PAUL RAFFIELD, Shakespeare's Imaginary Constitution: Late Elizabethan Politics and the Theatre of Law.

Abstract

This richly interesting book, focused upon six of Shakespeare’s plays, brings together concepts from a number of different areas of thought, chiefly drama criticism, the use of imagination in poetry, cultural perspectives, the study of humanism, political conflict and the exercise of power, and, its most sustained achievement, the study of aspects of legal debate at a time when the law was undergoing persistent scrutiny and change. For this last feature the author, who has a professional academic commitment to the law, ranges over several key issues of jurisprudence and draws attention to the stress and conflict which surrounded attempts to resolve divisive issues at the time. He concedes that his work does not add up to a single-minded conclusion about Shakespeare’s thinking, but he does bring out significant themes in the plays he chooses to investigate. Though the choice of plays may be somewhat arbitrary, and one might wonder what a different selection might reveal, the observations made here lead one to the view that Shakespeare had an abiding interest in some matters of law and that some of these are revealed in more than one play. This is sustained partly by the social context in which training in the law was a key element for the professional classes who would have been well represented in Shakespeare’s audiences, and indeed some of his plays were performed in the Inns of Court, as in 1594 and 1602, before a predominantly legal audience. There is also attention here to Revels at the Inns in the 1590s.