Communal Justice in Shakespeare's England: Drama, Law, Emotion by Penelope Geng

Abstract

Reviewed by: Communal Justice in Shakespeare's England: Drama, Law, Emotion by Penelope Geng Jessica Winston (bio) Penelope Geng, Communal Justice in Shakespeare's England: Drama, Law, Emotion. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021, Pp. xiv + 257 + 9 b/w illus. $75.00. Studies in early modern law and literature have emphasized professional and institutional transformations in the law, exploring topics such as legal jurisdiction, institutional legal reform, legal rhetoric, and legal training. Penelope Geng's book, Communal Justice in Shakespeare's England: Drama, Law, and Emotion, examines a hitherto overlooked topic, the place of popular or communal justice in early modern legal processes. As many scholars have established, the later Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods witnessed several important legal transformations, including the rise of the common law as the main legal system in England, a dramatic growth in litigation, and the increasing professionalization of legal practitioners. Yet, as Geng shows, these developments diminished longstanding practices and systems of lay or communal justice, and the popular drama of the period registered and responded to these trends. Geng's book is compellingly researched and lucidly written. It also deserves careful reading, since the book offers many new insights into the legal and dramatic cultures of the period. A summary can allow us to appreciate Geng's approach and argument. The Preface presents a foundational observation: early modern drama often depicts justice as communal action. Plays sometimes overtly criticize legal professionals, but equally and perhaps more often they featured "ingenious nonprofessionals solving murders, grief-stricken avengers prevailing over wrongdoers, and oppressed folks exposing corrupt magistrates" (xii). Such representations offer a "pointed refusal of the law's relentless centralization" and "fed audiences' desire to see justice unfettered by legal rules and procedures" (xii). Why might this be? The answer has to do with early modern transformations in English law. The Introduction, "A Double Obligation," describes these transformations, presenting historical, critical, and theoretical contexts that inform the book. One crucial concept comes from Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social "distinction" as it relates to law. According to Bourdieu, the legal field is "the site of a competition for the monopolistic right to determine the law" (qtd. p. 6)—that is, a competition over the question of who is authorized to understand and interpret law. In the early modern period, the common law became the dominant legal tradition in England. With this growth came a rise in the sheer number of legal professionals, such as barristers, as well as the gradual coalescence of their professional identities. Such legal professionals sometimes [End Page 414] distinguished their skills and training by denigrating the capacity of ordinary people to interpret or apply law. Sir Edward Coke's Reports (1600), for instance, contended that "reading, hearing, conference, meditation, and recordation, are necessarie … to the knowledge of the common Law, because it consisteth upon so many, & almost infinite particulars" (qtd. p. 14). Also writing in 1600, William Fulbecke denigrated the average person's ability to engage in legal interpretation, writing that "magistrates are the ministers of Lawes, the Judges are interpreters, the people are the Servants," who obtain "true libertie" by subjecting themselves to magistrates and judges (qtd. p. 16). Yet, as Geng shows, while legal professionals tried to distinguish their special learning and abilities, the drama of the time often questioned such efforts, suggesting that this seemingly superior legal learning or ability was not an undisputed or inevitable fact, but something that emerged over and against popular skepticism, criticism, even scorn of those with legal expertise. Furthermore, even as the drama of the period represented popular skepticism about the legal profession, it also "shape[d] public emotions around communal justice" (21) and it sometimes "explore[d] the complicated and messy emotions inherent in … communal action" (22). The main chapters of the book examine ways that legal authors, religious figures, dramatists, and others "sought to define lay magistracy and communal justice" (23). Chapter 1, "From Assise to the Assize at Home," discusses the history of lay justice in the assize, regional intermittent or periodic courts presided over by visiting judges of higher courts based in London. The assize emerged under Henry II as an alternative to trial by battle (30...