Shakespeare’s Staged Trials

Abstract

The trials in Shakespeare’s plays are strange. There are no lawyers or professional judges, there may be no witnesses, and the adjudicator often imposes unusual sanctions such as banishment. Most strikingly, almost all the trials are fakes, manipulated by a character toward a predestined result. Two obvious explanations—that trials in Shakespeare’s day were like that, and that trials in the contemporary drama were like that—turn out to be largely incorrect. It is more persuasive to trace the strange features of Shakespeare’s trials to the various dramatic functions they fulfill, yet even this approach does not explain everything.