Description
Book SynopsisEarly modern Britain witnessed a transformation in legal reasoning about human volition and intentional action. Examining the relation between law and theater in this period, this book reads plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, and others to demonstrate how legal understanding of willful human action pervades 16th- and 17th-century English drama.
Trade Review"Wilson's tracing of legal sources for ideas, situations, and vocabulary concerning intention and agency in the drama texts he studies is convincing. . . . The original contribution here is in the depth and detail of Wilson's readings of these few plays and his elaboration of the complexity of the issues of intention they dramatize." --
Renaissance Quarterly"Rather than surveying the representation of law in plays, or even theater legislation, Wilson tracks the way legal changes—critically in the area of contracts and contract law—both express and create new understandings of the nature of intention and action, fundamental categories of the legal, political, and psychological subject. . . . Throughout
Theaters of Intention, Wilson juxtaposes the law and the stage in provocative and productive ways, and captures the culture's anxious efforts to come to grips with its own emerging, slippery identities." --
Studies in English Literature"
Theaters of Intention is . . . an original and provocative study. It manages to range across a considerable amount of often dense legalistic and literary material, but does so in a way that maintains a reasonable degree of accessibility for the non-specialist. The lawyer will learn much about early modern literature, whilst the literary scholar will find much of interest regarding the exercise of law. Above all, it adds further weight to the thesis that it is impossible to study either law or literature in early modern England without due consideration of both." --
English Studies"This is a learned, densely researched, and above all weighty book. Scholars of Renaissance drama will want to come to terms with it, and draw upon the wealth of information it contains. Many critics have attempted to relate English Renaissance drama to contemporaneous legal developments, but Luke Wilson really delves into the subject and displays an intimate knowledge of the arcana of that most arcane of all subjects—English common law." --
Ben Jonson Journal"This is a provocative book, one that may well repay repeated consulatation." --
Seventeenth-Century NewsTable of ContentsList of illustrations; Preface and acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Hamlet, Hales v petit, and the hysteresis of action; 2. Ben Jonson and the law of contract; 3. Commodities and contracts; 4. Promissory performances; 5. Contracting damnation; 6. Nobodies that matter; Afterword; Notes; Bibliography; Index.
