, and recent theories of citizen subjectivity to demonstrate for the first time that Shakespeare's plays embody citizen and alien identities despite their aristocratic settings. Through three chapters, the book points out where the city shadows the country scenes of the major comedies, shows how London's trades animate the 'civil butchery' of the history plays, ans explains why England's metropolis becomes the fractured Rome of tragedy,

This is a literary history of international law in the age of Shakespeare, Milton, Grotius, and Hobbes. It tells the previously untold story of major English Renaissance writers who used literary genres like epic, tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, and history to help create modern international law. Whereas international law's standard histories regularly omit literary figures and debates, Warren instead delights in the early modern contests over literary form that animated a range of major seventeenth century texts.

Callan Davies presents “strangeness” as a fresh critical paradigm for understanding the construction and performance of Jacobean drama—one that would have been deeply familiar to its playwrights and early audiences. This study brings together cultural analysis, philosophical enquiry, and the history of staged special effects to examine how preoccupation with the strange unites the verbal, visual, and philosophical elements of performance in works by Marston, Shakespeare, Middleton, Dekker, Heywood, and Beaumont and Fletcher. Strangeness in Jacobean Drama therefore offers an alternative model for understanding this important period of English dramatic history that moves beyond categories such as “Shakespeare’s late plays,” “tragicomedy,” or the home of cynical and bloodthirsty tragedies. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of early modern drama and philosophy, rhetorical studies, and the history of science and technology.

The Shakespearean International Yearbook continues to provide an annual survey of important issues and developments in contemporary Shakespeare studies. This year the volume includes a special section on Updating Shakespeare, looking at Shakespearean adaptation in several countries. Contributors to the volume come from the US and the UK, Poland, Japan and Brazil.

This volume offers a wealth of critical analysis, supported with ample historical and bibliographical information about one of Shakespeare’s most enduringly popular and globally influential plays. Its eighteen new chapters represent a broad spectrum of current scholarly and interpretive approaches, from historicist criticism to performance theory to cultural studies. A substantial section addresses early modern themes, with attention to the protagonists and the discourses of politics, class, gender, the emotions, and the economy, along with discussions of significant ‘minor’ characters and less commonly examined textual passages. Further chapters scrutinize Macbeth’s performance, adaptation and transformation across several media—stage, film, text, and hypertext—in cultural settings ranging from early nineteenth-century England to late twentieth-century China. The editor’s extensive introduction surveys critical, theatrical, and cinematic interpretations from the late seventeenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, while advancing a synthetic argument to explain the shifting relationship between two conflicting strains in the tragedy’s reception. Written to a level that will be both accessible to advanced undergraduates and, at the same time, useful to post-graduates and specialists in the field, this book will greatly enhance any study of Macbeth. Contributors: Rebecca Lemon, Jonathan Baldo, Rebecca Ann Bach, Julie Barmazel, Abraham Stoll, Lois Feuer, Stephen Deng, Lisa Tomaszewski, Lynne Bruckner, Michael David Fox, James Wells, Laura Engel, Stephen Buhler, Bi-qi Beatrice Lei, Kim Fedderson and J. Michael Richardson, Bruno Lessard, Pamela Mason.

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.

Bringing key Shakespeare texts into dialogue with feminist socio-legal research, this book investigates the notion of a ‘crime of passion’ – indicatively, wife-killing. Its key concern is to bring attention to a cultural and legal revolution widely overlooked even in the law field where it occurred. In 2009, the English Parliament passed a controversial law abolishing the defence of provocation. Explaining the new law, reformers said that this so-called ‘heat of passion’ defence had allowed men to get away with murder by blaming the victim. Abolishing it in cases of alleged ‘infidelity’ would ‘end the culture of excuses’. Unpacking what was at stake in the reformers’ revolutionary challenge to the English law of murder’s age-old concession to ‘human frailty’ in ‘red mist’ rage cases, this book charts passion’s progress in wife-killing cases over the centuries. It commences in the early modern era when jurists were busy distinguishing murder from manslaughter and, contemporaneously, Shakespeare set about querying culturally inscribed excuses for femicide in his plays, Titus Andronicus and Othello. This book will appeal to feminist and socio-legal scholars, criminologists and those working in the fields of law and literature, legal theory and Shakespeare studies. More widely, it will appeal to anyone interested in so-called ‘crimes of passion’.

Offering a wide range of scholarly perspectives, Religions in Shakespeare’s Writings explores Shakespeare’s depictions, throughout his canon, of various religions and matters related to them. This collection’s fifteen essays explore matters pertaining to Catholic, Anglican, and Puritan Christianity, the Albigensian heresy of the high middle ages, Islam, Judaism, Roman religion, different manifestations of religious paganism, and even the “religion of Shakespeare” practiced by Shakespeare’s nineteenth-century admirers. These essays analyze how Shakespeare depicts both tensions between religions and the syntheses of different religious expressions on topics as diverse as Shakespeare’s varied portrayals of the afterlife, religious experience in Measure for Measure, and Black natural law and The Tempest. This collection also explores the political ramifications of religion within Shakespeare’s works, as well as Shakespeare’s multifaceted uses of the Bible. Additionally, while this collection does not present a Shakespeare whose particular religious beliefs can definitely be known or are displayed uniformly throughout his canon, various essays consider to what extent Shakespeare’s individual works demonstrate a Christian foundation. Contributors include John D. Cox, Cyndia Susan Clegg, Grace Tiffany, Matthew J. Smith, Bethany C. Besteman, Sarah Skwire, Feisal Mohamed, Benedict J. Whalen, Benjamin Lockerd, Bryan Adams Hampton, Debra Johanyak, John E. Curran, Emily E. Stelzer, David V. Urban, and Julia Reinhard Lupton.