Newly Published: Penelope Geng, Communal Justice in Shakespeare's England (University of Toronto Press, 2021) @penelope_hg @utpress

Penelope Geng, Department of English, Macalester College, has published Communal Justice in Shakespeare's England: Drama, Law, and Emotion (University of Toronto Press, 2021). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

The sixteenth century was a turning point for both law and drama. Relentless professionalization of the common law set off a cascade of lawyerly self-fashioning – resulting in blunt attacks on lay judgment. English playwrights, including Shakespeare, resisted the forces of legal professionalization by casting legal expertise as a detriment to moral feeling. They celebrated the ability of individuals, guided by conscience and working alongside members of their community, to restore justice. Playwrights used the participatory nature of drama to deepen public understanding of and respect for communal justice. In plays such as King Lear and Macbeth, lay people accomplish the work of magistracy: conscience structures legal judgment, neighbourly care shapes the coroner’s inquest, and communal emotions give meaning to confession and repentance. An original and deeply sourced study of early modern literature and law, Communal Justice in Shakespeare’s England contributes to a growing body of scholarship devoted to the study of how drama creates and sustains community. Penelope Geng brings together a wealth of imaginative and documentary archives – including plays, sermons, conscience literature, Protestant hagiographies, legal manuals, and medieval and early modern chronicles – proving that literature never simply reacts to legal events but always actively invents legal questions, establishes legal expectations, and shapes legal norms.

 

Newly Published: Chenxi Tang: Imagining World Order: Literature and International Law in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800 @CornellPress

Newly published: Chenxi Tang, Imagining World Order: Literature and International Law in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University press, 2018). Here, from the publisher's website, is a description of the book's contents.

In early modern Europe, international law emerged as a means of governing relations between rapidly consolidating sovereign states, purporting to establish a normative order for the perilous international world. However, it was intrinsically fragile and uncertain, for sovereign states had no acknowledged common authority that would create, change, apply, and enforce legal norms. In Imagining World Order, Chenxi Tang shows that international world order was as much a literary as a legal matter. To begin with, the poetic imagination contributed to the making of international law. As the discourse of international law coalesced, literary works from romances and tragedies to novels responded to its unfulfilled ambitions and inexorable failures, occasionally affirming it, often contesting it, always uncovering its problems and rehearsing imaginary solutions. Tang highlights the various modes in which literary texts - some highly canonical (Camões, Shakespeare, Corneille, Lohenstein, and Defoe, among many others), some largely forgotten yet worth rediscovering - engaged with legal thinking in the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In tracing such engagements, he offers a dual history of international law and European literature. As legal history, the book approaches the development of international law in this period —its so-called classical age—in terms of literary imagination. As literary history, Tang recounts how literature confronted the question of international world order and how, in the process, a set of literary forms common to major European languages (epic, tragedy, romance, novel) evolved.

 

Pershina on Metaphors of Crime and Punishment in Shakespeare's "Macbeth" @UAHes

Marina A. Pershina, University of Alcala, has published Metaphors of Crime and Punishment in Shakespeare’s 'Macbeth'. Here is the abstract.

The aim of the article is to study the notions of crime and punishment in the Shakespeare’s tragedy “Macbeth”. It analyses the role of supernatural elements and metaphorical symbols as key components of the images of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Complex metaphors and poetic symbols go through the play’s plot. They follow the development of the characters’ inner struggle, reveal their intentions, and finally reflect their fall. Most symbols represent the supernatural dichotomy of the heaven (king Duncan’s virtues are compared to angels) and the hell (Macbeth is called a devil). Even the scenes of nature are depicted fantastically. The words of Hecate and the ‘weird sisters’ express the idea of existence in the external human world of something unknown that affects people’s internal motivation. At the end of the tragedy, metaphors in Macbeth’s soliloquies embody the themes of death, destruction, moral disintegration of the personality of the person who lost the meaning of life. The results of the research show that metaphors and symbolic elements are implied in the tragedy to create a psychological portrait of main characters. On the one hand, Shakespeare used them to show individuals. On the other hand, these characters become the collective images of sinners and righteous men.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Willdenthal on Reflections on Spelling and the Shakespeare Authorship Question

Bryan H. Wildenthal, Thomas Jefferson School of Law, is publishing Reflections on Spelling and the Shakespeare Authorship Question: 'What's in (the Spelling of) a Name?' at the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship website (Forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

What’s in a name? Perhaps, as Juliet recognized, not much (see Romeo and Juliet, act 2, sc. 2). This essay argues that the differences in spelling between “Shakspere,” “Shakespeare,” and their variants do not in themselves provide a very strong argument for doubt about the authorship of the works of "William Shakespeare" (the likely pseudonym of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, 1550-1604), conventionally said to be written by William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon (1564-1616). While this essay does not go as far as the late Oxfordian scholar Peter Moore (one of our best), who called it a “zero argument,” it does agree with Moore—and to some extent with David Kathman, a Stratfordian scholar—that many non-Stratfordians have placed too much emphasis on spelling issues. But the spelling issues do raise interesting questions as part of the broader Shakespeare Authorship Question (SAQ). They add to the evidence indicating early doubts about the identity of the author “Shakespeare,” the subject of Professor Wildenthal's 2017 conference presentation and forthcoming book.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

A Collection on Fatal Fictions: A New Book on Law and Criminal Literature from Oxford University Press @OxUniPress

The Law Library has sent me up a copy of the new publication Fatal Fictions: Crime and Investigations in Law and Literature (Alison L. LaCroix, Richard H. McAdams, and Martha C. Nussbaum, eds., Oxford University Press, 2017). It includes an introduction by Scott Turow.  Link to the Table of Contents here.


Here's a description of the book's contents, courtesy of the publisher's website.

Writers of fiction have always confronted topics of crime and punishment. This age-old fascination with crime on the part of both authors and readers is not surprising, given that criminal justice touches on so many political and psychological themes essential to literature, and comes equipped with a trial process that contains its own dramatic structure.

 This volume explores this profound and enduring literary engagement with crime, investigation, and criminal justice. The collected essays explore three themes that connect the world of law with that of fiction. First, defining and punishing crime is one of the fundamental purposes of government, along with the protection of victims by the prevention of crime. And yet criminal punishment remains one of the most abused and terrifying forms of political power. Second, crime is intensely psychological and therefore an important subject by which a writer can develop and explore character. A third connection between criminal justice and fiction involves the inherently dramatic nature of the legal system itself, particularly the trial. Moreover, the ongoing public conversation about crime and punishment suggests that the time is ripe for collaboration between law and literature in this troubled domain.

The essays in this collection span a wide array of genres, including tragic drama, science fiction, lyric poetry, autobiography, and mystery novels. The works discussed include works as old as fifth-century BCE Greek tragedy and as recent as contemporary novels, memoirs, and mystery novels. The cumulative result is arresting: there are "killer wives" and crimes against trees; a government bureaucrat who sends political adversaries to their death for treason before falling to the same fate himself; a convicted murderer who doesn't die when hanged; a psychopathogical collector whose quite sane kidnapping victim nevertheless also collects; Justice Thomas' reading and misreading of Bigger Thomas; a man who forgives his son's murderer and one who cannot forgive his wife's non-existent adultery; fictional detectives who draw on historical analysis to solve murders. These essays begin a conversation, and they illustrate the great depth and power of crime in literature.

Wildenthal on Shapiro "On the Media": Name-Calling and Bullying Students and Doubters @tjsl

Bryan H. Wildenthal, Thomas Jefferson School of Law, is publishing Shapiro 'On the Media': Name-Calling and Bullying Students and Doubters in the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship Newsletter (2018). Here is the abstract.

For far too long, when it comes to the Shakespeare Authorship Question (SAQ), orthodox academics, whatever their motivations, have largely avoided the simple duty that any serious scholar has: to engage forthrightly with the evidence. Instead, such scholars, when they deign to mention the SAQ at all, have focused almost entirely on trying to denigrate or psychoanalyze authorship doubters. In its most insulting and ridiculous forms, this has involved suggestions of snobbery or even mental illness. A milder version — almost more maddeningly smug and condescending — has been to retreat behind a fog of fashionable academic jargon, analyzing authorship doubt as a purely contingent product of modern times and cultural preoccupations. This was largely the approach taken by English Professor James Shapiro of Columbia University in his book about the SAQ, "Contested Will" (2010). Somehow, from the orthodox perspective, it is never about the simple factual and historical issue at the heart of the SAQ: Does the available evidence, fully considered in context, raise reasonable questions about who actually wrote these particular works of literature? Professor Shapiro spoke at length about the SAQ in a December 2016 interview with Brooke Gladstone on her public radio show "On the Media." This essay criticizes the way in which both Shapiro and Gladstone approached the SAQ, especially the troubling implications of Shapiro's comments for how Shakespeare authorship doubters, especially students, should be treated.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

ICYMI: Lisa Hopkins on Shakespeare Allusion in Crime Fiction (Palgrave, 2016)

ICYMI: Lisa Hopkins, Sheffield Hallam University, has published Shakespeare Allusion in Crime Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

This book explores why crime fiction so often alludes to Shakespeare. It ranges widely over a variety of authors including classic golden age crime writers such as the four ‘queens of crime’ (Allingham, Christie, Marsh, Sayers), Nicholas Blake and Edmund Crispin, as well as more recent authors such as Reginald Hill, Kate Atkinson and Val McDermid. It also looks at the fondness for Shakespearean allusion in a number of television crime series, most notably Midsomer Murders, Inspector Morse and Lewis, and considers the special sub-genre of detective stories in which a lost Shakespeare play is found. It shows how Shakespeare facilitates discussions about what constitutes justice, what authorises the detective to track down the villain, who owns the countryside, national and social identities, and the question of how we measure cultural value.

ICYMI: Charles Ross, Elizabethan Literature and the Law of Fraudulent Conveyance (Routledge, 2003) @routledgepublishing

ICYMI: Charles Ross, Purdue University, Elizabethan Literature and the Law of Fraudulent Conveyance (Routledge, 2003).

This book investigates the origins, impact, and outcome of the Elizabethan obsession with fraudulent conveyancing, the part of debtor-creditor law that determines when a court can void a transfer of assets. Focusing on the years between the passage of a key statute in 1571 and the court case that clarified the statute in 1601, Charles Ross convincingly argues that what might seem a minor matter in the law was in fact part of a wide-spread cultural practice. The legal and literary responses to fraudulent conveyancing expose ethical, practical, and jurisprudential contradictions in sixteenth-century English, as well as modern, society. At least in English Common Law, debt was more pervasive than sex. Ross brings to this discussion a dazzling knowledge of early modern legal practice that takes the conversation out of the universities and Inns of Court and brings it into the early modern courtroom, the site where it had most relevance to Renaissance poets and playwrights. Ross here examines how during the thirty years in which the law developed, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare wrote works that reflect the moral ambiguity of fraudulent conveyancing, which was practiced by unscrupulous debtors but also by those unfairly oppressed by power. The book starts by showing that the language and plot of Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor continually refers to this cultural practice that English society came to grips with during the period 1571-1601. The second chapter looks at the social, political, and economic climate in which Parliament in 1571 passed 13 Eliz. 5, and argues that the law, which may have been used to oppress Catholics, was probably passed to promote business. The Sidney chapter shows that Henry Sidney, as governor of Ireland (a site of religious oppression), and his son Philip were, surprisingly, on the side of the fraudulent conveyors, both in practice and imaginatively (Sidney's Arcadia is the first of several works to associate fraudulent conveyancing with the abduction of women). The fourth chapter shows that Edmund Spenser, who as an official in Ireland rails against fraudulent conveyors, nonetheless includes a balanced assessment of several forms of the practice in The Faerie Queene. Chapter five shows how Sir Edward Coke's use of narrative in Twyne's Case (1601) helped settle the issue of intentionality left open by the parliamentary statute. The final chapter reveals how the penalty clause of the Elizabethan law accounts for the punishment Portia imposes on Shylock at the end of The Merchant of Venice. The real strength of the book lies in Ross's provocative readings of individual cases, which will be of great use to literary critics wrestling with the applications of legal theory to the interpretation of individual texts. This study connects a major development in the law to the literature of the period, one that makes a contribution not only to the law but also to literary studies and political and social history.

 

Karen Raber, Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018) @BloomsburyBooks @olemissenglish

New from Bloomsbury Publishing: Karen Raber, Professor of English, University of Mississippi, Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory (2018) (The Arden Shakespeare). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory charts challenges in the field of Shakespeare studies to the assumption that the category “human” is real, stable, or worthy of privileging in discussions of the playwright's work. Drawing on a variety of methodologies - cognitive theory, systems theory, animal studies, ecostudies, the new materialisms - the volume investigates the world of Shakespeare's plays and poems in order to represent more thoroughly its variety, its ethics of inclusion, and its resistance to human triumphalism and exceptionalism.

 

Shakespeare the Crime Author @CrimeReads @DwyerMurphy

Dwyer Murphy ranks some of Shakespeare's plays as crime fiction, noting that one can see Romeo and Juliet as "gritty urban crime" and Hamlet as a "private eye" drama. Number one on the list? The Scottish play, which is "outlaw noir"--"where morality and time have been turned upside down and a dark shadow has been cast over the land."

More here.

ICYMI: Fatal Fictions: Crime and Investigation in Law and Literature (OUP, 2017) @OxUniPress

ICYMI: Fatal Fictions: Crime and Investigation in Law and Literature (Alison L. LaCroix, Richard H. McAdams, and Martha C. Nussbaum, eds., Oxford University Press, 2017).\ Here is a description of the book's contents from the publisher's website.

Writers of fiction have always confronted topics of crime and punishment. This age-old fascination with crime on the part of both authors and readers is not surprising, given that criminal justice touches on so many political and psychological themes essential to literature, and comes equipped with a trial process that contains its own dramatic structure. This volume explores this profound and enduring literary engagement with crime, investigation, and criminal justice. The collected essays explore three themes that connect the world of law with that of fiction. First, defining and punishing crime is one of the fundamental purposes of government, along with the protection of victims by the prevention of crime. And yet criminal punishment remains one of the most abused and terrifying forms of political power. Second, crime is intensely psychological and therefore an important subject by which a writer can develop and explore character. A third connection between criminal justice and fiction involves the inherently dramatic nature of the legal system itself, particularly the trial. Moreover, the ongoing public conversation about crime and punishment suggests that the time is ripe for collaboration between law and literature in this troubled domain. The essays in this collection span a wide array of genres, including tragic drama, science fiction, lyric poetry, autobiography, and mystery novels. The works discussed include works as old as fifth-century BCE Greek tragedy and as recent as contemporary novels, memoirs, and mystery novels. The cumulative result is arresting: there are "killer wives" and crimes against trees; a government bureaucrat who sends political adversaries to their death for treason before falling to the same fate himself; a convicted murderer who doesn't die when hanged; a psychopathogical collector whose quite sane kidnapping victim nevertheless also collects; Justice Thomas' reading and misreading of Bigger Thomas; a man who forgives his son's murderer and one who cannot forgive his wife's non-existent adultery; fictional detectives who draw on historical analysis to solve murders. These essays begin a conversation, and they illustrate the great depth and power of crime in literature.

Chapter 1. Scott Turow, On My Careers in Crime

Part I: Criminal Histories
Chapter 2. Daniel Telech, Mercy at the Areopagus: A Nietzschean account of Justice and Joy in the Eumenides
Chapter 3. Barry Wimpfheimer, Suborning Perjury: A Case Study of Narrative Precedent in Talmudic Law
Chapter 4. Alison LaCroix, A Man for All Treasons: Crimes By and Against the Tudor State in the Novels of Hilary Mantel
Chapter 5. Marina Leslie, Representing Anne Green: Historical and Literary Form, And the Scenes of the Crime in Oxford, 1651
Chapter 6. Richard Strier & Richard McAdams, Cold-Blooded and High Minded Murder: The Chapter 7. Pamela Foa, What's Love Got To Do With It? Sexual Exploitation in Measure for Measure: A Prosecutor's View


Part II: Race and Crime 
Chapter 8. Justin Driver, Justice Thomas and Bigger Thomas
Chapter 9. Martha Nussbaum, Reconciliation Without Anger: Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country

Part III: Responsibility and Violence 
Chapter 10. Saul Levmore, Kidnap, Credibility, and The Collector.
Chapter 11. Jonathan Masur, Premeditation and Responsibility in The Stranger
Chapter 12. Saira Mohamed and Melissa Murray, Walking Away: Lessons from Omelas
Chapter 13. Mark Payne, Before the Law: Imagining Crimes against Trees

Part IV: Suspicion and Investigation 
Chapter 14. Caleb Smith, Crime Scenes: Fictions of Security in the Antebellum American Borderlands 
Chapter 15. Steven Wilf, The Legal Historian as Detective 

Index

John Kerrigan on Shakespeare's Binding Language (OUP, 2016) @Canbridge_Uni

ICYMI:

John Kerrigan, Professor of English, Cambridge University, has published Shakespeare's Binding Language (Oxford University Press, 2016).

This remarkable, innovative book explores the significance in Shakespeare's plays of oaths, vows, contracts, pledges and the other utterances and acts by which characters commit themselves to the truth of things past, present, and to come. In early modern England, such binding language was everywhere. Oaths of office, marriage vows, legal bonds, and casual, everyday profanity gave shape and texture to life. The proper use of such language, and the extent of its power to bind, was argued over by lawyers, religious writers, and satirists, and these debates inform literature and drama. Shakespeare's Binding Language gives a freshly researched account of these contexts, but it is focused on the plays. What motives should we look for when characters asseverate or promise? How far is binding language self-persuasive or deceptive? When is it allowable to break a vow? How do oaths and promises structure an audience's expectations? Across the sweep of Shakespeare's career, from the early histories to the late romances, this book opens new perspectives on key dramatic moments and illuminates language and action. Each chapter gives an account of a play or group of plays, yet the study builds to a sustained investigation of some of the most important systems, institutions, and controversies in early modern England, and of the wiring of Shakespearean dramaturgy. Scholarly but accessible, and offering startling insights, this is a major contribution to Shakespeare studies by one of the leading figures in the field.

 

Zucca and Judge on Measure For Measure on Trial: A Shakespearean Mock Trial @Lzucca

Lorenzo Zucca, Professor of Law and Philosophy, King's College, London, and Igor Judge, Lord Judge, Visiting Professor, King's College, London, have published Measure for Measure on Trial: A Shakespearean Mock Trial, at 2017 Journal of Dispute Settlement 1 (PDF paging). Here is the abstract.

Mock trials have been a privileged way to teach law for many years. They allow to convey to the students many subtleties in the workings of the law in a way that lecturing probably never can. Among many other things, it helps pinpoint the values in tension in the real life of the law, the drama of a court room, the imaginaries at play, the social pressure and other forces bearing down on the law’s different actors. Shakespeare’s work epitomises this passion, these waves that curl the flat, cool covers of the law books.

Download the article at the link (from the publisher's website).  

Something Legal This Way Comes: A Trial For "Macbeth"'s Weird Sisters

Tonight (June 19, 2017), the Shakespeare Theatre Company held its semi-annual mock trial. Tonight the problem was derived from Macbeth, petitioners were the Weird Sisters, and respondent was the Kingdom of Scotland. 

The government of Scotland charged the Weird Sisters with practicing witchcraft, and aiding and abetting Macbeth with the murder of Duncan. Here's a link to the scenario. 

Here's a link to petitioners' brief; here a link to respondents' brief. 

Presiding justice: Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Via @KevinDaleyDC, @ThisInHaste.

Kevin Curran's New Book on Shakespeare and Law Published by Northwestern University Press @kevdcurran

New from Northwestern University Press: Kevin Curran, University of Lausanne, has published Shakespeare's Legal Ecologies: Law and Distributed Selfhood (2017) (Rethinking the Early Modern Series). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

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.

Order the paperback edition with the code NUP2017 for a 25 percent discount per Dr. Curran (see his tweet) @kevdcurran.  

Who Wilt Thou Calleth? Ghostbusters!

If you like Shakespeare, Ghostbusters, and parody,  Ministers of Grace may be your cup of, er, tea.  Written in iambic pentameter by Jordan Monsell, it's a parody of the film starring Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, and Dan Ackroyd, set in England, and written as if by the Bard.  It's available from CreateSpace, and lists for $14.95. Forsooth!

Lauriat on Literary and Dramatic Disputes in Shakepeare's Time @KCL_Law

Barbara Lauriat, King's College London, Dickson Poon School of Law, is publishing Literary and Dramatic Disputes in Shakespeare's Time in the Journal of International Dispute Settlement. Here is the abstract.

Disputes over literary works and plays — between one authors and another, one publisher and another, and between authors and publishers — have arisen since the ancient world. This is to be expected, since publishing poems and plays and producing theatrical performances can have significant economic, political, and emotional implications all at the same time. The nature and legal frameworks governing these disputes have changed dramatically over the centuries, however, particularly with regard to the proprietary rights involved. Though modern copyright law did not exist at the time, the Elizabethan age saw a high degree of professionalism of theatrical performance, book publishing, and dramatic authorship. When audiences are clamoring for novel entertainments, authorship is becoming a professional activity, and profits are to be made, customs and traditions inevitably arise — as do violations of those customs and traditions. This article discusses the framework of authorship and publishing in Shakespeare’s time and examines some of the disputes that arose and how they were resolved in a context where the legal remedies were limited. Methods from patronage to private guild “courts” to theft to public denunciation to outright violence were employed in attempts to maintain profitable businesses in publishing and theatre.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Woodring on Liberty To Misread: Sanctuary and Possibility in The Comedy of Errors

Benjamin Woodring, Ph.D. Harvard, J.D. Yale, has published Liberty to Misread: Sanctuary and Possibility in The Comedy of Errors at 28 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 319 (2016). Here is the abstract.

Today’s hotly contested debates about “sanctuary cities” would feel very familiar to someone living in Shakespeare’s London. In this piece, which is part of a larger forthcoming book project titled Shakespeare’s Sanctuary Cities, I argue that Shakespeare is fascinated by the dramatic possibilities inherent in an asylum space situated on the fault line of a jurisdictional battle. A refuge site sits between life and death. At the same time, Elizabethan sanctuary was a contradictory swirl of concepts: something both holy and debauched, something at the same time archaic and unpredictably present. Shakespeare’s use of a sanctuary in The Comedy of Errors is not a simple endorsement of Christian mercy. It is rather a deeper reflection on genre and possibility: comedy is predicated on some escape valve from accumulating conflicts and obligations, while tragedy is ultimately insulated from such releases. Shakespeare creates an asylum episode in this play different from anything in Plautus or Gower, his main sources. The abbey, which jealously defends its sanctuary rights, is a space allowing for recognition and reintegration after long sequences of confusion and chaos. But it is also, I argue, a site for further potential misreadings. The sanctuary in Shakespeare’s play does not provide perfect resolutions. The sanctuary’s Abbess arguably bungles the play’s moral. But in the end, this imperfection is not only vastly preferable to tragedy’s irreversible misunderstandings, it is also a sign of Shakespeare’s nuanced unpacking of a generative social and spatial concept.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The Library of Congress, the Law Library of Congress, and the Continuing Relevance of "The Merchant of Venice" @librarycongress @LawLibCongress @WFULawSchool

Ellen Terrell of the Library of Congress discusses real life merchants of Venice on the Library of Congress Blog here. The post is related to other Merchant of Venice posts dedicated to Shakespearian events in 2016, and some taking place this year, including a program discussing the history of the Jewish Ghetto of Venice, taking place today, February 21st, and hosted by the Law Library of Congress. 

The program includes talks by Benjamin Ravid, on the European legal context surrounding the establishment and continuation of the ghetto, David Malkiel, who will discuss Jewish institutions of self-government within the ghetto, and Dick Schneider. who will discuss Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice.

Now Available: Paul Raffield, The Art of Law In Shakespeare (Hart Publishing) @hartpublishing @warwickuni

Now available from Hart Publishing:

Paul Raffield, The Art of Law in Shakespeare (Hart Publishing 2017).