Ethical Demands

Abstract

Abstract This chapter argues that ethical responsibility is focalized in judicial complaint, a poetic form whose vision of justice is premised on a divinely authored moral law that grounds and mediates human relations. It explores the conventional co-articulation of judicial complaint and conscience, then examines Shakespeare’s theorizing of conscience in Richard III. While the play’s ghost scene is often read as a depiction of the internal drama of conscience, this chapter contends that Shakespeare represents the ghosts as real presences that cause Richard’s experience of conscience, rather than as symbols of his inner torment. In formally linking their complaints to a chorus of judicial complaints that demand to be answered throughout the play, Shakespeare refigures conscience as an experience that responds to the complaints of a human other.