Download or read book Shakespeare and the Legal Imagination written by Ian Ward and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-07 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work offers an analysis of constitutional law, examining Shakespeare's plays as legal texts. Professor Ward uses the plays as a starting point to investigate the development of constitutional ideas such as sovereignty, commonwealth, conscience and moral law, and the art of government. In the developing area of law and literature, this book examines how Shakespeare's work offers a rich source of textual material on legal subjects.
Download or read book The Law in Shakespeare written by C. Jordan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-12-12 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading scholars in the field analyze Shakespeare's plays to show how their dramatic content shapes issues debated in conflicts arising from the creation and application of law. Individual essays focus on such topics such as slander, revenge, and royal prerogative; these studies reveal the problems confronting early modern English men and women.
Download or read book The Art of Law in Shakespeare written by Paul Raffield and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-02-09 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through an examination of five plays by Shakespeare, Paul Raffield analyses the contiguous development of common law and poetic drama during the first decade of Jacobean rule. The broad premise of The Art of Law in Shakespeare is that the 'artificial reason' of law was a complex art form that shared the same rhetorical strategy as the plays of Shakespeare. Common law and Shakespearean drama of this period employed various aesthetic devices to capture the imagination and the emotional attachment of their respective audiences. Common law of the Jacobean era, as spoken in the law courts, learnt at the Inns of Court and recorded in the law reports, used imagery that would have been familiar to audiences of Shakespeare's plays. In its juridical form, English law was intrinsically dramatic, its adversarial mode of expression being founded on an agonistic model. Conversely, Shakespeare borrowed from the common law some of its most critical themes: justice, legitimacy, sovereignty, community, fairness, and (above all else) humanity. Each chapter investigates a particular aspect of the common law, seen through the lens of a specific play by Shakespeare. Topics include the unprecedented significance of rhetorical skills to the practice and learning of common law (Love's Labour's Lost); the early modern treason trial as exemplar of the theatre of law (Macbeth); the art of law as the legitimate distillation of the law of nature (The Winter's Tale); the efforts of common lawyers to create an image of nationhood from both classical and Judeo-Christian mythography (Cymbeline); and the theatrical device of the island as microcosm of the Jacobean state and the project of imperial expansion (The Tempest).
Download or read book Something Else written by Daniel J. Kornstein and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2012-01-10 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Something Else is a sequel to Daniel J. Kornstein's classic 1994 study of Shakespeare and the law Kill All the Lawyers? The author found he had more something else to say on the subject. Written in the same crisp, lucid, and witty style as his previous critically acclaimed and highly influential book on Shakespeare, Kornstein's new book continues his illuminating, original, and entertaining explorations of the Bard and the law. In Something Else Kornstein probes new Shakespeare territory with insight and eloquence, but without academic. He analyzes from a fresh perspective, and devastatingly picks apart, Mark Twain's "evidence" that Shakespeare could not have written the plays because he was not a lawyer. Kornstein submits for the reader's verdict moot court briefs based on Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice. A timely chapter on Coriolanus shows how that rarely performed play explains much about democracy and elections in America. The author's discussion of Henry V and the law of war will rivet everyone's attention with its relevance to recent history and current events. Other chapters look at why Shakespeare never mentions Magna Carta in King John, comment on the many crooked judges in Shakespeare's plays, untangles The Comedy of Errors, tries to solve the mystery of Richard III and the princes in the Tower. In a whimsical final chapter, the author imagines a conversation
Download or read book Kill All the Lawyers written by Daniel Kornstein and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two-thirds of Shakespeare?s plays have trial scenes, and many deal specifically with lawyers, courts, judges, and points of law. Daniel Kornstein, a practicing attorney, looks at the legal issues and aspects of Shakespeare?s plays and finds fascinating parallels with many legal and social questions of the present day. The Elizabethan age was as litigious as our own, and Shakespeare was very familiar with the language and procedures of the courts. Kill All the Lawyers? examines the ways in which Shakespeare used the law for dramatic effect and incorporated the passion for justice into his great tragedies and comedies and considers the modern legal relevance of his work. ø This is a ground-breaking study in the field of literature and the law, ambitious and suggestive of the value of both our literary and our legal inheritance.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Imaginary Constitution written by Paul Raffield and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2010-10-28 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through an examination of six plays by Shakespeare, the author presents an innovative analysis of political developments in the last decade of Elizabethan rule and their representation in poetic drama of the period. The playhouses of London in the 1590s provided a distinctive forum for discourse and dissemination of nascent political ideas. Shakespeare exploited the unique capacity of theatre to humanise contemporary debate concerning the powers of the crown and the extent to which these were limited by law. The autonomous subject of law is represented in the plays considered here as a sentient political being whose natural rights and liberties found an analogue in the narratives of common law, as recorded in juristic texts and law reports of the early modern era. Each chapter reflects a particular aspect of constitutional development in the late-Elizabethan state. These include abuse of the royal prerogative by the crown and its agents; the emergence of a politicised middle class citizenry, empowered by the ascendancy of contract law; the limitations imposed by the courts on the lawful extent of divinely ordained kingship; the natural and rational authority of unwritten lex terrae; the poetic imagination of the judiciary and its role in shaping the constitution; and the fusion of temporal and spiritual jurisdiction in the person of the monarch. The book advances original insights into the complex and agonistic relationship between theatre, politics, and law. The plays discussed offer persuasive images both of the crown's absolutist tendencies and of alternative polities predicated upon classical and humanist principles of justice, equity, and community. 'It is now canon in progressive U.S. legal scholarship that to focus solely on the text of our Constitution is myopic. We look as well for "constitutional moments", moments when the zeitgeist is so transformed that our fundamental legal charter changes with it. In this breathtakingly erudite book, Paul Raffield argues that the late-Elizabethan period was such a "constitutional moment" in England, a moment literally "played out" for the polity by the greatest dramatist of all time. A lawyer and a thespian, Raffield handles both legal and literary sources with exquisite care. As with the works of the Old Masters, one dwells pleasurably on each detail until their cumulative force presses one backward to see the canvas in its sudden, glorious entirety. A major achievement.' Kenji Yoshino Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law, NYU School of Law
Download or read book Shakespeare and the Law written by Bradin Cormack and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-07-11 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "William Shakespeare is inextricably linked with the law. Legal documents make up most of the records we have of his life; trials, lawsuits, and legal terms permeate his plays. Gathering an extraordinary team of literary and legal scholars, philosophers, and even sitting judges, Shakespeare and the Law demonstrates that Shakespeare's thinking about legal concepts and legal practice points to a deep and sometimes vexed engagement with the law's technical workings, its underlying premises, and its social effects. Shakespeare and the Law opens with three essays that provide useful frameworks for approaching the topic, offering perspectives on law and literature that emphasize both the continuities and the contrasts between the two fields. In its second section, the book considers Shakespeare's awareness of common-law thinking and practice through examinations of Measure for Measure and Othello. Building and expanding on this question, the third part inquires into Shakespeare's general attitudes toward legal systems. A judge and former solicitor general rule on Shylock's demand for enforcement of his odd contract; and two essays by literary scholars take contrasting views on whether Shakespeare could imagine a functioning legal system. The fourth section looks at how law enters into conversation with issues of politics and community, both in the plays and in our own world. The volume concludes with a freewheeling colloquy among Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Judge Richard A. Posner, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Richard Strier that covers everything from the ghost in Hamlet to the nature of judicial discretion"--Jacket.
Download or read book The Legal Imagination written by James Boyd White and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1985-12-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: White extends his theory of law as constitutive rhetoric, asking how one may criticize the legal culture and the texts within it. "A fascinating study of the language of the law. . . . This book is to be highly recommended: certainly, for those who find the time to read it, it will broaden the mind, and give lawyers a new insight into their role."—New Law Journal
Download or read book Shakespeare and the Law written by Paul Raffield and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2008-08-29 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In July 2007, the School of Law at the University of Warwick hosted an international conference on 'Shakespeare and the Law'. This was a truly interdisciplinary event, which included contributions from eminent speakers in the fields of English, history, theatre and law. The intention was to provide a congenial forum for the exploration, dissemination and discussion of Shakespeare's evident fascination with and knowledge of law, and its manifestation in his works. The papers included in this volume reflect the diverse academic interests of participants at the conference. The eclectic themes of the edited collection range from analyses of the juristic content of specific plays, as in 'Consideration, Contract and the End of The Comedy of Errors', 'Judging Isabella: Justice, Care and Relationships in Measure for Measure', 'Law and its Subversion in Romeo and Juliet', 'Inheritance in the Legal and Ideological Debate of Shakespeare's King Lear' and 'The Law of Dramatic Properties in The Merchant of Venice', to more general explorations of Shakespearean jurisprudence, including 'Shakespeare and Specific Performance', 'Shakespeare and the Marriage Contract', 'The Tragedy of Law in Shakespearean Romance' and 'Punishment Theory in the Renaissance: the Law and the Drama'.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Legal Ecologies written by Kevin Curran and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies offers the first sustained examination of the relationship between law and selfhood in Shakespeare’s work. Taking five plays and the sonnets as case studies, Kevin Curran argues that law provided Shakespeare with the conceptual resources to imagine selfhood in social and distributed terms, as a product of interpersonal exchange or as a gathering of various material forces. In the course of these discussions, Curran reveals Shakespeare’s distinctly communitarian vision of personal and political experience, the way he regarded living, thinking, and acting in the world as materially and socially embedded practices. At the center of the book is Shakespeare’s fascination with questions that are fundamental to both law and philosophy: What are the sources of agency? What counts as a person? For whom am I responsible, and how far does that responsibility extend? What is truly mine? Curran guides readers through Shakespeare’s responses to these questions, paying careful attention to both historical and intellectual contexts. The result is a book that advances a new theory of Shakespeare’s imaginative relationship to law and an original account of law’s role in the ethical work of his plays and sonnets. Readers interested in Shakespeare, theater and philosophy, law, and the history of ideas will find Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies to be an essential resource.
Download or read book The Art of Law in Shakespeare written by Paul Raffield and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-02-09 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through an examination of five plays by Shakespeare, Paul Raffield analyses the contiguous development of common law and poetic drama during the first decade of Jacobean rule. The broad premise of The Art of Law in Shakespeare is that the 'artificial reason' of law was a complex art form that shared the same rhetorical strategy as the plays of Shakespeare. Common law and Shakespearean drama of this period employed various aesthetic devices to capture the imagination and the emotional attachment of their respective audiences. Common law of the Jacobean era, as spoken in the law courts, learnt at the Inns of Court and recorded in the law reports, used imagery that would have been familiar to audiences of Shakespeare's plays. In its juridical form, English law was intrinsically dramatic, its adversarial mode of expression being founded on an agonistic model. Conversely, Shakespeare borrowed from the common law some of its most critical themes: justice, legitimacy, sovereignty, community, fairness, and (above all else) humanity. Each chapter investigates a particular aspect of the common law, seen through the lens of a specific play by Shakespeare. Topics include the unprecedented significance of rhetorical skills to the practice and learning of common law (Love's Labour's Lost); the early modern treason trial as exemplar of the theatre of law (Macbeth); the art of law as the legitimate distillation of the law of nature (The Winter's Tale); the efforts of common lawyers to create an image of nationhood from both classical and Judeo-Christian mythography (Cymbeline); and the theatrical device of the island as microcosm of the Jacobean state and the project of imperial expansion (The Tempest).
Download or read book The Play of Conscience in Shakespeare s England written by Jade Standing and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-01-31 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Having a conscience distinguishes humans from the most advanced A.I. systems. Acting in good conscience, consulting one’s conscience, and being conscience-wracked are all aspects of human intelligence that involve reckoning (deriving general laws from particular inputs and vice versa), and judgement (contemplating the relationship of the reckoning system to the world). While A.I. developers have mastered reckoning, they are still working towards the creation of judgement. This book sheds light on the reckoning and judgement of conscience by demonstrating how these concepts are explored in Everyman, Doctor Faustus, The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet. Academic, student, or general-interest readers discover the complexity and multiplicity of the early modern concept of conscience, which is informed by the scholastic intellectual tradition, juridical procedures of the court of Chancery, the practical advice of Protestant casuistry, and Reformation theology. The aims are to examine the rubrics for thinking through, regulating, and judging actions that define the various consciences of Shakespeare’s day, to use these rubrics to interpret questions of truth and action in early modern plays, and to offer insights into what it is about conscience that developers want to grasp to eliminate the difference between human and non-human intelligences, and achieve true A.I.
Download or read book Shakespeare and Authority written by Katie Halsey and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-01-19 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines conceptions of authority for and in Shakespeare, and the construction of Shakespeare as literary and cultural authority. The first section, Defining and Redefining Authority, begins by re-defining the concept of Shakespeare’s sources, suggesting that ‘authorities’ and ‘resources’ are more appropriate terms. Building on this conceptual framework, the remainder of this section explores linguistic and discursive authority more broadly. The second section, Shakespearean Authority, considers the construction, performance and questioning of authority in Shakespeare’s plays. Essays here range from examinations of monarchical authority to discussions of household authority, literary authority and linguistic ownership. The final part, Shakespeare as Authority, then traces the increasing establishment of Shakespeare as an authority from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century in a series of essays that explore Shakespearean authority for editors, actors, critics, authors, readers and audiences. The volume concludes with two essays that reassess Shakespeare as an authority for visual culture – in the cinema and in contemporary art.
Download or read book Shakespeare and Law written by Andrew Zurcher and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-09-26 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readers of Shakespeare's language, from the playhouse to the classroom, have long been aware of his peculiar interest in legal words and concepts - Richard II's two bodies, Hamlet's quiddities and quillets, Pandarus' peine forte et dure. In this new study, Andrew Zurcher takes a fresh, historically sensitive look at Shakespeare's meticulous resort to legal language, texts, concepts, and arguments in a range of plays and poems. Following a preface that situates Shakespeare's life within the various legal communities of his Stratford and London periods, Zurcher reconsiders the ways in which Shakespeare adapts legal language and concepts to figure problems about being, knowing, reading, interpretation, and action. In challenging new readings of plays from King John and Henry IV to As You Like It and Hamlet, Shakespeare and Law reveals the importance of early modern common legal thinking to Shakespeare's representations of inheritance, possession, gift-giving, oath-swearing, contract, sovereignty, judgment, and conscience - and, finally, to our own reception and interpretation of his works.
Download or read book Cultural Legal Studies written by Cassandra Sharp and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-24 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What can law’s popular cultures do for law, as a constitutive and interrogative critical practice? This collection explores such a question through the lens of the ‘cultural legal studies’ movement, which proffers a new encounter with the ‘cultural turn’ in law and legal theory. Moving beyond the ‘law ands’ (literature, humanities, culture, film, visual and aesthetics) on which it is based, this book demonstrates how the techniques and practices of cultural legal studies can be used to metamorphose law and the legalities that underpin its popular imaginary. By drawing on three different modes of cultural legal studies – storytelling, technology and jurisprudence – the collection showcases the intersectional practices of cultural legal studies, and law in its popular cultural mode. The contributors to the collection deploy differentiated modes of cultural legal studies practice, adopting diverse philosophical, disciplinary, methodological and theoretical approaches and subjects of examination. The collection draws on this mix of diversity and homogeneity to thread together its overarching theme: that we must take seriously an interrogation of law as culture and in its cultural form. That is, it does not ask how a text ‘represents’ law; but rather how the representational nature of both law and culture intersect so that the ‘juridical’ become visible in various cultural manifestations. In short, it asks: how law’s popular cultures actively effect the metamorphosis of law.
Download or read book Legal Reform in English Renaissance Literature written by Virginia Lee Strain and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-14 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates rhetorical and representational practices that were used to monitor English law at the turn of the seventeenth century. The late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean surge in the policies and enforcement of the reformation of manners has been well-documented. What has gone unnoticed, however, is the degree to which the law itself was the focus of reform for legislators, the judiciary, preachers, and writers alike. While the majority of law and literature studies characterize the law as a force of coercion and subjugation, this book instead treats in greater depth the law's own vulnerability, both to corruption and to correction. In readings of Spenser's 'Faerie Queene', the 'Gesta Grayorum', Donne's 'Satyre V', and Shakespeare's 'Measure for Measure' and 'The Winter's Tale', Strain argues that the terms and techniques of legal reform provided modes of analysis through which legal authorities and literary writers alike imagined and evaluated form and character. Reevaluates canonical writers in light of developments in legal historical research, bringing an interdisciplinary perspective to works. Collects an extensive variety of legal, political, and literary sources to reconstruct the discourse on early modern legal reform, providing an introduction to a topic that is currently underrepresented in early modern legal cultural studiesAnalyses the laws own vulnerability to individual agency.
Download or read book Shakespeare Revenge Tragedy and Early Modern Law written by Derek Dunne and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-12 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, the first to trace revenge tragedy's evolving dialogue with early modern law, draws on changing laws of evidence, food riots, piracy, and debates over royal prerogative. By taking the genre's legal potential seriously, it opens up the radical critique embedded in the revenge tragedies of Kyd, Shakespeare, Marston, Chettle and Middleton.
