The Intellectual and Cultural World of The

THE INTELLECTUAL AND CULTURAL WORLD OF THE EARLY MODERN INNS OF COURTS

ABSTRACTS

DR CLARE RIDER AND MRS CELIA CHARLTON (INNER TEMPLE ARCHIVES) The Inns of Court in Context Based on the Inns of Court archives, a report submitted to Henry VIII and an anonymous account of the Middle Temple in the early sixteenth century, this paper will examine the administration and membership of the Inns of Court in the sixteenth century. This was a period in which there were changes in the internal organization of the Inns and a significant increase in membership, and coincides with the survival of records from all four Inns of Court. The administrative summary will discuss the structure of the Inns’s government and staffing, and outline the facilities provided to members, including libraries, whilst the final section will focus on the regulations governing the composition and conduct of the membership and to what extent they could be implemented.

PROFESSOR MARGARET MCGLYNN (DEPT OF HISTORY, WESTERN ONTARIO UNIVERSITY) Edward Hall and the Reformation: The View from Gray’s Inn Although he is best known to historians as the author of the monumental Chronicle, Edward Hall was also a member of the Reformation parliament, and a successful lawyer and legal officer of London, known to Thomas Cromwell and employed by him. While his chronicle is a standard source for Tudor historians, his other text, a reading on ‘Seint eglise’ is largely unknown. It is a technical, compressed set of lectures in Law French, originally planned for Lent 1540, but delivered in Lent 1541, as part of the regular cycle of education at the Inns of Court. In the lectures, Hall discusses some of the areas in which English common law and canon law could conflict. The text is not complete, but the surviving lectures cover the king’s rights over the election of bishops, the property and marriage rights of the ex-religious, probate jurisdiction, usury, and perjury. This reading is unusual for a number of reasons. Earlier readers who had wished to discuss matters relating to the church had worked with Magna Carta c.1, while Hall takes the statute 2 Henry IV c.1 as his base text. The choice to do a new reading on an old text indicates that Hall was planning to move away from the traditional grounds for discussion, and indeed he does deal with changes in the law made during the Reformation parliament, particularly in the sections dealing with the ex-religious. This also is unusual, since the readers usually preferred to let legislation operate for some time before discussing it in a reading. The text thus gives a glimpse into early legal responses to some of the changes of the Reformation parliament; this interest is enhanced by the fact that as an MP in that parliament, Hall may have been involved in those changes, and at the very least witnessed the passing of the relevant statutes.

DR DAMIAN POWELL (DEPT OF HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE) How did James Whitelocke (1570-1632) Learn and Live the Law? Points of Contact Within and Beyond the Early Modern Inns of Court Sir James Whitelocke, while less well known than contemporaries such as Sir Edward Coke, was one of the more distinguished and politically-intriguing lawyers of his age. His private journal the ‘Liber Famelicus’ – compiled over the course of a long and controversial career as a barrister-MP and then judge – offers candid and at times extraordinary insights into the social and intellectual world of the early Stuart Inns of Court. Commenting, as it does, upon his unusual joint formation in civil and common law, it provides what James McConica regards as ‘the best single account of early education’ for a lawyer of the period. My paper will examine, through Whitelocke and the records which illuminate his legal formation, the points of contact and influence which came together in the life of this early modern lawyer. These include his court-watching and work as a solicitor while attending the Inns, his participation in the formal and informal learning exercises of the Inns of Court and Chancery (such as Whitelocke’s 1619 Reading on Benefices at the Middle Temple), his commonplacing techniques, his engagement with the ill-fated Society of Antiquaries, and the financial and other records which attest to his dealings with and standing within his Inn in the course of legal advancement. The ‘common-law mind’ remains fertile ground for many historians; Whitelocke’s formation is an important test case for its coherence and currency, as constitutional issues again assert themselves in early Stuart historiography.

DR HUGH ADLINGTON (VISITING FELLOW, CRASSH, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE) Gospel, Law, and ars prædicandi at the Inns of Court, c.1600-c.1630 In order to extirpate popery from the Inns in the early 1570s, preachers were formally appointed for the first time. In the 1580s, however, increasing concerns over separatism meant that godly ministers such as William Charke and Richard Alvey gave way to more conformable churchmen such as Roger Fenton and Richard Hooker. Despite this shift towards religious moderation, however, the Inns retained throughout the Jacobean period a discernible tendency towards appointing evangelical preachers. As Wilfrid Prest has observed, puritanism held a number of attractions for common lawyers. These included anticlericalism, the equation of worldly success with spiritual election, and an emphasis on preaching as the prime means to lead men to God: ‘A lawyer could appreciate and criticize sermons on his own terms, for logic, rhetoric and argument from authority were also his basic stock in trade.’1 At the same time, Inns of Court preachers frequently used courtroom terms in their sermons to illustrate the relation of God to man. Prest has suggested that the balance of this temporary and incomplete alliance between Gospel and law differed between Inns, and changed over time. But how did this interchange actually work as scriptural exegesis, as ‘logic, rhetoric and argument from authority’? And how did individual preachers adjust this balance between law and religion in response to changing circumstances and occasions? To address these questions, this paper offers a comparative study in the way Inns of Court sermons employed the language and methods of common law. Preachers examined include Roger Fenton and Richard Sibbes (Gray’s Inn), Thomas Gataker, John Donne and John Preston (Lincoln’s Inn), William Crashawe and Abraham Gibson (the Temple). Izaak Walton famously described Donne as preaching ‘like an Angel from a cloud’, and Emmanuel Utie referred to ‘the naturall majestie’ of

1 Wilfrid R. Prest, The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts 1590-1640 (Harlow: Longman, 1972), p. 209. Roger Fenton’s oratory: ‘like a Master Bee without a sting’. Keeping in mind the significance attached to sermon delivery by contemporary commentators, I hope that a comparative study of the rhetorical elocutio of these preachers will lead towards an account of a definable ‘Inns of Court’ preaching style – moderately Reformed in doctrine, witty yet direct in elaboration, and frequently willing to use the terms of the law to construe moral and theological abstractions.

DR PAUL RAFFIELD (FACULTY OF LAW, UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK) Rhetoric, Religion, and Education at the Elizabethan Inns of Court The paper examines the correlation between sacrament, ceremony, and legal education at the Elizabethan Inns of Court. The influence of Platonic and Aristotelian theories of political community, engendered by the Renaissance, is central to my analysis. I suggest that commons was as much a religious ritual as it was a functional activity in the quotidian existence of common lawyers. The order of dining, and the associated educational exercises, represented the indissoluble trinity of divine law, natural law, and common law. Legal education was inextricably linked by common lawyers with their perceived sacerdotal role: the educational exercises undertaken by law students and barristers took place in hall, after the communal meal; the Word of God had been eaten, and it was now to be spoken by His ministers. The growing importance of ceremony to the communal life of the legal profession reflected a post-Reformation consensus that the uniqueness of English law could be represented by an imagistic form of visual rhetoric, which sought to emphasize the inherent divinity of the common law and its practitioners. Analysis of seminal texts (written by, amongst others, Gerard Legh and William Dugdale) leads to an examination of Richard Hooker’s contribution to the acceptance of sacrament- based religious worship, whose unique rhetorical vocabulary permeated the rituals of the legal community at the Inner and Middle Temple, as reflected in the Inns of Court revels and masques. Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity propounded a theory of triangular congruency between king, commonwealth, and church. I suggest that the Inns of Court sought to replicate this template for the ideal state; applying the religious and constitutional theories of Hooker (and his intellectual progenitor, Aristotle) to the governance of their communities.

DR EMMA RHATIGAN (MAGDALEN COLLEGE, OXFORD) ‘the sinful history of mine own youth’: John Donne’s Sermons at Lincoln’s Inn Critics have waxed lyrical about the intimacy of Donne’s relationship with the Society of Lincoln’s Inn. Indeed, it has become a commonplace in Donne biography to argue that he found in the Benchers, Barristers, and students his ideal congregation. Thus RC Bald describes how the Lincoln’s Inn sermons contain ‘personal reminiscence’ and ‘wit’ and are characterized by an ‘ease and familiarity of address’. But Bald’s comments are in need of elaboration and lead to a number of important questions which he does not pose. For example, what personal reminiscences does Donne draw on and with what intent? Donne was not only ‘witty’ at Lincoln’s Inn. Do the Lincoln’s Inns sermons exhibit more wit than those preached in other pulpits? Or a different sort of wit? And how does his ‘ease and familiarity of address’ coexist with his religious duty to call to account his congregation for their sins? In this paper I will address these question by focussing on Donne’s preaching relationship with the gentlemen students, who constituted about half of his congregation at Lincoln’s Inn. In so doing I hope to explain why it was that Donne’s preaching was so warmly received by the Society and detail the evidence for what seems to have been a distinctly pastoral relationship between preacher and congregation.

PROFESSOR WILFRID PREST (HISTORY/LAW, UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE) Reader’s Dinners and the Culture of the Early Modern Inns of Court Over the past thirty years or more our knowledge of the Elizabethan and early Stuart Inns of Court has grown by leaps and bounds. Those who have contributed to this burgeoning body of scholarly work and publication may be conveniently if crudely divided into three main disciplinary streams: (a) legal historians, primarily concerned with the Inns of court as law schools and associations of common lawyers; (b) general historians, interested in the broad political, religious, and social influence of the Inns; and (c) literary/art-historical/musicological scholars, drawn to explore the Inns’s diverse roles as centres of artistic and literary creativity. Of course these disciplinary streams frequently meet and intermingle, especially in relation to the subject matter of this conference. Even so, legal and general historians have been castigated, not entirely unjustifiably, for paying insufficient attention to the culture and rituals of the Inns. This paper is partly a response to such criticism, while also contributing to a long-running debate about the causes and timing of the collapse of the medieval system of legal education by means of aural learning exercises. It has been widely assumed that increasingly lavish entertainment provided at the Lent and Autumn readings was one main reason why readings could not be successfully revived after 1660. However, close scrutiny of the costs and benefits of such entertainment, cultural and social as well as financial and gastronomic, suggests that the crucial problem was the diminishing pedagogical and professional utility of the readings themselves, rather than the spiralling extravagance of associated drinking and feasting.

PROFESSOR NIGEL LLEWELLYN (DEPT OF ART HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX) The Temple Church: Commemorating Lawyers in Early Modern England The years around 1600 saw an unprecedented increase in the numbers of funeral monuments erected in England in some cases for quite new kinds of subjects and in others by new classes of clients. Lawyers marked their ever-increasing status in Tudor and Stuart England by joining the ranks of those in society who were commemorated by means of elaborate funeral monuments. In this they were joined by other members of what was, in effect, a post-Reformation meritocratic elite, comprising people who expressed their individual and collective virtue through reference to scholarly accomplishments and thus challenged the assumed authority of blood lineage, for example, the clergy, the scholars, and the bureaucrats. This talk, which will take place in the Temple Church – itself a site for the display of an interesting range of actual and now lost monuments from this period – will trace the particular characteristics of the many monuments erected across early modern England to the memory of those educated at the Inns of Court, many of whom went on to develop careers as lawyers. Lawyers’ tombs used a particular rhetoric to display the virtues of their subjects, both by appealing to well-established chivalric and heraldic formulae and by inventing new forms of portrayal and allegory. DR TARNYA COOPER (16 TH CENTURY CURATOR, NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY) Professional Pride and Personal Agendas: Portraiture and the Inns of Court, 1560- 1620 As members of the legal profession increased in wealth and status, numerous portraits of lawyers, barristers, and judges were painted from the 1560s. This paper will explore the various ways that members of the legal profession and others associated with the Inns of Court chose to be represented in painted portraits during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Both judges and lawyers are shown portrayed in professional attire – sometimes at key moments in their careers – and these portraits of men in robes became a standard formulaic type in the late sixteenth century. However, these schematised images contrast sharply with several examples of individualised portraits of men with legal training. Such portraits promote highly personal agendas via inscriptions, ingenious emblems, and new types of posturing. The most remarkable of these is the portrait of John Donne, circa 1595 (by an unknown artist, and recently purchased by the National Portrait Gallery). Limited evidence indicates that this portrait was on display in the chamber of fellow students at Lincolns Inn in the 1590s. The functions and meanings of these portraits in relation to burgeoning professional identity and personal, religious, or scholarly motives will also be examined. It is clear that a significant proportion of both types of portraits were painted for display in a domestic context, but to what extend portraiture was in evidence at the Inns of Court at this time is questionable. The survival rates of portraits from this period are undoubtedly low and thus the available evidence is limited, however investigating the circumstances of the commission of existing portraits does provide some suggestive evidence.

DR ANDREW ASHBEE Accomplishments and Diversions: Music at the Inns of Court Evidence for music-making at the Inns of Court is hard to come by. It was not, after all, part of the official raison d'être for their existence. Nevertheless, most members of the nobility spent some time, however briefly, at the Inns. If music was a normal part of their families’ routines, it is to be expected that they would wish to keep their interest while at the Inns by arranging lessons and performances. This paper is an attempt to explore the subject from two fronts. The first follows in the steps of John R Elliott Jr in extracting information from surviving records at the Inns relating to music and musicians; the second briefly assesses what might be learned from papers of members: diaries, accounts, etc. Links with musicians from the Royal Court and the London waits will also be explored.

DR PAULA HENDERSON The Evolution of the Gardens of the Inns of Court Like the other great inns along the Strand – most of them originally the metropolitan mansions of bishops and, later, of aristocratic grandees – the Inns of Court were surrounded by fine gardens and open fields. Some of these gardens resembled the courts of monastic and collegiate houses in form and function. Increasingly, the gardens were enlarged and fashioned like those of the private houses nearby. Because an interest in gardens was considered a worthy activity of a cultured, educated man, changes to the gardens were carried out by men like Sir Francis Bacon, whose improvements to the gardens of Gray’s Inn are well documented. Bacon’s first work there was the creation of walks in the 1580s on an area that had previously been land open to the general public. The gradual enclosure of Inns’s property reflected a greater emphasis on privacy and individual recreation. Although the documentary and visual evidence is limited, it is possible to reconstruct the evolving forms of many of these gardens, demonstrating how they enhanced the setting with walks, ornamental compartments (including mazes and labyrinths), mounts, banqueting houses, bowling alleys, and utilitarian gardens for growing fruits and vegetables. Equally significant is information on how the garden functioned. Typically, the pleasure gardens were used for relaxation, private discourse, and for the enjoyment of the sensuous delights of plants and wildlife. They were also used for more serious pursuits, including the entertainment of eminent visitors. Most famously, in Shakespeare’s Henry VI (pt. 1, 2.4) the protagonists in the War of the Roses (finding the hall ‘too loud’) met in the ‘more convenient’ garden of the Temple, where each plucked a rose – red or white – to establish his loyalties. However fictional such accounts are, they tell us much about the importance of the Inns’s gardens in the early modern period.

DR GEOFFREY TYACK (KELLOGG COLLEGE, OXFORD) The Rebuilding of the Inns of Court after the Restoration In the years following the Restoration each of the Inns of Court embarked on a process of physical expansion and rebuilding which drastically altered the architectural character both of the Inns themselves and of London’s ‘legal quarter’ as a whole. This expansion coincided with a decline in the educational role of the Inns, and was partly necessitated by the need to rebuild after fires (especially in the Temple and Gray’s Inn). But the main motivation appears to have been the desire to profit from the growing demand for lawyers’ chambers through property speculation. The end result was that London acquired its finest extant ensembles of late-seventeenth century domestic architecture, anticipating the better-known eighteenth-century squares of the West End: Kings Bench Walk at the Inner Temple (1668-78); New Court, Essex Court, Brick Court, and Pump Court at the Middle Temple (1676-86), together with the Middle Temple Gateway of 1683-4; New Square at Lincoln’s Inn (begun 1682); and Gray’s Inn Square (1685-93). Though well known to architectural historians and London topographers, this phase in the architectural history of the Inns has been relatively little studied. My paper will look at the circumstances that lay behind the rise in building activity in the Inns. It will also identify and discuss the main agents in the rebuilding: builders and speculators, including the notorious Nicholas Barbon, the eminence grise behind much of the work at the Temple, and also, where it is possible to identify them, the Benchers, notably Roger North, the designer of the Middle Temple Gateway and writer of a revealing essay on building which remained unpublished until 1981. It will finally assess the part played by the post-Restoration rebuilding in establishing the architectural and institutional character of the Inns as we perceive it today. This will be done with reference to the revolution in London building that followed the Great Fire and the Rebuilding Act of 1667 and also through comparison with other corporate establishments such as the London Livery Halls and the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. It is intended that the paper will be based, wherever possible, on an examination of documentary evidence both within the archives of the Inns themselves and elsewhere. DR MARK GIROUARD The Architecture of the Halls of the Inns of Court The Halls of Gray’s Inn, Staple Inn, Middle Temple, and Lincoln’s Inn, as built, enlarged and fitted out in the Elizabethan and early Stuart decades, form a rare and precious survival of work of this period in London, and are impressive evidence of the growing prosperity of the law as a profession and source of education; that of the Middle Temple was the biggest of all Elizabethan great halls, rivalling in scale and richness the early Tudor halls at Christ Church, Oxford, and Hampton Court Palace. The Halls combined the traditional and the up-to-date in a way that must have seemed apposite to the legal profession: open timber roofs and arched or traceried windows in the late Gothic manner, as established in collegiate and domestic architecture, combined with ebullient Mannerist or Classical screens and other embellishments, including heraldic glass, by the best available London craftsmen. Their central position, clientele drawn from all over England, and the fashionable entertainments put on in them made them exemplars the influence of which has been underestimated, but can be traced in the domestic great halls of Longleat, Burghley, Wiston, and Wollaton; the early seventeenth century collegiate halls at Wadham College, Oxford, and Trinity College, Cambridge; and the elaborate screens of the same date at Knole, Hatfield, Audley End, and elsewhere. The possible two-stage development, iconography, and influence of the Middle Temple screen is especially worthy of discussion.

PROFESSOR JESSICA WINSTON (DEPT OF ENGLISH AND PHILOSOPHY, IDAHO STATE UNIVERSITY) Forming a Professional Community: Lyric Poetry at the Early Elizabethan Inns of Court Throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, lyric poetry was written and published regularly in manuscripts, which circulated in aristocratic households, the universities, the court, and the Inns of Court. Recent studies have explored some of the contexts in which manuscript poetry was written and shared, especially the court, the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century Inns, and regional literary circles. Little attention has been paid, however, to the significance of manuscript poetic exchange at the early Elizabethan Inns of Court. This paper has two aims; the first is to consider why the poetry of the early Elizabethan Inns has been overlooked. Here, I will briefly address the place of such poetry in studies of Renaissance literature and the lack of accessible sources (both surviving manuscript materials and modern editions). The second is to explore how manuscript poetry functioned socially at the Inns. Looking at some of the defining characteristics of this poetry (especially its overt didacticism and moralizing), as well as the educational and professional environment of the law schools, I will suggest that poetic composition and circulation helped members of the Inns to shape a professional identity and community. More to the point, they shared their verse in order to shape the values of a group that would partly define who they were to others. Texts to be addressed include: Barnabe Googe (1540-1594), Eglogs, epytaphes, and sonettes (1563); George Turberville (1540?-1610?), Epitaphes, epigrams, songs and sonnets (1567); George Gascoigne (c.1534-1577), A hundreth sundrie flowers (1573) and Posies (1575); John Grange (fl.1577), The golden Aphroditis (1577); and Timothy Kendall (fl.1577), Flowers of epigrammes (1577).

DR CLIFF FORSHAW (DEPT OF ENGLISH, UNIVERSITY OF HULL) The Chameleon Muse in the Inns of Court: Sir John Davies, John Marston, and Everard Guilpin Prizing wit, the Inns of Court fostered the production of epigrams and verse satire, as well as often licensing particularly savage bouts of flyting through the Saturnalia of the Revels. Since Martial, the epigram had of course two main parallel strands: praise and blame. My paper attempts to show how the figure of the hypocritical Barking Satyrist ‘with his tongue rioted in bawdery’, through whom the formal verse satires of John Marston and Everard Guilpin are voiced, grows to some extent out of this dual epigrammatic tradition. ‘Our English Martiall’, Sir John Davies, exemplifies a certain Inns of Court type: proud of his ‘Chameleon Muse’ and eager for both preferment and a reputation as a wit, he engages in the dangerous game of flattering the powerful publicly, while mocking them privately for the amusement and approval of his peers. My paper investigates Davies’s literary strategies to secure advancement, overcome disgrace, and gain rehabilitation against the context of the Inns of Court Revels and flyting. It considers how echoes of Davies’s verses are not only used to construct a series of sexually and morally ambiguous figures which shape-shift through Guilpin’s Skialethiea (1598) and Marston’s Certaine Satyres (1598) and The Scourge of Villanie (1598), but are instrumental in creating Marston’s grotesque persona, Kinsayder: the hypocritical, prurient, and psychopathic Chameleon Satyrist himself.

DR AGNIESZKA STECZOWICZ (DEPT OF FRENCH, UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH) The Masque of Mountebanks: Paradoxes in Performance at the Inns of Court The purpose of this paper will be to show that rhetorical paradoxes or mock encomia, which have their roots in classical epideictic oratory, formed part of legal training at the Inns of Court. Devoted to praising an unexpected or trivial subject, mock encomia bear a certain resemblance to a judicial procedure, in that they often take the form of an apology designed to free the guilty subject of accusations or aspersions levelled against it by common opinion. Hence perhaps their popularity with students of law. The revels, which took place at the Temple and Gray’s Inns at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, testify to a culture of paradox at the Inns of Court. Set pieces, such as a ‘Defence of Woman’s Inconstancy’, were recited at the revels and plays held yearly around Christmas at the larger Inns. This is the theme of a paradox by John Donne, whose collection of Paradoxes and Problems was composed in the early 1590s when Donne was studying law at Lincoln's Inn. The paper will be centred on The Masque of Mountbanks, performed at Gray’s Inn in the 1618-19 revels. This play features a character named Paradox, who comes forward to utter various witty paradoxical statements, such as ‘A Drunkard is a good philosopher; for he thinks aright that the world goes round’. The Masque of Mountbanks, I shall argue, is testimony to the great appeal that rhetorical paradoxes, comic counterparts of those which formed part of legal training, had for students of law.

DR BARBARA RAVELHOFER (DEPT OF ENGLISH, UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM) Dancing and Masquing at the Inns of Court The ‘old measures’ represent a group of social dances which date back to Elizabethan times and have been associated with members of the Inns of Court. My paper will discuss these dances in the light of other choreographic treatises of the period. Taking a technical assessment of the ‘old measures’ as a point of departure, I will then discuss dancing in various masques performed by members of the Inns of Court, with particular attention to James Shirley’s The Triumph of Peace (1634).

PROFESSOR LORNA HUTSON (DEPT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS) The Evidential Plot: Shakespeare and Gascoigne at Gray’s Inn, 1566-1594 In the Comedy of Errors, as is well known, Shakespeare makes much of the reputation of Ephesus for producing illusions by magic – it’s supposed to be full of ‘jugglers that deceive the eye,/ Dark working sorcerers that change the mind’. But no such eye- deceiving magic actually takes place. The play, which seems to have been first performed at Gray’s Inn in 1594, is rather produced (in the sense of ‘extended in duration’) as the deferral of a legal sentence, concluding in scenes of impassioned dispute over conflicting witness testimony, resolved by a recognition. Nothing in Plautine comedy – to which the Comedy of Errors is overtly indebted – prepares for a structure like this. In Plautine comedy, as Adele Scafuro has argued, characters tend to use threats of legal action as forms of self-help remedy, and there is no real distinction between legal action and the tactics of deception. Where, then, did Shakespeare’s innovative structure, with its different positioning of law, come from? My paper will suggest that Shakespeare’s Comedy is a response to the only previous classical intrigue comedy played in Gray’s Inn, George Gascoigne’s translation of Ariosto’s I Suppositi, which was performed in 1566 and published 1573 and 1575. I will argue that in Gascoigne’s play, scenes of mounting anxiety over the adequacy of legal methods of proof in cases of deception and fraud spoke to those members of the audience who sat on Parliamentary committees and in Guildhall hearings dealing with precisely these issues. Some of these men were also on the 1572 and 1576 High Commissions which seem to have objected to aspects of Gascoigne’s publications. Gascoigne – like Sidney, in the Old Arcadia – resolved the ethical problems raised by his implicit identification of Roman comic plot and legal fraud by adapting the plot of classical intrigue to that of the trial of evidence by law. My reading of the Comedy of Errors will suggest that Shakespeare, in turn, may have responded to Gascoigne’s and Sidney’s poetic solutions with his ‘evidential plot’.

PROFESSOR BRADIN CORMACK (DEPT OF ENGLISH, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO) Placing the Revels: Jurisdiction at the Inns This paper asks how the idea and history of jurisdiction might structure the relation between legal and literary discourse within the educational culture at the Inns. Building on the work especially of Peter Goodrich, I understand the sixteenth-century Inns as a site both for the consolidation of the common lawyers’ professional identity and also, in the event, for the manufacture of a rationalized legal identity much at odds with the law’s complex and plural history. Focusing on the 1561-62 revels at the Inner Temple and the Gesta Grayorum of 1594-95, as well as on some passages in William Baldwin’s 1559 Mirror for Magistrates, I argue that the revellers’ fictive representations of legal and political authority recasts jurisdictional tensions inside the developing law as the externalized discursive binary familiar today as ‘law and literature.’

PROFESSOR ANDREW GURR (UNIVERSITY OF READING) The Inns and the Plays Evidence of the relations between members of the Inns and the theatre are extensive, not just in the plays staged in the Inns at Christmas but in playgoing and familiarity with plays as a stock feature of the Innsman’s culture. Poets and playwrights, mostly from Gray’s, Lincoln’s, and the Middle and Inner Temples, who are known to have been regular visitors to the playhouses include John Davies, John Marston, Everard Guilpin, Henry Fitzgeoffery, Richard Brathwait, and John Ford. Other Innsmen, such as Parr Stafferton and Valentine Browne, became involved in and even started fights at or outside playhouses. The Bridewell court records note a misdemeanour at the Inner Temple where a Templer was expelled for smuggling in a whore dressed as a boy page, a disguise familiar from plays of the time. A rather less criminal group, chiefly in the 1630, kept diaries or accounts which list the number of times they went to plays, often more than once a week. Two of the most remarkable Innsmen, both deeply committed to the professional companies, were John Webster and John Ford of the Middle Temple. Ford spent twenty years writing poems while also engaging himself in the patching of plays for the Henslowe enterprises, before in 1628 he began to write his own plays, the exceptionally radical and ambitious works mostly published under the anagram of his name, ‘FIDE HONOR’. His career is the clearest example of the intimate bonds that developed between the lawyers and the professional playing companies.

PROFESSOR RICHARD C MCCOY (QUEENS COLLEGE AND THE GRADUATE CENTER, CUNY) Law-Sports and the Night of Errors: Shakespeare at the Inns of Court Revels at the Inns of Court were extravagant affairs, and one of the grandest of all was the Gesta Grayorum held at Gray’s Inn between December and March in 1594-5. The kingdom’s highest and mightiest attended several of these events, including Lord Burleigh, Lord Howard of Effingham, the Earls of Essex and Southampton, and even Queen Elizabeth herself. The Gesta Grayorum also marked the courtly debut of the newly formed Lord Chamberlain’s Men and its resident playwright, William Shakespeare. He had recently dedicated Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece to the Earl of Southampton, and the Earl’s patronage may have helped to secure him a place in the revels. The Comedy of Errors was performed in the great hall of Gray’s Inn on December 28, but a mocking contemporary account deemed the appearance of ‘a company of base and common fellows’ a source of confusion and embarrassment. The next night, the ‘conjurer’ held responsible for the previous ‘Night of Errors’ was put on trial, but, claiming that it had all been ‘nothing else but vain illusions, fancies, dreams and enchantments,’ he was pardoned. My paper will explore some of the conflicts and contradictions inherent in these ‘law-sports,’ contrasting the play’s threats of bondage and possession with its insistence that ‘Man is master of his liberty’ (2.1.7). I will also consider just how far its farcical violence pushes against its promise that the ‘sweet breath of flattery conquers strife’ (3.2.28), while showing how these aggressive impulses find outlets in pageants of misrule. Finally, I will discuss how a ‘Night of Errors’ at the Inns of Court helped launch the most successful career in English drama.

PROFESSOR ALAN H NELSON ( UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY) New Light on Music and Drama at the Inns of Court to 1642 Alan H Nelson is completing a Records of Early English Drama (REED) collection for the Inns of Court to 1642. John R Elliott, Jr, began this collection about 1980. As editor of Cambridge (Colleges, University and Town) and, also with John R Elliott Jr, of Oxford (Colleges and University) for REED, Nelson will survey discoveries which have resulted from recent trawls through the archives and libraries of the four major Inns of Court. A major point of his presentation will be to compare traditions of music and drama at the Inns of Court to comparable traditions at Cambridge and Oxford.