Rethinking the 'Spectacle of the Scaffold' : Juridical Epistemologies and English Revenge Tragedy

Michel Foucault's analysis of penal torture as part of a regime of truth production continues to be routinely applied to the interpretation of English Renaissance drama. This paper argues that such an application misleadingly overlooks the lay participation that was characteristic of English criminal justice. It goes on to explore the implications of the epistemological differences between continental inquisitorial models of trial and the jury trial as it developed in sixteenth-century England, arguing that rhetorical and political differences between these two models are dramatized in the unfolding action of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Evidence

This entry defines evidence in early modern English law as the informing of the jury to enable them to decide a ‘matter of fact’, which in turn is defined as an issue, or an alleged act, the precise nature of which is in dispute. It considers the well-attested yet elusive transformation of the jury’s role from neighbour-witnesses to evaluators of evidence, noting the contrast between English and Continental procedures. It sketches out the double effects of an emergent legal culture of lay evidence-evaluation alongside the grammar school promulgation of literary techniques to produce enargeia /evidentia (vividness) through artificial proof, circumstances and indicia or signs. Finally, it indicates how dramatists adapted the techniques of Roman forensic rhetoric’s evidentia, inviting audiences to collaborate in the production of theatre’s psychological, local and temporal verisimilitude

Intending to Act

Luke Wilson, Theaters of Intention.- Drama and Law in Early Modern England, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Pp. x, 362. $49.50. Theaters of Intention has the makings of a major book. Its farreaching claims about the relationship between law and theater in early modern England are both intricately argued and meticulously substantiated. It is a demanding book, too; partly, of course, because of the often-attested resistance of common-law terminology to being translated into layman\u27s terms, but also, I think, because, as Wilson points out, discussions of intention themselves must derive from a range of disciplinary contexts. The book proposes that what the institutions of law and theater primarily share in early modern England is a preoccupation with the problems of representing human action as intentional. Neither the discipline of literary criticism, nor that of legal history, however, has ever exactly theorized intention as a problem relating to the representation of action in this way. So the book\u27s complexity arises from the fact that the relationship of similarity and difference between early modern legal and theatrical investments in representing intentional action can only be explored by using the analytical tools of a range of disciplines: literary criticism, poststructuralist literary theory, theater studies, legal history, sociology, anthropology, philosophy of language, and the history of classical rhetoric, to name just a few. The idea that both the law and the theater might have an interest, in a certain historical moment, in representing human action as intentional is powerfully innovative in itself. It forces one to think of intention not as necessarily antecedent to and causative of human action, but as a problem. The idea runs against our common sense ways of talking both about dramatic fiction and about legal liability. In the case of drama, especially Shakespearean drama, the remarkable post-Bradleyan and post-poststructuralist tenacity of character criticism attests to our investment in ascribing intentions to the agents of dramatic plot, rather than seeing their actions as rhetorically instrumental within the fiction (New Historicism, seeing characters as cultural symptoms rather than poetic achievements, hardly challenges this kind of common sense). Similarly, our tendency to think of homicide cases as mysteries on the models of Agatha Christie and Inspector Morse urges us to organize our ideas about evidence, proof, and legal liability around a reconstruction of motives and intentions-the revelation of the guilty mind that planned it all. In both instances it is assumed that actions - sometimes only retrospectively signified (by corpses, murder weapons, ghosts) - have agents, and that agents have intentions. So what does it mean to talk about the representation of intentional action as a problem for legal practice and dramatic composition in the sixteenth century

Probable Infidelities from Bandello to Massinger

(This is the abstract of the book, not of my chapter) This collection recovers the continuities between three forms of romance that have often been separated from one another in critical discourse: early modern prose fiction, the dramatic romances staged in England during the 1570s and 1580s, and Shakespeare’s late plays. Although Pericles, Cymbeline, Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest have long been characterized as "romances," their connections with the popular prose romances of their day and the dramatic romances that preceded them have frequently been overlooked. Constructed to explore those connections, this volume includes original essays that relate at least one prose or dramatic romance to an English play written from 1570 to 1630. The introduction explores the use of the term "dramatic romance" over several centuries and the commercial association between print culture, gender, and drama. Eight essays discuss Shakespeare’s plays; three more examine plays by Beaumont, Fletcher, and Massinger. Other authors treated at some length include Boccaccio, Christine de Pizan, Chaucer, Sidney, Greene, Lodge, and Wroth. Barbara Mowat’s afterword considers Shakespeare’s use of Greek romance. Written by foremost scholars of Shakespeare and early modern prose fiction, this book explores the vital cross-currents that occurred between narrative and dramatic forms of Greek, medieval, and early modern romance