Trial Scene Research Articles

Lewis Carroll and the Victorian Stage: Thearicals in a Quiet Life by Richard Foulkes

MLR, I02.4, 2007 1147 Finale,' which also proves tobe Hassett's finaleand interpretative peak, a discussion centred on the poet's reading of Revelation, The Face of theDeep (I892), and also Verses (I893). Both texts are formalhybrids, biblical, exegetic, and lyrical,concerned 'not to arrange an argument but toorder the flowof emotions as these are felt in the timing of syllables and verses, the pacing of rhymes, and the overall momentum of stanzas' (p. 232). Allowing herself, and the reader, to experience but not be crushed by theviolence of feeling inherent in religious faith,Rossetti contains thenightmarish cruelty of Revelation within diligent close readings that recover but hold its inten sity.For Hassett, it isRossetti's sense that poetry grants such recovery thatmakes her such an enchanting and comfortingwriter. Hassett's readermight experience the same consolation by engaging with her vital and eloquent critical study. UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK EMMA MASON Lewis Carroll and theVictorian Stage: Theatricals in a Quiet Life. By RICHARD FOULKES. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2005. Xi+224 pp. 145. ISBN 978-o-7546 0466-2. In his new study of Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll, Richard Foulkes investigates every aspect of theatricality attached to the author of theAlice books, in the process uncovering many fascinating byways of theVictorian artistic and social scene. Dodg sonwas a highly contradictory character capable of espousing some liberal views while remaining a fundamentally strait-laced and censorious individual, and the story of his relationswith a variety of theatrical enterprises throughout his lifeoffersa sharply focused perspective on thisenigmatic man. In theperiod under consideration, during which Dodgson attended more than 400 productions, theBritish stage was under going a phase of expansion and diversification. We would look in vain, however, for any Carrollian response to Ibsen, Shaw, or Pinero, Dodgson's tastes remaining con servative throughout his life.Foulkes provides an insightful account ofDodgson's childhood theatrical activities, notably of his involvement inmarionette theatres.At Eton, Dodgson was plunged into a culture of play production, and this activity in tensified atOxford, where he came into contact with thenew Dean ofChrist Church, Dr Liddell, whose familywere devotees of amateur theatricals. Foulkes traces this milieu expertly, and analyses the subsequent activities of the 'Philothespians', whose production brought toOxford both Henry Irving and the young Ellen Terry. All these events, as Foulkes explains, were curiously entangled with the imbroglioover Dodgson's failure to take holy orders, and came to a head in his trip toMoscow in I867, where he saw a range of plays 'all inRussian' (p. 41). The enthusiasm for,and involvement in, theatrical devices of every kind would find expression in theAlice books, and Foulkes aptly uncovers the relation of transformation scenes, trial scenes, and other pantomimic techniques to those remarkable essays. It was inevitable that theAlice books would laterbe dramatized, and the impersonation of the heroine by theyoung Phoebe Carlo or Isa Bowman was capable ofprompting an ecstatic response from theauthor. Family entertainments featured largely in the middle-class homes to which Dodgson had access, and inhis relationship toGeorge MacDonald's domestic hearth Dodgson experienced a kind of surrogate paternity, engaging enthusiastically in their cult of amateur dramatics. But it isDodgson's long-running relationship with Ellen Terry that is of special significance here-this 'magically beautiful and vigorous child' (p. 9I) who was destined to become so controversial a figure in late Victorian culture. Dodgson's letters to Terry, Foulkes notes, illuminate his views on specific roles, her turbulent private life,and his habit of demanding favours for his young female protegees. This patronage led Dodgson to support the campaign I I48 Reviews against limitations on child employment on stage-one of the fewoccasions when he would enter thepublic arena. Itwas a practice which fell into two categories: first,his espousal of 'littleactress friends [. . .]of a rather lower status' (p. 123), and secondly his interest in young ladies of a higher class, towards whom Dodgson cultivated a 'snobbish protectiveness' (p. 123). This double-bind leads towards thevexed issue of Dodgson's photographic hobby. These aremurky waters, but Foulkes offers a clear headed and judicious account of the uses of photography in stage publicity and of Dodgson's development of a theatrically inflectedphotographic art. Foulkes devotes his...

Divine Justice across the Mediterranean: Hittite Arkuwars and the Trial Scene in Aeschylus' Eumenides

AbstractA survey of Bronze Age Akkadian prayers and Hittite arkuwars, and Iron Age Anatolian, Greek and Latin curses shows a wide-spread conflation of prayer and forensic speech. The evidence is sufficiently abundant to allow us to trace an evolution in the conventions of prayer which keeps pace with changes in judicial procedure. Furthermore, the Hittite prayers in particular, with their detailed descriptions of the imagined court scenario, provide context to the trial scene in Aeschylus' Eumenides, allowing us to separate traditional elements from innovations.

Jephthah's Kin: The Sacrificing Father in The Merchant of Venice

Jephthah'S Kin:The Sacrificing Father in The Merchant of Venice Michelle Ephraim (bio) And Jephthah vowed a vow unto the Lord, and said, If thou shalt deliver the children of Ammon into mine hands, then that thing that commeth out of the doors of mine house to meet me, when I come home in peace from the children of Ammon, shall be the Lord's, and I will offer it for a burnt offering. Judges 11:30–11 After Jessica steals his jewels and elopes with Lorenzo, a Christian, Shylock famously wishes her death in Act III of The Merchant of Venice: "I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear! Would she were hears'd at my foot, and the ducats in her coffin!" (3.1.87–90).2 Presumably, Shylock does not intend to kill Jessica himself; her departure, however, transforms his "ancient grudge" against the Venetian Christians into active bloodlust. Buoyed by news of Antonio's doomed argosies, Shylock declares that he will "plague" (116) and "torture" (117) the Christian merchant by demanding their agreed-upon penalty—"an equal pound/Of your fair flesh, to be cut off and taken,/In what part of your body pleaseth me" (1.3.149–51)—should Antonio forfeit the loan he solicited on Bassanio's behalf. Though Shakespeare gives us clear evidence of Shylock's mercenary desires and cruelty in this scene, in Shylock's responses to his friend Tubal, who reports on Jessica's sale of Shylock's deceased wife's turquoise ring "for a monkey" (3.1.119) and provides consolatory news of Antonio's own economic misfortune, he also constructs a Jewish father more grief-crazed than pointedly homicidal. Indeed, [End Page 71] Shylock's heartfelt lament for Leah—"I had it of [her] when I was a bachelor. I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys" (121–3)— reveals a history of familial loss that perhaps provides explanation for Shylock's brief reference to his synagogue at the end of the scene; an intimation of prayer and mourning ritual that flickers incongruously alongside his retributive declarations. Shylock's quick allusion, I believe, also foreshadows his audacious justification of Antonio's murder during the trial scene as the fulfillment of a private vow he has made to God. In this essay I contend that early modern responses to Jephthah in Judges 11:29–40, a Jewish father honored as a "hero of faith" in the Epistle to the Hebrews despite the fact that he sacrifices his only daughter, illuminate our reading of Shakespeare's ambivalent depiction of the sympathetic would-be murderer Shylock. As I will show in my discussion of Judges below, the story's ambiguous entangling of pious and profane aspects fascinated Christian readers: in the immediate aftermath of leading the Israelites to victory, Jephthah fulfills his divine vow to sacrifice the first "thing that commeth out of the doors of [his] house" (should he defeat the Ammonite enemy) by killing his daughter who has run out of the house to greet him. Although Shakespeare does not explicitly refer to Judges 11 in Merchant, his allusions to Jephthah's vow and sacrifice in 3 Henry VI and Hamlet make clear his familiarity with this provocative story.3 Like Jephthah's unnamed daughter, Jessica devastates her father by leaving the family home. This narrative echo, however, also sharply distinguishes Jessica from the obedient daughter in Judges and highlights the difference between Jephthah's deadly turn upon his daughter's departure and Shylock's. Jephthah does not intend to kill his daughter yet ultimately does so in order to demonstrate his piety; Shylock's bitter vision of Jessica and his subsequent claim to "the heart of [Antonio]" (3.1.127) are driven by vengeance and pride—his refusal to be made "a soft and dull-eyed fool" (3.3.14) who passively accepts the Christians' affronts. Poised to take a pound of Antonio's "fair flesh" (1.3.150) in Act IV, Shylock's crude form of "justice" seems to confirm contemporary notions of Old Testament blood sacrifice as evidence of the Jew's spiritual inferiority...

The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England ed. by Emily Steiner, Candace Barrington

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER ety in the bag. Are they all ‘‘documents’’? Should we pay attention to the differences, say, between pamphlets and quittances and ragman rolls, and, if so, why? Also given that documents ought to be stored in official places, what is the significance of the bag’s having been concealed by mitered Mum and his confederates for many years? These were all questions that, given the nature of Steiner’s enterprise, I hoped to find addressed. In sum, I felt that this book made some large claims that were difficult to sustain, and in other places did not push material as far as it ought to go. There is excessive recapitulation of material that bloats the trajectory of the argument. But while I am in disagreement with many of the arguments and the consistency of the methodology, this is a book that made me think, and indeed to reread in a new light the texts that it examines. Helen Barr Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington, eds. The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. Pp. viii, 257. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper. The Letter of the Law is an unusual collection of essays by diverse hands in that it reads, with few exceptions, almost as if it were a single-authored book on its subject. That is a compliment both to the discipline of the contributors and the management skills of the editors. Indeed, the contributors follow the general theses of one of the editors, Emily Steiner, in her highly regarded book, Documentary Culture: vernacular literature calls upon legal discourse to validate its own production. At the same time, vernacular literature also explores the contradictions, interstices, and exceptions ignored in formal legal documents. Literature , that is, both critiques formal legal institutions and proposes its own alternative legal fictions. Such an approach differs from many Law and Literature studies, such as the largely Hegelian enterprise of Theodore Ziolkowski, who reads major shifts in legal practice into key works of literature throughout history, and of the anti-Hegelian enterprise of PAGE 364 364 ................. 11491$ CH13 11-01-10 14:02:57 PS REVIEWS Richard Posner, who argues that literature and law are entirely distinct discourses that bear a different relation to language and practice. Indeed , the volume as a whole, with few exceptions, owes its intellectual allegiance less to the subdiscipline of literature and law studies and more to the critical historicism of recent medieval English studies, especially the work of Paul Strohm and David Wallace, and to a relation between discourse and practice that has engaged French social theory, especially the work of Bourdieu and Foucault. That is, the themes of many of the chapters are political rather than exclusively legal concepts, such as power, authority, resistance, and affinity. Steiner and Barrington begin the volume with a helpful introduction, clearly setting forth the argument of the book and summarizing the contribution of the various chapters, frankly necessary given their density and allusiveness. Those chapters cover a wide range of writings and authors. Christine Chism delinks the Robin Hood ballads from their folkloric and romantic contexts, and reads them as complex critiques of power relations as centralized authority displaces local baronial control. Depending on their context, the Robin Hood ballads create parodic or parallel legal and governmental systems within and between the greenwood and the official world, but rather than always valorizing Robin and his men, the various plots stress the proper exercise of power and judicial authority. Jana Mathews offers an understanding of the trial scene in Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid, noting the association of the heroine (and the narrator) with descriptions of landscape, thereby metaphorizing the relation of the female subject to the land, raising the vexed questions of land and ownership (especially where females were involved ) that obsessed fifteenth-century Scottish legal proceedings. By visiting leprosy upon the heroine, her very legal personhood is thereby obliterated, but she reasserts her agency by her ‘‘Testament,’’ a legal document that reinscribes her subjectivity. Andrew Galloway’s ‘‘The Literature of 1388 and the Politics of Pity in Gower’s Confessio Amantis...

‘which ’longs to women of all fashion’: Churching and Shakespeare's <em>The Winter Tale</em>

In Act 3, scene 2 of The Winter’s Tale , Leontes brings his wife Hermione to trial, formally charging her with conducting an adulterous relationship. During her defense, Hermione rightly complains that she has had ‘the child-bed privilege denied, which ‘longs / To women of all fashion’. In this trial scene Shakespeare draws attention to the fact that Leontes, in his hasty condemnation of his wife, not only denies Hermione her month of privilege after giving birth and exposes her to the public humiliation of not being afforded a proper churching ceremony, but also deliberately disregards the divine oracle. There can be little doubt that Shakespeare’s contemporaries would have been aware of the fact that Hermione’s first public appearance should not have been her trial, but instead her churching. Thus, the personal, legalistic action that Leontes puts forward as a matter of state usurps the obligations of religious discipline and church authority that are not simply wrongs she suffers individually, but ones that affect the community at large. As a consequence of the breech in divine order caused by Leontes, Hermione’s reappearance in the play’s final scene serves as a delayed churching service that reaffirms the redemptive themes so often discussed in this play. Further, the epistemological concerns found throughout The Winter’s Tale regarding the apprehension of truth are resolved, specifically, in Hermione’s reintegration into public life and, more broadly, in the affirmation of a dialogic unity attained through shared communal knowledge.

The Legacy of Max Schach

W thenever I see The Producers I am reminded of Max Schach, a little known and long forgotten character who, for a brief spell during the 1930s, caused so much havoc and scandal in the British film industry that it was doubted whether the business could ever recover. Perhaps the writers of that wonderful film had him in mind when they created his American counterpart, Max Bialystock. Strangely enough, it was Alexander Korda who reaped the opprobrium for all the extravagance and excesses in British film-making rather than the real perpetrator, possibly because Korda was a more charismatic and flamboyant personality while Schach was content to remain in the background, pulling strings and raising money.1 Yet in his quiet unobtrusive way, almost by accident, it was Schach who nearly managed to wreck the British film industry, set the biggest names in the City at each other's throats and, without even turning up in Court, create so much chaos in the King's Bench Division that at times the proceedings were reminiscent of the trial scene in Alice in Wonderland. Then, just as suddenly as he had appeared, Schach faded into obscurity, leaving behind in his wake a string of bankruptcies, insolvencies and puzzled creditors who never knew exactly what hit them or how they came to lose all their money overnight. It could be argued that Schach himself was just as mystified as the insurance companies which had backed him and the bankers who had made the loans, as to just where the errant ? 1.75 million had gone. This sum was a veritable fortune in its day and it was difficult to comprehend how such a large amount could have been absorbed in such a short space of time (no more than about three years). Nevertheless there was no denying that his company, Capitol Film Productions Ltd., had repeatedly overspent budgets; massive amounts had gone on acquiring film rights; large sums had been squandered on bringing Hollywood stars over from America and settling their hotel bills and lavish expenses for months on end; the luxury West End premises had to be paid for, and so did the numerous staff manning the offices. In his book Inside Pictures, Ernest Betts, the critic and screenwriter, describes those early heady days with a certain nostalgia and tells how in 1935, as a struggling journalist, he had stepped into the role of scenario editor at Capitol Film Productions at a huge salary. All the staff were fired with enthusiasm. The Slump may have affected the rest of the country, but the impression Betts gives is that everyone at Capitol Films, cocooned in their plush offices at 293 Regent Street, could see no further than this vibrant young company, supported by seemingly limitless funds, all set to make its mark on an eagerly awaiting world. There was an atmosphere of frenzied activity about the place, although Betts says that, along with other re-write men, he had little to do all day but read scripts and put forward suggestions which everyone was too busy to listen to. (In fact he is being overly modest he wrote screenplays or additional dialogue for at least three or four Schach films.) Meanwhile, costs were mounting and the films were not proving as successful as expected. But undeterred and still bursting with confidence, Schach pressed ahead with increasingly ambitious plans, raising more and more money to cover the rapidly rising expenses. Betts describes Schach as a clever little man, 'clever with money and clever with people and he had the inexhaustible energy of the movie man'.2 In 1937, only two years after he had joined the team at Capitol Films, Ernest Betts found himself out of a job. Two years later it emerged that Capitol

Black Beauties, White Devils: The English Italian in Milton and Webster

When she disguises herself as a young doctor of the law during the trial scene of The Merchant of Venice, Portia takes the name "Balthazar," the name of the youngest Magus to visit the Christ child, a Magus conventionally represented as African. It is also the name of her trusted servant who, because of his name, is possibly African as well. 1 Portia's selection of this particular name can help specify some of the associations her crossdressing might possess for a sixteenth-century English audience. In particular, "Balthazar" supports an interpretation in which crossdressing is seen as generally analogous to racial darkening, and gender difference as analogous to racial difference. 2 In the argument that follows, I will pursue the implications of a further determinant of Portia's identity—Italianness—for her figuration here, for the figuration of countless other characters in English Renaissance drama portrayed, like Portia, by English actors, and, indeed, for the self-figuration of several generations of English poets.

Legal Narratives of Self-Defense and Self-Effacement in Their Eyes Were Watching God

Surprisingly little close attention has been paid to legal nuances of climactic scenes in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, in which Janie Woods crosses shots with her rabid husband, Tea Cake, killing him, then is tried and acquitted of murder later same day. If we turn legally-informed critical lens on Hurston's handling of killing and trial, novel's central concerns with problematics of selfhood and relation of narrative construction to individual identity come into view in new way. Though not legal expert, Hurston brilliantly orchestrates scene of crossed shots to demonstrate how acts of intentional, lethal violence, from which one would ordinarily infer subjective hostility and for which individuals would ordinarily be held responsible, can be performed without legal culpability by actors whose deepest feelings for each other are unconditional love. She then uses law's insistence on transforming antecedent events into morally-inflected, responsibility-assigning narratives to show how Janie's role in death scene is serially reinvented. The narrator's initial description of her as an assertive, fully agentic woman who preserves her life in an act of self-defense, is, in rapid succession, reformulated first by black community which casts Janie as treacherous, cold-blooded killer, then by both Janie herself and judge as self-effacing wife who commits mercy killing out of compassion for her husband's suffering, and finally by jury, whose verdict that killing was entirely accidental erases Janie's agency completely and renders her shot no more her own rationally-chosen act than was Tea Cake's. Taken together, these scenes and ideas require us to rethink novel's handling of selfhood, love, violence, and narrative. Of those critics who have looked at killing and trial scenes in Their Eyes Were Watching God, most have focused on such questions as whether Tea Cake's death is symbolic revenge for his earlier beating of Janie, whether decision to render Janie's testimony through summary description by third-person narrator impairs her achievement of selfhood by depriving her of voice, or how trial demonstrates white legal authority's enforcement of power over black men. (1) Or, filling in for themselves what text aggressively refuses to delineate, critics have applauded Janie's triumphant eloquence in proving her need for self-defense, declared trial to be conversion experience for whites, who are forced to acknowledge sexual-relational feelings (the 'humanity') of their social, and racial 'inferiors,' or concluded that it illustrates the depth of Janie's discovery of self, degree to which she has become a complete woman ... at home with cycles of birth and death, love and loss, knowledge and selfhood. (2) By focusing on voice, race, and fact that Janie's testimony is followed by her acquittal, critics have not only overlooked Janie's utter self-effacement and absence of any mention of self-defense at her trial, but, more generally, have failed to attend to novel's extraordinary dissection of agency and its relation to narrative. The scene of crossed shots renders very idea of coherent selfhood problematic, especially assumption that behavior expresses self in any simple way. Act and mental state may be consistent, or they may not. What seems to be mental may really be physical; what seems to be purposeful may really be diseased body's miming of intentionality. Indeed, gap between mind and act is so extreme in shooting scene that it forces us to question easy confidence with which we make inferences about personality, character, or motivation from evidence of an individual's behavior. Shifting grounds of analysis in this way transforms troubling question of Janie's ultimate achievement of independence and autonomy into more general question about purposes and circumstances under which we create narratives of autonomy or dependence that define our own identities. …

Noblesse Oblige: The Role of the Count in the Trial Scene of Le Mariage de Figaro

<i>Noblesse Oblige:</i> The Role of the Count in the Trial Scene of <i>Le Mariage de Figaro</i>

Expert Witnesses: Women and Publicity in Mary Barton and Felix Holt

Separated by almost twenty years, Elizabeth GaskelFs Mary Barton (1848) and George Eliot's Felix Holt (1866) illustrate the development of the industrial novel and present similar concerns about the political power of the working class and the role of women in society. The political and class problems in Mary Barton (a bitter strike) and Felix Holt (an election riot) result in the dramatic trial scenes which effectively conclude each text. The heroines in both novels become important witnesses, testifying at crucial moments and ultimately saving the heroes.

Shakespeare and the Politics of Culture in Late Victorian England (review)

Shakespeare and the Politics of Culture in Late Victorian England, by Linda RozmovitsThe title of this compact and elegant study is misleadingly broad. The first chapter does indeed attest that Shakespeare's moral authority had attained a quasi-religious stature by mid-nineteenth century, but the remaining chapters of the book focus on a single work, The Merchant of Venice. With a sure grasp of cultural history, Rozmovits shows how this play, frequently produced on stage and regularly taught in classrooms, helped Victorian England reflect on the roles of women and Jews in a modern liberal society between 1870 and 1920.Rozmovits's second chapter, Portia: The White Woman's Burden, situates the play's heroine in the debate over the changing status of women. Whereas some viewed the Lady of Belmont as a model of the New Woman, most Victorians considered a rejoinder to that movement, an emblem of female submissiveness. For them, most significant action was not donning male disguise to defeat in the trial scene of Act 4, nor clever disclosure of that triumph in Act 5, but betrothal speech, where she surrenders myself and what is mine to husband, i.e., her lord, governor, king. Whether submissive or assertive, Portia evoked more conversation about the appropriate degree of independence for unmarried women than did about the appropriate treatment of Jewish aliens in a Christian society. Today, despite our own feminist movement, the emphasis is on the Jewish question, and even Rozmovits takes half of book to explain how Victorians used to think about England's growing Jewish population.Rozmovits describes the critical and commercial success of Henry Irving's landmark productions of the play over a twenty-five-year period and summarizes the artistic choices he made to render sympathetic and the play tragic. Were interested readers to consult standard stage histories of the play by Toby Lelyveld and James Bulman, they might conclude that she gives insufficient credit to Edmund Kean for being the first to break with the deeply ingrained stage tradition of the villainous Jew in his production of 1814. They might also challenge Rozmovits's belief that Irving cut the play's fifth act only during the opening run, and they might also discover that one of Irving's most memorable bits of stage business, Shylock silently walking in the moonlight across the bridge and deserted streets to his home (p. 74), from which Jessica has eloped, was borrowed from Verdi's Rigoletto. Rozmovits claims that Irving reduced Shylock's references to his daughter in order to marginalize Jessica, first for disobedience in eloping with a Christian and second for entering an interracial marriage. Unfortunately, the passages in question also contain bawdy puns (stones= testicles, flesh=penis), and so invited excision on grounds of taste and propriety, which (she agrees) was common practice at the time. Rozmovits's case for the marginalizing of Jessica seems surer for Victorian school texts, whose editors pruned lines and contrasted disloyalty with Portia's obedience. …

Trial Scenes at Nuremberg

Music AnalysisVolume 20, Issue 2 p. 239-267 Trial Scenes at Nuremberg Alexander Rehding, Alexander RehdingSearch for more papers by this author Alexander Rehding, Alexander RehdingSearch for more papers by this author First published: 23 January 2003 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2249.00137Citations: 1AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume20, Issue2July 2001Pages 239-267 RelatedInformation

From Beaumarchais to Da Ponte: a new view of the sexual politics of 'Figaro'

Journal Article FROM BEAUMARCHAIS TO DA PONTE: A NEW VIEW OF THE SEXUAL POLITICS OF ‘FIGARO’ Get access RICHARD ANDREWS RICHARD ANDREWS Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Music and Letters, Volume 82, Issue 2, May 2001, Pages 214–233, https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/82.2.214 Published: 01 May 2001

American Criminal Trial Films: An Overview of Their Development, 1930–2000

The history of American trial films – and I am speaking of trial films in general at the moment, not of the sub‐division of criminal trial films – has been shaped both by changes in public attitudes toward law and lawyers and by shifts in viewer tastes. These same factors have necessitated changes in the way we define ‘American trial films’. In earlier years one could recognize a trial film with relative ease: it was a drama in which a heroic lawyer or lawyer surrogate solved the film’s dilemmas in the course of a civil or criminal trial, usually a trial held within a courtroom. Contemporary movies, in contrast, are more interested in action than in debate and oratory, and they are more cynical about the effectiveness of legal processes. Thus they tend to embed a short trial scene in a longer adventure story, and they seldom depict lawyers as heroes on the grand scale or courts as places where fundamental social and moral issues are settled. In sum, the trial film genre is undergoing major change, if not dissolution.

Constructing a Cultural Icon: Nomos and Shaw's Saint Joan in Paris

George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan quickly became a play without a passport. Shaw began writing the play in England in late April 1923 and completed it in Ireland in August of that same year. After its production in New York in December 1923 and in London in March 1924, the play appeared on the Continent. In Paris, it ran at the Theatre des Arts from 28 April to 30 June 1925. The director in Paris, Georges Pitoëff, staged the play with his wife, Ludmilla, in the heroine's role. While Shaw's Joan is usually seen as the "foremother of Protestantism and of French nationalism", the play can be read in many other ways, as Saint Joan lends itself easily to several approaches and parallels. With an eye to Ireland, the play can be read as a gloss on the Charles Parnell story referred to in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where the Irish are seen as having betrayed their own MP. Joan's words to Dunois, "If the goddams and the Burgundians do not make an end of me, the French will", would be one place to begin such an analysis. The play could also be seen as a parable for Irish nationalism on the troublesome Protestant question in a society run by Catholics. Additionally, it could be viewed as a running political diatribe on British imperialistic tendencies overseas. However, as its reception in 1925 Paris suggests, Saint Joan may also be read as an allegory for a France undergoing a painful period of reconstruction after being shattered by World War I. While most critics are aware that Shaw's play was very popular in Paris (the Pitoeffs kept it in their repertory for several years), the reasons behind its popularity have yet to be adequately explained. Betrayal, sacrifice, dogmatic strife, and nationalist power plays fully overlap in the play to historicize the well-known story in terms contemporary audiences, particularly in Paris: found highly compelling. As I argue in this essay, the popularity of Shaw's Saint Joan in 1925 Paris involves three factors seldom discussed: the cultural semiotics of constructing an icon like Joan of Arc, the historical and political context of 1925 France as it relates to the play's reception, and the brash display of nomos (i.e., governance) in the trial scene.

No Way for a Victim to Act?: Beatrice Cenci and the Dilemma of Romantic Performance

TWO PROBLEMS HAVE HISTORICALLY PREOCCUPIED READERS OF THE CENCI. First of all: what does this verse-play have to do with theatre? If only by default, Shelley's drama occupies liminal space between closet and stage. Shelley indisputably wished Cenci to be acted, picked out his lead actors, and even asked friend to procure ... its presentation at Covent Garden.(1) play's subject made such performance impossible. Yet, while moral strictures against play about incest had expired by 1886, aesthetic judgment of Cenci as undramatic (first voiced by Byron) has lasted considerably longer. Until recently, critics tended to view dramatic form and stage destination of play as contingencies to be overlooked in favor of its poetic aspects and/or its political subtexts, on assumption that Cenci makes poor theatre. This assumption derives in part, as Stuart Curran notes, from critical stereotypes of Shelley as an inward-turning poet who coveted power of stage performance while lacking pragmatic grasp of medium.(2) But traditional judgment against Cenci as theatre is also deeply grounded in text itself, and here we approach second critical problem. At first glance, unspeakable incest aside, Cenci seems to serve up just sort of Gothic/melodramatic duel which pleased early nineteenth-century spectators. But problem with this duel as melodrama or tragedy is that its sole survivor is finally neither heroic, nor even sympathetic. Critics agree that Beatrice Cenci turns readers and spectators against her in fifth act, where, under arrest for murder of father who raped her, she undertakes to save herself by lying about her role in crime. Not content with having a higher truth on her side in court, Beatrice denies petty facts of her story as well. know thee! How? where? when? (to her hired assassin).(3) Worse still, perhaps, Beatrice fails to make audience party to her deceit. Unlike many romantic antihero, she does not expose and deplore her own hypocrisy in soliloquy. Joseph Donohue observes that even jaded modern spectators of Cenci are repelled by this breach of trust(4)--one which seems to implicate author as well as his creation. (In Preface, Shelley condemns parricide but makes no mention of Beatrice's cover-up performance.) Critics have expressed their own discomfort with Beatrice by charging Shelley with aesthetic error of inconsistency. Roger Blood pinpoints this reaction, even as he suggests that supposed between various moments in Beatrice's performance merely externalizes which is basis of theatre. [T]he inconsistency [in Beatrice] which all critics sense ... is not merely result of discrepancy between character and action ... but absolute self-contradiction, literal counter-statement of her deceit, which mars her self-representation and self-justification after murder.(5) Julie Carlson is more explicit about why Beatrice bothers readers and viewers who want tragic victim-heroine. The trial scene allows her to finally appear as what and who she `is': commanding actress.(6) In short, and strangely enough, Shelley's heroine proves her own unfitness for stage by acting. Yet, is this (anti-)climax of Cenci inconsistent with its beginnings? On contrary, I contend that Beatrice's performance of public deceit is merely most off-putting of play's densely layered theatrical metaphors. From Cenci's declaration that his crimes are a matter (1.i.71), to Beatrice's prediction that the vain and senseless crowd, / ... that they may make our calamity / Their worship and their spectacle, will leave / churches and theatres as void / As their own hearts ...(V.iii.36-40), Cenci is text which seems to refuse to let us forget that it was intended for stage, and what such an intention entails. …

On the Tenth Anniversary of Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature

Last Spring I was honored to be elected President of the Law and Humanities Institute, an organization linked structurally and ideologically to the Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature. The LHI sponsors colloquia, lectures, literary and legal salons, as well as other interdisciplinary, scholarly events, which are often published in the journal as Proceedings or as individual articles. The journal, which is the repository of significant scholarly studies on a wide range of legal and literary subjects, is the inspirational and informational source for many of LHI's events. While reading a 1993 volume of the journal dedicated to The Merchant ofVenice, I was inspired to organize an international symposium on Law and the Arts, which gathered together leaders in the field of Law and Literature. They witnessed and commented on the Retrial of the Merchant of Venice: Shylock v. Antonio on Appeal. This production, staged again at the New York City Bar Association one year later, consisted of several segments: the performance of the trial scene in Act IV of the play, the writing and publication of briefs and reply briefs for the Appellant and Appellee in the New York Law Journal, the staging of the actual trial before seven judges including two federal judges, the theater critic of the Daily News, law professors, and Shakespeare scholars. The Retrial of the Merchant of Venice attracted a standing room only crowd of more than two hundred people in the Great Hall of the New York City Bar Association a testimony to the intrinsic value of the Law and Literature Movement. The two hour production was a truly memorable event in the annals of literary history simply because it focused on the legal issues of a literary masterpiece. This unusual production of The Merchant of Venice involved key players of the journal without whose intellectual rigor, experience in the law, and keen literary sensitivity this happening would not have taken place. I am truly proud to be a member of the team of the LHI and a contributor to the journal because the creative energy of these people has proven to be contagious as well as

怪誕小説——《西遊補》和《斬鬼傳》

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English. 本文的寫作目的在探討《西遊補》和《斬鬼傳》兩本小説，是否屬於怪誕作品。怪誕的基調就是可怖與可笑兩種相異的情緒，互相衝擊而產生的不協調感覺。怪誕藝術與變形有着千絲萬縷的關係，人獸混合的變形，或者是由人變獸、由獸變人的轉變，都會產生滑稽與恐怖的怪誕情調。怪誕藝術與變形有關，它除了製造可笑與可怖的怪誕情緒外，更予人驚愕及誇張之感。此外，怪誕藝術中所表現的陌生化世界，亦與夢境和超實主義有關。 《西遊補》和《斬鬼傳》兩本小説，都是屬於怪誕諷刺類作品。《西遊補》最精彩的怪誕描述，就是行者在未來世界中審訊秦檜，以及秦檜在地獄中被變形為馬、螞蟻和“蜻蜓”等片斷。至於《斬鬼傳》中的“人鬼”，都是人類不良癖性的化身。五鬼鬧鍾馗一幕，可説是全書最精彩之處。五鬼的“兒戲”、笑話加上負屈斬鬼的恐怖，令這幕充滿可笑復恐怖的不協調感。這篇文章分為下列幾個部份： 一 怪誕的定義二 不協調的基調三 怪誕中的反常四 怪誕中的誇張五 怪誕與諷刺畫六 怪藝藝術的清滌作用結論The objective of this article is to examine whether Xiyou Bu and Zhangui Zhuan belong to the category of grotesque novels, “Grotesque” always been merged with satire and it is an opposition to the “Sublime” type of literature. The basic idea regarding grotesque is the tone of incongruity. What contributes to this tone is the controversial feelings of horror and laughter being aroused simultaneously. Very often, grotesque has been regarded as a kind of black humour. Besides the tone of incongruity, grotesque literature frequently associate with exaggeration, abnormal presentation, caricature type of description as well as responsible for producing the effect of shock and surprise. In Liu Zhang（劉璋）: Zhangui Zhuan, the national hero Zhong Kui （鍾馗）killed different “spirits” in the human world. These “spirits” actually represent different vices in men. The luster monk keeps a group of his mistresses in a religious temple. The mean- spirited miser at the moment when he breathes his last, still rises up and makes sure that his son will be smart as not to be cheated by others. The luster, the miser and all the other thirty-six “spirits” are allegorical figures representing different human follies. These “spirits” creates funs and horror at the same time. Take the scene of the five spirits making fun of Zhong Kui as an example. It begins as a joke and ends up as a slaughter. It is a world of topsy turvydom that the “spirits” get the upper hand but it is also a world of funs with the national hero becomes a drunken man. This comic atmosphere changes to a battle ground of slaughter when the general of Zhong Kui return. Both laughter as well as fear aroused simulaneously and create a sense of incongruity. As for Xiyou Bu, it is also a grotesque novel. The grotesque elements mainly concentrate in chapter 8 and 9 where Wu-kong (悟空) acts as the supreme judge of the underworld and Qin Hui (秦檜) becomes the criminal. This court trial scene builds a wonderful atmosphere of grotesque into the novel. The type of punishment that Qin Hui receives invokes both laughter and fear. As for the content outline, this article falls into the following parts: 1) Definition of the grotesque:The definitions put forward by Philip Thomson and Wolfgang Kayser have been examined careful to get a more acceptable definition of the grotesque.2) The grotesque and incongruity:Incongruity is the tone of the grotesque. Controversial feelings of fear and happiness aroused simultaneously contribute to the tone of incongruity.3) The grotesque and the Abnormal presentation and reduction are techniques to devalue the target of satire.4) The grotesque and the Exaggeration.5) The grotesque and the Caricature:Just like caricature, characters appear in the grotesque literature are queer, exaggerated, and strike out to be the target of satire.6) Cathartic Effect:The release of anxiety aroused by the grotesque literature helps readers to strike a balance in the upset disturbing mood.7) Conclusion:The relationship between grotesque and satire.

"Love Me Like I Like to Be": The Sexual Politics of Hurston's Their Eyes were Watching God, the Classic Blues, and the Black Women's Club Movement

Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is a text at once (ac)claimed for its ability to speak to contemporary gender and sexual politics and blamed for its inability to speak to the local, particularized politics of its time. Their Eyes has been used to situate strong, culture-based women at the center of an African American women's literary tradition, on the one hand, and has been read as reinforcing primitivism or as idealizing the folk, on the other.(1) As important as Hurston's critical reception has been, it has mediated against considering her work as politicized in her own historical moment. Just as Claudia Tate notes the invisibility of the politics of early black domestic fiction, I am suggesting that much of the political embeddedness of Hurston's text has been lost. Their Eyes engages in early twentieth-century black feminist politics. To develop a context for the sexual politics of earlier writers, critics and historians have turned to the discourses of the black women's club movement, which had its origins in the antilynching campaign, and the classic blues, sung and written in large part by African American women. Pauline Hopkins and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, in particular, have been read as engaged in the political debates of the black women's club movement, as have Hurston's contemporaries Nella Larsen, Angelina Weld Grimke, and, obliquely, Jessie Fauset (Tate; Carby, Reconstructing; McDowell, 'Nameless' 142).(2) Unaccountably, Hurston has been left out of this investigation, even though Their Eyes clearly took shape within a broad continuum of African American women's writing on sexuality early in this century.(3) Hurston's biography supports such historical contextualization of her work. She worked for Mary McLeod Bethune just before Bethune founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935 and traveled in the same circles as Alice Dunbar Nelson, an officer in the Federation of Colored Women's Clubs (Hemenway 19; Hull 90, 166). In addition, the discourse of the anti-lynching campaign must have been particularly visible to a student at Howard just before and during the push for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill in 1922.(4) Hurston was also an authority on African American folk music, assisting Alan Lomax in his collecting and recording for the Music Division of the Library of Congress in 1935 (Hemenway 211). Although Hazel Carby has read Hurston as opposed to urban or commercialized versions of the blues (Politics 75), her relationship to them was complex. Hurston was a friend of Ethel Waters, for example, and attempted to sell her a song on at least one occasion (Hemenway 207, 284). On a trip with Langston Hughes, she stayed with Bessie Smith (106) and was quite familiar with Harlem cabarets as well as the Southern tent-show and vaudeville tradition which showcased classic blues singers (26-27). In fact, she once joined a traveling theatrical troupe as a wardrobe girl (17).(5) It is my contention that Hurston has been left out of this debate primarily because her text disrupts neat dichotomies between respectability and desire, middle- and working-class discourses, and club and blues women. Their Eyes alludes to the politics of rape and lynching, as I discuss in detail below, by first charging Janie with sexual misconduct and then by exonerating her, primarily in the trial scene. However, Their Eyes does not reject charges of African American women's libidinousness at the expense of sexual expression, as literary critics have argued of other texts from this period. Critics like Carby and Deborah McDowell have generally read African American women's literature during the Harlem Renaissance as replicating the middle-class conservatism of club discourse and as opposing or suppressing the liberatory sexual discourse of the blues.(6) Hurston's text doesn't fit this critical bifurcation. Historians, too, claim that club and blues discourses existed to some extent in opposition to one another. …

Lawyers, Law &amp; the Movies: The Hitchcock Cases

Reel Justice: The Courtroom Goes to the Movies, by Paul Bergman and Michael Asimov, and Legal Reelism: Movies as Legal Texts, edited by John Denvir, represent valuable initial steps in the consideration of how movies and other elements of popular culture reflect the cultural positions of lawyers and law, and how their study can aid discussion of issues of legal theory. Reel Justice analyzes movies about lawyers and law, particularly those with significant trial scenes. It determines whether movies accurately portray legal reality. Legal Reelism discusses how movies can be considered legal texts that reflect themes and problems of legal theory. The approaches of each of these books are considered in analyzing three films about criminal trials directed by Alfred Hitchcock: The Paradine Case, I Confess, and The Wrong Man. The treatment of Hitchcock's movies by film critics and scholars over the years reveals the fundamental similarity of the questions raised by interpretation of movies and the interpretation of more conventional legal materials such as statutes. The history of Hitchcock's movies also shows that interpretive issues cannot be overlooked if movies are truly to be treated as legal texts, as suggested by Legal Reelism. Movies and television have served as the primary source of information about law and lawyers for millions of people over the years, and they will continue to do so. Popular entertainment has also continually influenced lawyers' understandings and attitudes toward law and the legal profession. Posted with permission.