Introduction to the Fifteenth Annual International Commercial Arbitration Workshop: Arbitral Advocacy

Abstract

WELCOME TO the Fifteenth Annual Workshop of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration. We are going to begin this Workshop with some advice that many of you, maybe all of you, have heard before, from Shakespeare's masterwork Hamlet . At this point in the play, an itinerant troupe of actors has come to the castle at Elsinore, and Hamlet hatches a scheme to use their performance to ‘catch a king’ – that is, to expose his uncle's perfidy in murdering Hamlet's father and marrying his mother. Before the players begin, Hamlet gives them some advice about the craft of acting. He says: ‘Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus; but use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance, that may give it smoothness’. He continues: ‘Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you overstep not the modesty of nature; for anything so overdone is far from the purpose of playing, whose end, …