Snaring Statutes and the General Pardon in the Gesta Grayorum

Chapter 2 examines the Gesta Grayorum, an account of the 1594-5 Christmas revels at Gray’s Inn, one of the English common-law societies and educational institutions. The Christmas revelers mounted a large mock court, and the elaborate entertainments for their fictional Prince of Purpoole were performed by and before a community of Inn members and associates that included common-law students, legal professionals, courtiers, parliamentarians, and statesmen. In their abridged parliament, they mock the general pardon that historically compensated for the numerous ‘snaring’ statutes that had accrued over the course of the sixteenth century. These statutes, which turned subjects into unintentional lawbreakers, found their way into Shakespeare’s comedies, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Comedy of Errors, and John Donne’s satires. In parodying the terms and structure of the Elizabethan general pardon, the revelers target a legal-political device that publicly forgave select statutory infractions and broadcasted the sovereign’s merciful character. If the revels open with a mock parliament, Francis Bacon’s subsequent orations on government redirect the entertainments away from the comical errors of lawmakers and legal representatives toward the systematic reform of the fictional state.

Legal Excess in John Donne’s ‘Satyre V’

Chapter 3 examines John Donne’s ‘Satyre V’, which applies the social and ethical reforming energy of the satiric genre to the need for system-wide legal reform in England. The piece is a tribute to his employer, the Lord Keeper Thomas Egerton, who was lauded for his integrity and commitment to reforming the financially exploitative aspects of legal process, particularly in the Court of Chancery. Central to Donne’s satiric critique of the law is his attack on the excesses within the legal-political system that have been generated by the offences of suitors and legal professionals alike. His analysis is complicated, however, through the evocation of corrective strategies that instrumentalise excess, including equitable reasoning and practices (in Chancery and in statute interpretation), legal and political representation, and secretarial service. Donne exploits and revitalizes traditional legal-political analogies to illuminate the tensions in a system that was forestalled by, but also functioned through, excess. The result is an analogical, rather than metaphysical, style that generates new ethical implications for the Donnean speaker’s characteristic subject position. His in-betweenness emerges here not as a function of individual freedom, but as a function of his new proximity and enlarged responsibilities to others as well as to prevailing social, legal and political forms.

Introduction

This introduction provides an overview of the extensive work of legal reform in the later sixteenth century. Through close readings of Nicholas Bacon’s parliamentary speeches, the topic is organized into efforts to ‘perfect’ the law and to administer or ‘execute’ it. As Elizabeth’s Lord Keeper for two decades, Bacon repeatedly emphasised the importance of the law’s perfection through the reform of its form and content and the surveillance and correction of the officers in charge of the law’s execution. While Bacon’s speeches illuminate the proper targets of reform, establishing priorities and speech patterns for his successors, the literary works that are subsequently examined develop the problematics of legal reform in practice.

The Winter’s Tale and the Oracle of the Law

This last chapter shifts focus from the representation of local governance to the representation of national law and politics in another Shakespeare play. While the reform of justice in Measure for Measure results from the Provost and Duke’s labour-intensive and improvisational interventions in the lives of subjects and in the legal process, justice in The Winter’s Tale is restored through the more careful observance of the boundaries between legal and political power. Chapter 5 examines the character of the ‘oracle of the law’ within legal and literary writings contemporaneous with The Winter’s Tale. The legal-political connotations of ‘oracle’ facilitate a new reading of play, in which Apollo’s supernatural oracle evokes human judicial figures. While Apollo’s oracle makes only a brief appearance in the trial scene, nevertheless its influence pulses throughout the play via its representatives, Camillo and Paulina, whose strategies and counsel ultimately ensure that the oracular prophecy is fulfilled. Through these human oracles, as well, the play is infused with the explosive tensions between the sovereign and the judiciary in early seventeenth-century England, through which the King’s prerogative and the jurisdictions of courts came into question.

‘Perpetuall Reformation’ in Book V of Spenser’s Faerie Queene

This chapter offers a close reading of Book V of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, which represents the reformation of law in terms of both its equitable correction and its administration. The Knight of Justice, Artegall, corrects regional law and governance across a number of historical allegories that most frequently allude to the sixteenth-century English efforts to colonise Ireland. Yet his methods and success are called into question not only through his defeat in combat by Radigund, but also through his rescue that is accomplished by his fiancé. As Britomart travels back through Faerieland, retracing the knight’s steps in order to liberate him from thraldom to the Amazon, we discover that the countryside has not been subdued in the wake of his reformation of justice. Britomart’s re-enactments of the knight’s battles re-present the activities of legal reform and governance as ongoing tasks requiring consistent magisterial presence and attention. This chapter appears at the beginning of the book not only for chronological reasons, but because the matter introduces a number of topics and contexts that will be developed at greater length in the studies that follow, including legal and character education, Aristotelian legal equity, artificial reason, and itinerant justice.

The Assize Circuitry of Measure for Measure

In this chapter, it is argued that Measure for Measure is patterned on the cyclical structure of the Assize sessions, through which judges from Westminster presided over trials in counties throughout England. Convening twice a year, the court produced a repeating representation of central authority that shaped the countryside’s legal and social calendar. Most importantly, by the end of the sixteenth century, the Assize judges had acquired the responsibility for the oversight of local justice. During the court sessions, local magistrates could be publically exposed and shamed for corruption. Shakespeare’s play presents a version of the process of local intelligence-gathering and public revelation that was specifically associated with Assize justice. The court’s unique structure, its operational ethics, and its discourse on magisterial character provide new lenses through which the behaviour and reasoning of the play’s Duke and officers can be re-evaluated.