The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (review)

Abstract

Hutson, Lorna. 2007. The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press. $99.00 he. 383 pp.Anthony DiMatteoNew York Institute of TechnologyWe usually speak of casting suspicion or having it raised, but in these times when terrorism and counter-terrorism can be hard to distinguish, we have had to relearn what it means to invent suspicion. That there is a long history of individuals and governments inventing such a thing - of generating suspicion about those persons walke in the night, or sleep in the day, as William Lambarde prescribed for Elizabethan constables (Hutson 331) should at least give us pause to suspect our own suspicions. Indeed, the use of suspicion, whether there is something to be suspicious about or not, has comprised a master political art in modernity, and perhaps the very hallmark of modernity, with techniques and goals first identified by Machiavelli.No wonder the arts of suspicion are powerfully displayed in English Renaissance drama, which from one perspective can be seen as responding to monopolistic, centrist pressures from above - despite royal proclamations by Queen Elizabeth I not to make windows men's souls, or by James I that commoners had their own Solomon-like conscience when acting as jurors. Hutson convincingly develops another view of the prevalence of suspicion in the drama of George Gascoigne,Thomas Kyd, Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, a view from below, as it were, turning the Foucauldian approach on its head. The English common man and woman were more and more participating in forensic inquiry, as evidenced by the great amount of litigious activities going on in the final decades of the sixteenth century. The playwrights hold a mirror not up to nature but to the motives and consequences of a society in a chronic state of suspicion, as they were trained to do not only by their own experiences but by their Roman forerunners in drama - Plautus and especially Terence - whose works were often cited in Roman law books. The forensic rhetoric of Roman New Comedy, with its ability to summon up realities that may or may not exist, had a pervasive effect across all the genres of English Renaissance drama as Hutson demonstrates, provocatively showing how this development in Tudor and Jacobean drama links to major reformations in the understanding and practice of law and justice.The connections that Hutson identifies have roots in the classical ideal that acknowledges poets as legislators, giving rules for wedded life, building towns, and engraving laws on tablets, in Horace's impressive formulation of the Orphic archetype. In Hutson's reading, when we weigh evidence for and against, raising as well as reflecting upon causes for why people act, we are like poets weaving stories, entertaining conjectural answers to questions of who, what, when, where, how and why. We see into evidence so that, at least in our minds, we can judge for ourselves and sound plausible to others, our accounts taken as socially and legally valid. From the perspective of forensic rhetoric Hutson writes a complex history of the relations of law and literature in Tudor and Jacobean England, showing the importance of poets who were trained in law such as Thomas Norton, Thomas Sackville, Christopher Yelverton, and John Foxe. From Cicero and Quintilian, they learned a forensic conception of narrative that aimed to weave together circumstances and testimonies a seamless account, the intelligible spring from the accidental in Paul Ricoeur's phrase, which Hutson finds especially useful in understanding how emplotment (muthos) functions as both matter and arrangement in Aristode's conception of mimesis. Hutson charts how this forensic training - in making one's account of some action sound true by mounting artificial and inartificial proofs - filtered throughout early modern England as processes of justice involved more and more people. …