Positive representation of Inns of Court lawyers in Jacobean city comedy A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by David Westlake English, School of Arts, Brunel University November 2009 i Abstract _____________________________________________________________________ This thesis examines representations of lawyers and law in examples of Jacobean city comedy, taking into account certain contemporary developments in the legal profession and the law in England. The period covered is 1598-1616. The thesis questions the conventional interpretation of city comedy as hostile to the legal profession. It suggests the topic is more complex than has been assumed, arguing that city comedy makes direct and indirect positive representation of Inns of Court lawyers, who are to be distinguished from attorneys (newly segregated in the Inns of Chancery), amateur quasi-lawyers, and university-educated civil lawyers. It is proposed that city comedy represents Inns of Court lawyers positively in two ways. Firstly, by means of legal content: representations of developments in the profession and the law demonstrate a wish to connect with the young lawyers and students of the Inns of Court, and reflect a contemporary drive by them for increased organization and regulation. Secondly, by means of literary form: ostensibly pejorative representations need not be taken at face value; instead, they may be found to be ironic. The main proposed contributions to knowledge are: that Inns of Court lawyers were a favoured part of the target audience of the private playhouses, making it questionable that they would be represented negatively in city comedy; that lawyers as represented in city comedy are not a single or a simple category; that representation of lawyers is inflected by the various forms and impulses of city comedy; and that city comedy incorporates some reflection of the increasing professionalization of legal practice in the period. ii Contents _____________________________________________________________________ Abstract i Contents ii Acknowledgements v Abbreviations vi 1. Introduction 1 1.1 The Argument 1 1.2 Anti-lawyer sentiment 5 1.3 Theatrical culture of the Inns of Court 26 1.4 The private theatres and genre 33 (i) Private rivals? The Blackfriars and Paul’s 33 (ii) Jonson’s ideas about comedy 38 (iii) Antecedents 46 (iv) Criticism 54 1.5 Literature and law 65 2. Defamation and anti-lawyer sentiment in Poetaster 72 2.1 Defamation and satire in Poetaster 74 2.2 Anti-lawyer sentiment in Poetaster 98 iii 3. The Phoenix and the rise of the new profession 112 3.1 Tangle and the legal profession 113 3.2 Law and monarchy in The Phoenix 133 4. Law Tricks for Inns of Court lawyers 139 4.1 Legal matter in Law Tricks 142 4.2 Polymetes’ attitude to studying law 157 5. Wife-selling in early modern comedy 164 5.1 Wife-selling in Elizabethan and Jacobean literature 165 5.2 Wife-selling in early modern England 171 6. Ram Alley and the Inns of Chancery 184 6.1 Throte and the decline of the Inns of Chancery 186 6.2 Other legal matter in Ram Alley 201 7. Michaelmas Term and Slade’s Case 210 7.1 Legal precedent and Michaelmas Term 211 7.2 The Induction to Michaelmas Term 227 8. Conclusion 236 8.1 Contribution 236 8.2 Significance 237 8.3 Limitations 244 8.4 Further work 247 iv Appendices (i) Report of the case of Mericke v. Pie, A.D. 1602 250 (ii) Plays performed at the Inns of Court, 1500-1615 255 (iii) STC numbers and location of early modern books 258 Bibliography 262 v Acknowledgements _____________________________________________________________________ I want to thank Nina Taunton and Bill Leahy for their integrity, their expert advice, and their support. Thank you to Meretta Elliott for keeping me in work, and to Suzanne Wills for her help along the way. Special thanks to Patsy Holly. vi Abbreviations _____________________________________________________________________ Details of texts are in the Bibliography. Car in the reign of Charles I (in law report citation) Cf. confer, compare Ch. chapter Co Rep standard legal citation for Coke’s reports Cro. Eliz. citation for Croke’s reports of cases in the reign of Elizabeth Cro. Jac. citation for Croke’s reports of cases in the reign of James I Ed. editor or edition, as appropriate F folio H.M.S.O. Her Majesty’s Stationery Office KB King’s Bench (legal citation for The Law Reports) MS. manuscript No. number n.d. no detail supplied n.p. no publisher stated r recto: right-hand page RSV Revised Standard Version (Bible reference) STC Short-Title Catalogue St Tr state trials (in legal citation) s.v. sub verbo, under the word (dictionary reference) Tr. translated by v verso: left-hand page Vol. volume 1 Chapter one Introduction _______________________________________________________________________________________________________ 1.1 The argument In this thesis I consider Jacobean city comedy as a complex literary and dramatic form that involves representations of lawyers and law. I regard the material duration of the genre as being from 1598 to 1616.1 This compact lifespan coincides with some notable developments in English law, and comes at the height of a period of profession-defining change in London’s Inns of Court. I examine five plays: Jonson’s Poetaster (1601), Middleton’s The Phoenix (1603-4) and Michaelmas Term (1606), John Day’s Law Tricks (1604), and Lording Barry’s Ram Alley (1607-8). My central argument is that the attitude taken in the plays to lawyers and law is more complex than has previously been assumed. It is, I contend, often deceptively positive. Positive representation of lawyers in city comedy is an idea contrary to prevailing opinion, which says in general terms that the genre is hostile to the legal profession and the law.2 I propose that the plays take a positive attitude to lawyers and law essentially on account of three points. 1 1598 for the first performance of the original version of Every Man in His Humour; Brian Gibbons deems The Devil is an Ass (1616) the terminal point in the genre in Jacobean City Comedy: A Study of Satiric Plays by Jonson, Marston and Middleton, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1980), 152. Dates relate usually to first performance rather than time of original composition or publication. Unless otherwise indicated, the source for dates is Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 286-98. 2 Gibbons says that city comedy features “dishonest and ruthless” lawyers, and displays “increasing ambivalence of attitude towards [lawyers’] methods and appetites”: Jacobean City Comedy, 118-19. 2 The first point is commercial consideration. These plays were written for performance before an audience including Inns of Court men, so it is questionable that the plays should unambiguously undermine this desired section of their audience. The second point is legal content. I argue that the plays incorporate reflections of contemporary legal developments in a way that would appeal to Inns of Court lawyers. Barry’s Ram Alley provides possibly the most straightforward example of how what appears to be a broadly negative representation of lawyers becomes positive in relation specifically to Inns of Court lawyers. The play contains allusions to the newly enforced division between the Inns of Court and the Inns of Chancery. The lawyer-figure, Throte, is an Inns of Chancery man, and Barry has the character declare to the audience that he only seems a lawyer, implying that it is the Inns of Court which produce superior, so-to-speak real lawyers – a sentiment that could be Tom Cain affirms the conventional view of anti-lawyer sentiment in his edition of Poetaster (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 45. Gail Kern Paster perpetuates the standard view of Michaelmas Term’s Induction as a “sharp satire against the law as a mercenary system run for its own benefit” in her edition of Middleton’s play (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 57. See also Alan Brissenden, “Middletonian Families,” in Plotting Early Modern London: New Essays on Jacobean City Comedy, ed. Dieter Mehl, Angela Stock, and Anne-Julia Zwierlein (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 29; C. W. Brooks, Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 134; Daniel B. Dodson, “Thomas Middleton’s City Comedies” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1954), 95; G. Blakemore Evans, Elizabethan-Jacobean Drama (London: A. & C. Black, 1989), 285; Edward Gieskes, Representing the Professions: Administration, Law, and Theater in Early Modern England (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 119-21; Alfred B. Harbage, Shakespeare and the Professions (Fred S. Tupper Memorial Lecture, 2 April 1965; The George Washington University, n.p.), 20; W. J. Jones, Politics and the Bench (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971), 33; Wilfrid Prest, The Rise of the Barristers: A social history of the English bar, 1590-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 289. 3 expected to have pleased the Inns of Court men in the audience at the Whitefriars. The increased determination of the members of the Inns of Courts to stand apart (and to be seen to stand apart) from the Inns of Chancery is only one example of divisions within the legal profession. The word “lawyer” had anything but a univocal, vocationally unified meaning, and lawyers in the plays are not a single or a simple category. To speak against one type on the stage would have been to find favour with another. The third point is literary form. I propose that representation of lawyers in the plays is inescapably the product of various devices and attitudes which are conventional in city comedy. For example, I show how some ostensibly pejorative representations may be taken to be ironic. The self-consciously sophisticated and ambitious writers of the plays would not have been content merely to perpetuate a predictable literary tradition without adding some twist.