Tales of Resistance: Combating Legal Power from Italian Shores to London Streets A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Jessica Apolloni IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Advised by John Watkins April 2016 © {Jessica Apolloni} {2016} i Acknowledgements I am very grateful for everyone who has made this project possible. I extend my deepest thanks to my adviser, John Watkins, who has been a supportive mentor, constructive critic, and enthusiastic coach throughout my time at the University of Minnesota. I also thank Shirley Nelson Garner, for believing in my abilities from the moment I stepped into her classroom as an undergraduate interested in Shakespeare. John and Shirley have both nurtured my love of literature and guided me to this rewarding career, for which I cannot adequately express my gratitude. I wish to thank my committee members, Nabil Matar and Susan Noakes, for their guidance, critical attention to my work, and adamant support. The intellectual framework of this project owes a huge debt to my Fulbright cohort as well as my fellows in the Mellon Academy for Advanced Study in the Renaissance. In our discussions, events, and workshops, Edward Muir and Regina Schwartz greatly influenced my critical approach to Renaissance studies, and more specifically, law and literature. I wish to extend heartfelt thanks to University of Minnesota faculty members, including Giancarlo Casale, Rebecca Krug, and Katherine Scheil, who all had crucial roles in my development as a scholar. I also express my gratitude to the University of Minnesota English Department, Center for Early Modern History, and Graduate School for their generous support in travel and research grants, including a 2015-16 Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. Special thanks go to my writing (and often life) coach Kirsten Jamsen at the University of Minnesota Center for Writing. I would not have made it through this dissertation without her optimism and critical eye. I also thank Karen Frederickson for ii guiding me through countless administrative questions and concerns. Fellow graduate students and faculty members in the English department’s medieval and early modern workshop were immensely helpful in shaping dissertation chapters. I would especially like to thank Amanda Taylor, Penelope Geng, Hyeryung Hwang, and Francesca Bortoletti, for their continued support and thoughtful responses to my writing and thinking. I also wish to thank Danielle Tessmer, Eunha Na, and Laura Moltz who have seen me through the many stresses of graduate school. My heartfelt thanks extend to my family. My parents, Mary and Jeff Orton, provide unyielding support and guidance without which none of this would have been possible. I also thank my in-laws, Dara and Rick Apolloni, for introducing me to the beautiful language of Italian. Most importantly I thank my better half, Jeremy Apolloni, whose love and encouragement sustains me through any challenge. Lastly, I am grateful for our dog, Mika. She always knows the right moment to pull me away from work with her big puppy eyes and wagging tail. iii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to my father, who, during summer storms, would read Shakespeare to me by flashlight until the power came back on. iv Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter One “Muoia il Podestà!”: Legal Authority and Community Forces in Late Medieval Novelle……………………………………………….......................................................20 Chapter Two Local Communities and Monarchic Power in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure…………………………………………………………………………………..53 Chapter Three Italianated Englishmen: Cony-Catchers and Communal Justice in Local Legal Experience……………………………………………………………………………..…86 Chapter Four Transforming Juries in John Webster’s The White Devil……………………………....131 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………..176 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………...178 1 Introduction In 1566, members of the Inner Temple wrote and staged Gismund of Salerne for Queen Elizabeth I. As an adaptation of a tale in Boccaccio’s Decameron, Gismund is the earliest known English play that derives from Italian novelle.1 In the same year, George Gascoigne produced two plays at Grays Inn, one of the most influential Inns of Court and a central place for legal training in England. The two plays, Supposes, deriving from Ariosto’s Suppositi, and Jocasta, a tragedy adapted from Lodovico Dolce’s Giocasta, similarly share Italian sources. These three plays mark the beginning of a larger English phenomenon, in which playwrights transformed Italian narratives for the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage.2 The connections between law, theatricality, and Italian literature in these plays also exemplify the two larger discourses in this dissertation, including: the dialogue between law and literature in early modern theatre, and the expansive influence of Italian culture on English literature. Legal historians and literary scholars alike continually demonstrate how the law provides one of the primary concepts in which people comprehend the world in which they live.3 The law informs societies of the past and present like no other discipline, 1 As noted in Murray J. Levith’s Shakespeare’s Italian Settings and Plays (London: Macmillan, 1989), 2. 2 Gascoigne’s Jocasta is also thought to be the first Greek tragedy on the English stage, and was translated from the Italian of Lodovico Dolce’s Giocasta with the help of Francis Kinwelmershe. For more information, see Gillian Austen, George Gascoigne (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008), 52. Murray J. Levith references The Supposes as one of the first English plays based on an Italian play in Shakespeare’s Italian Settings and Plays, 2. 3 Christopher W Brooks, Law, Politics and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 7. 2 mapping power structures, political spheres, and social relationships in the process. The new “legal turn” in literary studies has added a great deal to our understanding of early modern legal experience, especially in terms of the connections of literary genres to categories of law and jurisdictional boundaries, as well as the immense overlap between the kinds of narrative structuring inherent to literary and legal texts.4 Yet, law-literature studies have often relied on nationalistic boundaries, overlooking the intense interchange of legal and literary ideas circulating across geographical divides.5 The following analysis showcases how early modern theater became a coalescing site of transnational legal knowledge and perspectives. I use the strong connection between Italian and English literature to think through how legal ideas travel across cultural divides and circulate in both legal learning and popular understandings of law. In this process, I examine what it means for literature and legal texts entrenched in Italian social circumstances to circulate in England’s drastically different legal environment as well as the ways in which Italian law prompted new perspectives on English legal authority. Specifically, I illustrate how English authors appropriated Italian texts to oppose increasing monarchic power in the legal system. I argue that Italian materials provided a 4 See, for example: Christopher Warren, Literature & the Law of Nations, 1580-1680 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Bradin Cormack, A Power to do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common law, 1509-1625 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007); Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Victoria Kahn and Lorna Hutson, Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); and the edited volume, Taking Exception to the Law: Materializing Injustice in Early Modern English Literature, eds. Donald Beecher, Travis Decook, Andrew Wallace, and Grant Williams (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015). 5 Christopher Warren’s book Literature & the Law of Nations, 1580-1680 also highlights and combats this nationalistic tendency in law-literature studies. 3 comparative legal viewpoint for writers to contest the overarching power shift from local to state legal authority in sixteenth-century England. By recovering the Italian sources of popular English plays and pamphlets, I establish English authors’ engagement with Italian law, in which legal authority was already invested in court powers removed from local communities. At the same time, I demonstrate how English writers manipulated common stereotypes of Italian court authority, such as the Duke’s mastery of Machiavellian dissemblance in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and Webster’s violent display of court corruption in Italian revenge tragedies, to disturb audiences and provoke a wider public to evaluate the role of court power in legal affairs. My project then reveals the preoccupation of popular literature with legal concepts as well as Italian influences on early modern English expectations and understandings of law. I develop this argument through close analysis of literary texts within chapters dedicated to specific features of English common law. While individual chapters focus on particular aspects of the English legal system, collectively, they showcase a broader view of literature’s place in contested negotiations for power in early modern England. Italian-English Connections in Legal Knowledge and Practices The relationship between