Playhouse Law In Shakespeares World

Download or read book Playhouse Law in Shakespeare's World written by Brian Jay Corrigan and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a human face to Shakespeare's theatrical world. It has been captured and preserved in the amber of litigious activity. Contracts for playhouses represent human aspiration: an avaricious hope for profit or an altruistic desire to provide for a family. Lawsuits have preserved the declarations of rights and the righteous indignations as well as the fictions and half-truths under which the Renaissance theater flourished. Leases and agreements preserve the intentions, honest or dishonest, of the men who wrote, performed, and bankrolled the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The period 1590-1623, the limits of the original Shakespearean enterprise, resemble nothing so much as a third of a century of the sort of squabbling, shoving, and place-seeking familiar to every modern theatrical professional.

Download or read book Shakespeare's Law written by Mark Fortier and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-05-30 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare's Law is a critical overview of law and legal issues within the life, career, and works of William Shakespeare as well as those that arise from the endless array of activities that happen today in the name of Shakespeare. Mark Fortier argues that Shakespeare’s attitudes to law are complex and not always sanguine, that there exists a deep and perhaps ultimate move beyond law very different from what a lawyer or legal scholar might recognize. Fortier looks in detail at the legal issues most prominent across Shakespeare’s work: status, inheritance, fraud, property, contract, tort (especially slander), evidence, crime, political authority, trials, and the relative value of law and justice. He also includes two detailed case studies, of The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure, as well as a chapter looking at law in works by Shakespeare's contemporaries. The book concludes with a chapter on the law as it relates to Shakespeare today. The book shows that the legal issues in Shakespeare are often relevant to issues we face now, and the exploration of law in Shakespeare is as germane today, though in sometimes new ways, as in the past.

Download or read book The Law in Shakespeare written by C. Jordan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-12-12 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading scholars in the field analyze Shakespeare's plays to show how their dramatic content shapes issues debated in conflicts arising from the creation and application of law. Individual essays focus on such topics such as slander, revenge, and royal prerogative; these studies reveal the problems confronting early modern English men and women.

Download or read book Shakespeare and the Law written by Bradin Cormack and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-07-11 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "William Shakespeare is inextricably linked with the law. Legal documents make up most of the records we have of his life; trials, lawsuits, and legal terms permeate his plays. Gathering an extraordinary team of literary and legal scholars, philosophers, and even sitting judges, Shakespeare and the Law demonstrates that Shakespeare's thinking about legal concepts and legal practice points to a deep and sometimes vexed engagement with the law's technical workings, its underlying premises, and its social effects. Shakespeare and the Law opens with three essays that provide useful frameworks for approaching the topic, offering perspectives on law and literature that emphasize both the continuities and the contrasts between the two fields. In its second section, the book considers Shakespeare's awareness of common-law thinking and practice through examinations of Measure for Measure and Othello. Building and expanding on this question, the third part inquires into Shakespeare's general attitudes toward legal systems. A judge and former solicitor general rule on Shylock's demand for enforcement of his odd contract; and two essays by literary scholars take contrasting views on whether Shakespeare could imagine a functioning legal system. The fourth section looks at how law enters into conversation with issues of politics and community, both in the plays and in our own world. The volume concludes with a freewheeling colloquy among Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Judge Richard A. Posner, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Richard Strier that covers everything from the ghost in Hamlet to the nature of judicial discretion"--Jacket.

Download or read book Shakespeare and the Law written by Gary Watt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-10-24 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare and the Law appreciates Shakespeare and his works as expressions of an English early modern culture in which the shared rhetorical practices of dramatists and lawyers were informed by the renaissance of classical practice. It argues that Shakespeare was not primarily concerned with the technical accuracy of law, legal ideas, and legal performances, but with their capacity to generate dramatic interest through dispute, trial, the breaking of bonds, and the bending of rules. It follows that all Shakespeare's plays are in a sense “law plays”. Rhetorical practices can emerge as performances of power, but in Shakespeare's works they show more as instances of the human instinct to challenge power by playing with rules. Shakespeare employs the special magic of legal language, actions, and materials to conjure playgoers to act as a critical jury to events transacted on stage. This calls for close attention to Shakespeare's poetic sound effects and the ways they prompt audiences to confer a fair hearing.

Download or read book Literature and Law written by Mark Fortier and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-05-09 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fields of literature and law intersect in frequent, and often surprising ways. This clear and concise book offers an introduction to the area, covering the history, key thinkers and ideas as well as detailed and fascinating studies into areas such as evidence and truth, inheritance, sex, vigilantism and justice. Each chapter examines a number of familiar authors and texts including Shakespeare, Brecht, Austen, Dickens, Ishiguro, Beecher-Stowe, Atwood, Miller. The book also opens up the broader study of law as it relates to culture in such areas as film, television, and digital media and how they affect such issues as a right to privacy, copyright and creative reworking, and censorship. Mark Fortier offers a concise, systemic introduction to the law and legal system for the lay person, covering basic notions of justice and law (fundamental justice, natural law, positive law) and the legal system (common law vs civil law, case law, statute, constitutional law, private law [tort, contract, property], criminal law, equity, basic rules of evidence, stare decisis, the adversarial system) as well as a very handy glossary of legal terms. This is a fascinating guide to a very topical and increasingly relevant area of literary studies.

Download or read book Law as Performance written by Julie Stone Peters and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-14 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tirades against legal theatrics are nearly as old as law itself, and yet so is the age-old claim that law must not merely be done: it must be "seen to be done." Law as Performance traces the history of legal performance and spectatorship through the early modern period. Viewing law as the product not merely of edicts or doctrines but of expressive action, it investigates the performances that literally created law: in civic arenas, courtrooms, judges' chambers, marketplaces, scaffolds, and streets. It examines the legal codes, learned treatises, trial reports, lawyers' manuals, execution narratives, rhetoric books, images (and more) that confronted these performances, praising their virtues or denouncing their evils. In so doing, it recovers a long, rich, and largely overlooked tradition of jurisprudential thought about law as a performance practice. This tradition not only generated an elaborate poetics and politics of legal performance. It provided western jurisprudence with a set of constitutive norms that, in working to distinguish law from theatrics, defined the very nature of law. In the crucial opposition between law and theatre, law stood for cool deliberation, by-the-book rules, and sovereign discipline. Theatre stood for deceptive artifice, entertainment, histrionics, melodrama. And yet legal performance, even at its most theatrical, also appeared fundamental to law's realization: a central mechanism for shaping legal subjects, key to persuasion, essential to deterrence, indispensable to law's power, —as it still does today.