Notes Introduction: Staging Justice 1. From the epilogue of Eiranarcha, or Of the Office of the Iustices of the Peace (London, 1581) (STC no. 15163), p. 511. 2. This mirrors provisions in early modern England for local justices of the peace to refer more complex cases on to the assize judges, as discussed in Chapter 2. 3. This is typified by Fredson Thayer Bowers’ Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587–1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940). For the lasting impact of Bowers ’ work, see Chapter 1. 4. Contrast this with scholarly interest in the trial scene of The Merchant of Venice, for example. 5. For example, Victoria Kahn and Lorna Hutson, eds, Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Erica Sheen and Lorna Hutson, eds, Literature, Politics and Law in Renaissance England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Subha Mukherji, Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Constance Jordan and Karen Cunningham, eds, The Law in Shakespeare (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Paul Raffield and Gary Watt, eds, Shakespeare and the Law (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2008); Andrew Zurcher, Shakespeare and Law, Arden Critical Companions (London: Methuen, 2010). The predeliction for Shakespeare’s work is evident from the titles even in this small sample. 6. For an overview, see C. W. Brooks, ‘Litigants and Attorneys in the King’s Bench and Common Pleas, 1560–1640’, in Legal Records and the Historian, ed. J. H. Baker (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978), pp. 41–59. This is treated in depth in Chapter 1. 7. The participatory nature of early modern justice is well documented by legal and social historians. See Thomas Green, Verdict According to Conscience: Perspectives on the English Criminal Trial Jury 1200–1800 (London: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Cynthia B. Herrup, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, 1550–1640 (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000). 8. Tensions surrounding the role of the jury are dealt with in Chapter 3. 9. For the vengeful roots of common law practices, see Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, The Common Law (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 38 (first publ. in 1881). 10. The Invention of Suspicion, in particular Chapters 2 and 6. 11. See for example Bradley J. Irish’s survey article, ‘Vengeance, Variously: Revenge before Kyd in Early Elizabethan Drama’, Early Theatre, 12 (2009), 167 168 Notes 117–34. On the idea of revenge in the genre of comedy, see Anne Rosalind Jones, ‘Revenge Comedy: Writing, Law and the Punishing Heroine in Twelfth Night, Merry Wives of Windsor, and Swetnam the Woman-Hater’, in Shakespearean Power and Punishment: A Volume of Essays, ed. Gillian Murray Kendall (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), pp. 23–38. 12. As the protagonists in revenge tragedy are predominantly male, I will be using the pronoun ‘he’ throughout. Women do have a significant part to play in many of the revenge plays, and this will be addressed when discuss- ing the collective nature of onstage revenge. 13. I deliberately do not discuss an earlier tradition within the Inns of Court that includes plays such as Gorboduc, Horestes, Gismond of Salerne and The Misfortunes of Arthur. No doubt these plays are deeply embedded in legal culture, but the difference between private performances at the Inns of Court and the staging of revenge in the public playhouse is crucial to the genre’s participatory structure. 14. The collective and participatory revenges at the culmination of both of these plays is in striking contrast to Hamlet’s isolation throughout. 15. English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 6. The exception here is Hamlet, who is very much a part of a ruling elite. 16. John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 204. 17. Charles A. Hallett and Elaine S. Hallett, ‘Antonio’s Revenge and the Integrity of the Revenge Tragedy Motifs’, Studies in Philology, 76 (1979), 366–86 (p. 380); Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 18. As I argue in Chapter 5, this has been obscured due to an overly Hamlet- centric approach to the revenge genre. 19. ‘These Were Spectacles to Please My Soul’: Inventive Violence in the Renaissance Revenge Tragedy’, in Staging Pain, 1580–1800: Violence and Trauma in British Theater, ed. James Robert Allard and Mathew R. Martin (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 49–56 (p. 49). 20. Castaldo, ‘These Were Spectacles to Please My Soul’, p. 49. 21. Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation, 3rd edn (London: Harvard University Press, 2009) (first publ. 1988), p. 106. 22. I engage more fully with Posner’s argument in Chapter 5, where I argue that Hamlet has less to offer from a legal perspective than the supposedly deriva- tive Antonio’s Revenge or The Tragedy of Hoffman. 23. Posner, Law and Literature, p. 108. 24. ‘The Ghost of History: Hamlet and the Politics of Paternity’, Law and Literature, 18 (2006), 171–97 (p. 192, n. 10). 25. Robert N. Watson, ‘Tragedies of Revenge and Ambition’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. Claire McEachern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 160–81 (p. 160). 26. Gregory M. Colón Semenza, ‘The Spanish Tragedy and Revenge’, in Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion, ed. Garrett A. Sullivan Jr, Patrick Cheney, and Andrew Hadfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 50–60 (p. 54). Notes 169 27. I. G., A Refutation of the Apology for Actors (London, 1615) (STC no. 12214), p. 57. 28. James Boyd White, The Legal Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Posner, Law and Literature; Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); Richard Weisberg, Poethics: And Other Strategies of Law and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). 29. A Critical Introduction to Law and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 8. 30. See also Jacques Derrida’s explication of Kafka’s story, in an article also called ‘Before the Law’, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 181–220. 31. Posner, Law and Literature, p. 305ff. 32. ‘“Understood Relations”: Law and Literature in Early Modern Studies’, Literature Compass, 6 (2009), 706–25 (p. 710). For a more in-depth analysis of the need to surpass such ‘sterile polarity’ in relation to early modern drama and law, see Mukherji’s ‘Jonson’s The New Inn and a Revisiting of the “Amorous Jurisdiction”’, Law and Literature, 18 (2006), 149–69 (p. 154). 33. From Lawrence M. Friedman, The Republic of Choice: Law, Authority, and Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 4. 34. Cf. E. J. Hobsbawm, Bandits (London: Abacus, 2001): ‘Indeed the original (Italian) meaning of bandito is a man “placed outside the law”’, p. 12. 35. See Kathy Eden’s introduction to Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 5ff. 36. Kill All the Lawyers?: Shakespeare’s Legal Appeal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 4. 37. For an excellent discussion of the sociocultural implications of mooting, see Karen J. Cunningham, ‘“So Many Books, So Many Rolls of Ancient Time”: The Inns of Court and Gorboduc’, in Solon and Thespis, pp. 197–217 (p. 200). 38. Theaters of Intention: Drama and the Law in Early Modern England (California: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 21. 39. Weisberg, Poethics, p. 15. 40. Peter Goodrich’s entry on ‘Law’ in The Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, ed. Thomas O. Sloane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 425. This antagonism is arguably more prominent in modern-day legal theory, but it still has relevance for the early modern period. See also Barbara Shapiro, ‘Classical Rhetoric and the English Law of Evidence’, in Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe, pp. 54–72. 41. ‘The Law Wishes to have a Formal Existence’, in Closure or Critique: New Directions in Legal Theory, ed. Alan Norrie (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), pp. 157–74 (p. 170). 42. Mukherji, ‘Jonson’s The New Inn and a Revisiting of the “Amorous Jurisdiction”’, p. 151. 43. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. Donald A. Russell, Loeb Classical Library Series (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001) 4.2.21. 44. The Invention of Suspicion, p. 78ff. For the application of such ‘prob- able’ modes of thinking to the development of the illusion of character depth on the early modern stage, see ‘Law, Probability and Character in Shakespeare’, in Fictions of Knowledge: Fact, Evidence, Doubt, ed. Yota Batsaki, 170 Notes Subha Mukherji, and Jan-Melissa Schramm (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), pp. 61–83. 45. Philip J. Finkelpearl discusses the many connections between legal and liter- ary circles, going so far as to say: ‘For a brief space of time – roughly from 1550 to 1575 – [the Inns of Court] were the literary center of England’, John Marston of the Middle Temple: an Elizabethan Dramatist in his Social Setting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 24. 46. See Sir George Buck’s tract, The Third Universitie of England: Or a Treatise of the Foundations of all the Colledges, Auncient Schooles of Priviledge, and of Houses of Learning, and Liberall Arts, within and about the Most Famous Cittie of London, published in an appendix to John Stow’s The Annales of London (London, 1615) (STC no. 23338). 47. Seneca His Tenne Tragedies, ed.