Dunne On Shakespeare, Revenge Tragedy, and Early Modern Law

Derek Dunne has published Shakespeare, Revenge Tragedy and Early Modern Law (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

Revenge tragedies are filled with trial scenes, miscarriages of justice and untrustworthy evidence, yet this is the first study to explore how the revenge plays of Kyd, Shakespeare and others critically engage with their legal system. Featuring groups of citizens taking the law into their own hands, revenge tragedies stage a participatory justice of their own, which problematises the progress of English common law during this crucial phase of English legal history. By connecting English revenge tragedies to major crises within the legal system including the erosion of trial by jury (Titus Andronicus), food riots in the 1590s (Antonio's Revenge), and debates over royal prerogative (The Revenger's Tragedy) a persistent legal critique is revealed to be at work. The book also offers a major new reading of Hamlet that argues against the play's engagement with law, in contrast to the radical socio-legal commentary identified in other revenge plays. Revenge tragedy can thus be understood as an index of early modern citizens' fractious relationship with their law.           

Examining Moral Realism Through Shakepeare

Matthew H. Kramer, Churchill College, Cambridge University; University of Cambridge, Faculty of Law, has published Shakespeare, Moral Judgments, and Moral Realism as University of Cambridge Faculty of Law Research Paper No. 1. Here is the abstract.

Among the many areas of scholarship that can be enriched through an engagement with Shakespeare’s plays, moral philosophy is a particularly fruitful territory. In the present essay, I draw on a couple of Shakespearean tragedies to come to grips with a challenge that has sometimes been mounted against moral realism. Moral realism I take to be the thesis that morality (or ethics more broadly) is objective along a number of different ontological, epistemic, and semantic dimensions. Here the challenge to be countered - with assistance from Shakespeare - is focused on the foremost respect in which morality is semantically objective. That is, some opponents of moral realism have sought to deny that moral judgments are ever truth-apt, by contending that such judgments are inherently possessed of motivational force. This essay will examine their reasoning, with the aim of showing that (insofar as the reasoning is sound) it can readily be accommodated by moral realism.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Law in "Titus Andronicus"

Paul Raffield, University of Warwick School of Law, has published "'Terras Astraea reliquit’: Titus Andronicus and the Loss of Justice," in Shakespeare and the Law (Paul Raffield and Gary Watt eds.; Hart 2008) at 203-220). Here is the abstract.

This paper considers the constitutional and political significance of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, in the context of fin-de-siècle Elizabethan rule, during which period the jurisdiction of the prerogative courts threatened to supersede that of the courts of common law. I examine juristic belief in the existence of an unwritten law, superior in authority to imperial edict: a theme which resonates throughout Titus, but which also underscores The Reports of Sir Edward Coke, which he was compiling in the 1590s. I analyse also the symbolic importance of ancient Rome to the development in England of a body of literature that might loosely be termed republican. The story of the destruction of Troy and its re-emergence in London as Troynovant is a literary device that was employed by Elizabethan writers as a means of establishing the ancient credentials of the English state and English common law.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.