Hospitable Justice: Law and Selfhood in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Abstract

This article is concerned with the uses to which Shakespeare put legal subject matter. I focus on three sonnets in which the speaker acknowledges himself as the victim of a crime committed by the young man, but pledges to testify against himself on the young man's behalf. This strange justice, I argue, belongs to the philosophical tradition of hospitality, exemplified in a range of writings from St. Paul's Epistles to work by Derrida and Lévinas. Returning Shakespeare's sonnets to this strand of intellectual history equips us with a set of concepts ideally suited to making sense of the way Shakespeare uses law to reflect upon the nature of selfhood.This article is concerned with the uses to which Shakespeare put legal subject matter and with the related question of what it means for a piece of writing by Shakespeare to be characterized as "legal." I focus on three sonnets -35, 49, and 88 -which have in common a peculiar legal conceit. In all three, the speaker acknowledges himself as the victim of a crime committed by the young man, but pledges to testify against himself on the young man's behalf. This role reversal connects to no known legal principle or procedure in Shakespeare's time. To read sonnets 35, 49, and 88 as legal, then, requires that we depart from the critical orthodoxies of Shakespeare studies and embrace a wider range of philosophical and theological understandings of law and justice than are afforded by early modern legal history. Specifically, I shall argue that the justice presented in sonnets 35, 49, and 88 belongs to the philosophical tradition