(Mis)representing Justice on the Early Modern Stage

Abstract

Early modern notions of justice tended to be strongly linked to procedural ideals, casting the state rather than the individual as the guarantor of just order, even if specific officials and systems could be identified as falling short of those ideals. In this essay, I trace some early modern perceptions of the proper means of attaining justice and then explore how those means are represented in the period's drama. As I show, although Renaissance literature's supposedly "intima[te] . . . engagement with the law" has become a critical staple, there is a striking mismatch between the ways justice was done in early modern England and the judicial processes depicted on stage. I offer a number of explanations for why an accurate portrayal of English judicial procedure may have eluded Shakespeare and his contemporaries and delineate the (not necessarily detrimental) consequences of this misalignment for the dramatic representation of justice.

Re‐assessing Trial by Jury in Early Modern Law and Literature

“…Elsewhere Hamlet commends the ‘judicious few’ in his advice to the players (3.2.26), while Jonson uses the same adjective when addressing the audience in the induction to Bartholomew Fair (Induction.65ff). On one level then the analogy between audience and jury is an important one, although we should be alert to differences as well as the similarities between playhouse and courthouse (Mukherji, ‘Jonson's The New Inn ’ 150; Syme, ‘(Mis)representing Justice’ 79).…”

“…This can be mapped onto the jury's antagonistic relationship with the bench outlined here, for example when the villain Piero in Antonio's Revenge takes it upon himself to act as judge in his daughter's trial (4.2), or the Duke of The Revenger's Tragedy intervenes on behalf of his stepson at the moment of sentencing (1.2.83). The penchant for trial scenes in this genre and beyond is well established, but rarely are they recognisable as the institutions described in English common law (Syme ‘(Mis)representing Justice’). Yet for all this, they have much to tell us about the shifting balance of power between judges and juries in early modern England.…”