Shakespeare and Law
eBook - PDF

Shakespeare and Law

  1. 352 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Shakespeare and Law

About this book

Readers of Shakespeare's language, from the playhouse to the classroom, have long been aware of his peculiar interest in legal words and concepts - Richard II's two bodies, Hamlet's quiddities and quillets, Pandarus' peine forte et dure. In this new study, Andrew Zurcher takes a fresh, historically sensitive look at Shakespeare's meticulous resort to legal language, texts, concepts, and arguments in a range of plays and poems. Following a preface that situates Shakespeare's life within the various legal communities of his Stratford and London periods, Zurcher reconsiders the ways in which Shakespeare adapts legal language and concepts to figure problems about being, knowing, reading, interpretation, and action.

In challenging new readings of plays from King John and Henry IV to As You Like It and Hamlet, Shakespeare and Law reveals the importance of early modern common legal thinking to Shakespeare's representations of inheritance, possession, gift-giving, oath-swearing, contract, sovereignty, judgment, and conscience - and, finally, to our own reception and interpretation of his works.

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Yes, you can access Shakespeare and Law by Andrew Zurcher in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Literary Criticism of Shakespeare. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. CONTENTS
  3. ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS
  4. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
  5. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
  6. Chapter One: Preamble: ‘How shall I understand you?’
  7. Chapter Two: Shakespeare’s Legal Life
  8. Chapter Three: The Love of Persons: Common Law and the Epistemology of Conscience in the Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint
  9. Chapter Four: Wasting Time: Conditionality and Prosperity in As You Like It and the Second Tetralogy
  10. Chapter Five: Rex v. Lex, or, the Proud Issue of a King
  11. Chapter Six: The Report of the Cause of Hamlet
  12. Chapter Seven: Codicil: the Maxim and the Analogy
  13. NOTES
  14. BIBLIOGRAPHY
  15. INDEX