Hospitable Justice: Law and Selfhood in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Abstract

This article is concerned with the uses to which Shakespeare put legal subject matter. I focus on three sonnets in which the speaker acknowledges himself as the victim of a crime committed by the young man, but pledges to testify against himself on the young man’s behalf. This strange justice, I argue, belongs to the philosophical tradition of hospitality, exemplified in a range of writings from St. Paul’s Epistles to work by Derrida and Lévinas. Returning Shakespeare’s sonnets to this strand of intellectual history equips us with a set of concepts ideally suited to making sense of the way Shakespeare uses law to reflect upon the nature of selfhood.