Notes on a strange eventful history

This paper retells the story of a strange event. In the summer of 2016, I joined The Song Company of Australia (described on its website as “the continent’s leading vocal ensemble”) in rehearsing and performing a Shakespeare-themed show that I had co-written with their Artistic Director, the composer Antony Pitts. The idea behind A Strange Eventful History (‘ASEH’) was to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death with a symphony of famous Shakespearean speeches and musical pieces connected by a playful narrative. The narrative, which was loosely structured according to the “seven ages of man” as presented by Jaques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (2.7.1 40–67), was threaded throughout by the conceit that The Song Company had assisted scientists in recovering snippets from the original sound scape of Shakespeare’s London. Thus the narrator introduces the show as “a journey back to Shakespeare’s London and the journey of a lifetime from birth to the last scene of all” (ASEH, prologue). Another idea, at least for my part, was to experiment with some of the performance theories and practical techniques that I had written about in a book –Shakespeare’s Acts of Will: Law, Testament and Properties of Performance– that was published around the time of the show

Dickens, Daumier and the Man of Law

This chapter is concerned with the forms of the legal profession at the start of the Age of Reform (1820–1920) as represented by Charles Dickens (1812–1870) and Honoré Daumier (1808–1879). It is a tale of two cities, London and Paris, and of the legal professions practised in these two cities, and it is a tale of two art forms, text and image, and how those two forms combined in print publications to represent the legal profession in the popular imagination. Dickens’s first novel developed from a commission to supply literary illustrations to accompany another artist’s comic drawings, whereas Daumier’s major professional output was the production of images to be accompanied by text legends written by his editors. The present chapter is also a tale of two sexes, of men and women in art and law. The single most significant legislative reform to occur in the legal profession across the Age of Reform was the admission of women to the ranks of practising lawyers. In France, a law of 1900 opened the way for the first women to enter the profession that year. In England, the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 was followed in 1920 by the first admission of women to the Inns of Court (the traditional site of education in English law), and in 1922 the pioneers were at last called to the bar and the first woman entered legal practice

Sovereigns, sterling and “some bastards too!”: Brexit seen from Shakespeare’s King John

2016 marks the 800th anniversary of the death of King John and the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare. The premise of this article is that the dynamics of human motivation which Shakespeare attributed to individuals living four hundred years before he wrote, apply as well four centuries on, in the year of “Brexit”. Statistics will never tell us what led the majority of UK voters to vote “leave” on the fateful day of the EU referendum, but an appreciation of Shakespeare's King John promises to reveal something perennial about human motivations for dramatic action. It also promises to tell us a great deal about human responses, resolution and regret in the aftermath of an explosive enactment of political free will

Dress, Law and Naked Truth

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Why are civil authorities in so-called liberal democracies affronted by public nudity and the Islamic full-face ‘veil’? Why is law and civil order so closely associated with robes, gowns, suits, wigs and uniforms? Why is law so concerned with the ‘evident’ and the need for justice to be ‘seen’ to be done? Why do we dress and obey dress codes at all? In this, the first ever study devoted to the many deep cultural connections between dress and law, the author addresses these questions and more. His responses flow from the radical thesis that ‘law is dress and dress is law’. Engaging with sources from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Shakespeare, Carlyle, Dickens and Damien Hirst, Professor Watt draws a revealing history of dress and civil order and offers challenging conclusions about the nature of truth and the potential for individuals to fit within the forms of civil life

Passing resemblance: the burden of the mask in legal and theatrical tradition

Legal scholars have frequently observed that the word ‘person’ and the language of legal ‘personality’ derives from the Latin persona, which was the ancient Romans’ term for an actor’s mask, but they have seldom attended to the theatrical significance of the mask and sought there for insights into the legal idea. To address that lack, this article presents three case studies connected by concern for the passing on of theatrical masks. The first mask was made for a ballet directed by the Hungarian dancer and choreographer Rudolf Laban in Germany in the 1930s. The mask escaped when Hitler burned Laban’s books and was passed from hand to hand until it eventually found its way to England. The second mask is the mask of Pulcinella, one of the principal stock characters or ‘Masks’ of the commedia dell’arte. The focus in relation to this mask is upon its passing to the renowned Italian actor Eduardo De Filippo and from him to his actor son, Luca. The third is the hannya mask of traditional Japanese Noh theatre, which is a demonic mask associated with scorned and jealous women. It features in the cult Japanese horror film Onibaba (Shindo 1964) where it carries a cautionary tale on death, the passing of masks, and the fixing of masks; a cautionary tale that this article carries over to the performance of masks in law. The three case studies suggest that the burden of the mask is most keenly felt when it is laden with the weight of tradition. Whilst taking a broadly positive view of the art and artifice of theatrical masking, it is acknowledged that the benefits of masking depend upon artificial representation through a non-human property and therefore cannot exist without corresponding burdens, including the burdens inherent in property relations, representation, and mediation

Dress, Law and Naked Truth

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Why are civil authorities in so-called liberal democracies affronted by public nudity and the Islamic full-face ‘veil’? Why is law and civil order so closely associated with robes, gowns, suits, wigs and uniforms? Why is law so concerned with the ‘evident’ and the need for justice to be ‘seen’ to be done? Why do we dress and obey dress codes at all? In this, the first ever study devoted to the many deep cultural connections between dress and law, the author addresses these questions and more. His responses flow from the radical thesis that ‘law is dress and dress is law’. Engaging with sources from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Shakespeare, Carlyle, Dickens and Damien Hirst, Professor Watt draws a revealing history of dress and civil order and offers challenging conclusions about the nature of truth and the potential for individuals to fit within the forms of civil life

Performance rhetoric in Shakespeare and law

The published works submitted for this PhD demonstrate that attention to the practice of performative rhetoric can produce deep insights into the operation of persuasive arts in society, law courts and the Shakespearean playhouse. The main plank of my submission comprises chapters selected from my book Shakespeare’s Acts of Will: Law, Testament and Properties of Performance (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016). In that book, I demonstrate that since Roman times legal testamentary processes have been theatrically performative and that then, as now, and as in Shakespeare’s day, the testamentary process serves as a productive analogy for theatrical performance. This is because legal processes of testament, executorship and probate have their counterparts in the practices by which theatrical performance engages actors to execute the dramatist’s will and playgoers to witness it, to test it, and hopefully to approve it. Words uttered at thresholds between states of being have a quality that is called in various contexts ‘ceremonial’, ‘ritual’, and even ‘magical’. All liminal language is potent, but none more so than words spoken at the threshold between life and death. Shakespeare acknowledges that ‘the tongues of dying men / Enforce attention like deep harmony’ (RII, 2.1.5-6). In theatre, the language of the play performs a sort of magic as it passes from the world of the stage to the world of the playgoers. In law, so-called ‘operative words’ (such as ‘I agree’, ‘I declare’ and ‘I swear’) have a comparable capacity to move people from one state of social being to another. The words of a last will and testament have a distinctive liminal power to cross the threshold of death itself. Through words of will and the performance of the testamentary document, one acts now to expresses one’s will over the properties of a future world. Pursuing the testamentary trope through Shakespeare’s Elizabethan plays, I argue that the performance of will can supply a definitional distinction between tragedy and comedy in human drama. Namely, that tragedy follows where the enactment of free will is frustrated or overborne and comedy flows where will breaks free of traditional hierarchical bonds only to resubmit itself voluntarily to new subjection in an endless cycle of unlearning. I contend that Shakespeare’s dramatic works are especially apt to shed light upon the theatricality of performing testamentary will. This is in part down to Shakespeare’s dramatic genius, flourishing out of an intensely rhetorical school education and playhouse practice, and in part down to the peculiar socio-legal context in which Shakespeare worked as regards the emergence of modern free will. I demonstrate that Shakespeare was born into a new age of will, in which individual intent had the potential to overcome dynastic expectation. Special significance is attached to the 1540 Statute of Wills, which liberated testamentary disposition of land and thus marked a turning point from hierarchical feudal tradition to the modernity of horizontal free trade and democratic self-determination. The other published chapters that complete my submission are taken from books written or co-edited by me. They focus on material aspects of rhetorical performance (synecdoche of material things in The Merchant of Venice and the relationship between dress and proof in Twelfth Night and Othello) they advance my thesis that the meaning and persuasive effects of the play text can only be appreciated in the context of performance, and that this requires us to attend to prosody (including the sound, metre and rhythm of speech) as well as to the performed relationship between words, silence, gesture and movement through space. Speech, silence and movement must also be appreciated in their physical context, which in the playhouse includes the material environment formed of stage structures, fixtures, costume and moveable props

Hamlet and pure object revenge – the matter of life and death

Why do we strike intrinsically inoffensive objects when they intrude upon our lives? Why, for example, do we kick the car when it breaks down, or slap the chair that pinches our finger against the table, or strike the open door that collides with our head? In this essay, I ask whether this phenomenon, which I call the performance of “pure object revenge”, might arise from an impulse to execute vindicatory, and in that sense vengeful, justice upon the offending object. My new explanation for the phenomenon is that we strike the offending object because it has no life but has briefly acted as if it were alive. It therefore reminds us in the brief moment of its offence that our bodies are also inanimate dust and will return to dust and in the meantime are only briefly animated. In short, my argument is that we strike the object because it is a memento mori. To test and support this, I offer a reading of the “closet scene” at the centre of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to illustrate the performative impulse to banish inanimate objects at the threshold of the living and the dead

Sound and fury signifying Brexit

“Acoustic Jurisprudence” (Parker, 2015) seeks to move our appreciation of the operation of sound in law beyond the merely metaphorical use of acoustic language to the audible quality of the soundscape itself. In this paper, I seek to connect the linguistic-metaphorical to the audible-sensory in the soundscape of the United Kingdom’s legal secession from the European Union. My context is the “Brexit” dispute as it has been played out in the UK Parliament, the UK Supreme Court, and elsewhere, especially as that dispute came to a crescendo on two key occasions in the latter part of 2019. The first occasion was the Government’s attempt in September 2019 to prorogue parliament for an unusually long period, accompanied, later that month, by the UK Supreme Court’s decision to declare that attempt unlawful and therefore null and void. The second occasion was the UK General Election held on 12 December 2019, in which the Conservative Party – led by Prime Minister Boris Johnson with the election slogan “Get Brexit Done” – secured its largest majority in the House of Commons since 1987