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• W1503404122 abstract "Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewLorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama. Lorna Hutson. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. x+382.Constance JordanConstance JordanClaremont Graduate University Search for more articles by this author Claremont Graduate UniversityPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreLorna Hutson's comprehensive and deftly executed study of early modern English drama and its engagement with legal texts and concepts represents two closely related subjects: English law as it moves from a medieval modality reflecting Roman inquisitorial law to early modern common law practices centered on the evaluation of evidence; and contemporary English theater as it reflects both institutions but emphasizes, over time, such common law practices as the testimony of witnesses, the jury as determiners of fact, and the forensic oratory required to convince a court that what is represented to it is true. The Invention of Suspicion places the largely benign development of common law in perspectives that both illuminate and shadow its effects. Evidential practices tended to obviate the tyranny of the inquisitor, but they also allowed for prosecutorial or judicial error, whether intentional or accidental. As Hutson shows, early modern English plays dramatize such error, often the product of the deft uses of language that law promotes and even celebrates.The juridical character of the medieval morality play illustrates perhaps the most important feature of the inquisitor's court: its reliance on conscience. The action of a morality play moves through rituals of confession, penance, and then absolution; it features a jurisdiction, Hutson observes, that has a demonic aspect—once absolved, the criminal can never be innocent. In A treatise concernynge the division betwene the spirytualtie and temporaltie (1532), Christopher St. German argues that a jurisprudence centered on conscience needs to be tempered by a consideration of evidence. Specifically, he proposes that culpability at law is not to be answered by ready restitution—assuming wrongdoing—but rather by examination of “‘the due evidence that is required for making of restitutions', that is, the examination of evidence of a moral obligation to repay” (53). By contrast, Thomas More, St. German's opponent in this debate, regards the judge conscientiously as God's proxy and the jury as incapable of determining fact; for St. German, the jury's only and all important role is to determine fact (61). Their positions reflect their respective practices: inquisitorial justice gets what the judge regards as proof; evidential justice determines fact, which being subject to pro and contra argument necessarily remains “a contentious conjectural issue,” in other words, not a truth but an act (77). Hutson establishes that Titus Andronicus (1594) dramatizes “the refusal of an open hearing of evidence” as incident to “political tyranny” (91). The evidence that it presents is not examined as more or less probable but rather taken as proof the emperor Saturninus chooses to accept (96). But she also suggests why evidence, however gathered but necessarily rendered in descriptive terms before a court, should itself be subject to critical review. The actions of Titivillus, the delightful amanuensis demon in Mankind (1465), reveal how words and thus the evidence they report can be manipulated and misconstrued, by contrast to Mercy's infallible words at the Last Judgment, as he “schall rewle the mater wythowte contrauersye” (42).Narrative and its rhetorical construction therefore become issues in the investigation of evidential justice. Central to its representation in drama is Hutson's analysis of mimesis, specifically, the imitation of the action that constitutes the dramatic narrative. Conventionally, actions under legal scrutiny are to be skeptically examined, most especially when searching for their causes: do the circumstances of place, time, occasion, and means have significance? But the brilliance of the theater Hutson goes on to examine resides precisely in the possibilities it creates for moral inversion: the rhetoric used to describe dramatic action transforms it; rather than what is “really there,” we the audience see what the “words persuade us to see,” even to the point of our inferring “inward and psychological causes” for what characters wish or hope to do (137, 155–56). Such is the ars occulta that reshapes the elements of dramatic intrigue so that it becomes an image of a fallible jurisprudence. Modeled on the works of Terence and Plautus, English comedies of the midcentury associate evidential procedures with “illusion-producing power” (177). Audiences at John Foxe's Titus and Gesippus (1544), Jacke Jugeler (1562), Gammer Gurton's Needle (1562–63), and Nicholas Udall's Ralph Roister Doister (1552) could see such power at work, fashioning an antimorality from the drama's exercise of justice. Latent certainly in the practice of evidential justice in which mistakes really do occur, a fallible jurisprudence becomes explicit in theater. Hutson instances Gascoigne's Supposes (1566), whose false inferences Gascoigne explicitly notes in the margins of his revision of the play The Posies (1575).Hutson then considers whether early modern English plays stage a counterargument to their satirical representations of evidential justice gone awry. Do they dramatize the fundamental equities inherent in evidential justice as the basis for political and social stability? In response, she analyzes a brilliantly evocative example of such counterargument in The First Part of the Contention betwixt the two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster or 2 Henry VI (1594), which begins as the play's citizens noisily intervene to demand an investigation of the death of Duke Humphrey. This effectively supports Warwick's coroner-like examination of Humphrey's body, whose signs he reads as indicating violence resulting in murder, and makes the commons, in Hutson's words, “a kind of jury.” The action as a whole becomes “cathartic,” dispelling “the sense of judicial procedure as the plaything of those in power in the regime” (245). It is worth noting, because Shakespeare's audience certainly would have, how deeply this scene evokes an image of public participation in the evidential practices of common law. A look at such handbooks as William Lambarde's Eirenarcha, or of the Office of the Justices of Peace in foure Bookes (London, 1614); Michael Dalton's The Countrey Justice, conteyning the practise of the Iustices of the Peace out of their Sessions (London, 1618); and William Sheppard's An Epitome of all the Common & Statute Lawes of this Nation Now in force (1656) confirms the vital role of the citizenry, persons on whom officers enforcing the law could and did count. Sir Thomas Smith, describing the workings of the commonwealth in De republica Anglorum (1583), observes that a constable in search of a “theefe” “ought to raise the parish to aid him.…[Thus] euerie English man is a sergiant to take the theefe” (ed. Mary Dewar [Cambridge University Press, 1982], bk. 2, chap. 7, 107), a dictum that Dalton's Countrey Justice states as a rule: “Euery Private man may arrest another, whom he knoweth to have committed Robbery, Manslaughter, or other felony, and may deliuer him to the Constable of the towne where such an offender is apprehended” (Countrey Justice, 295). The citizens of 2 Henry VI are therefore behaving responsibly in raising a hue and cry. As Hutson notes, Cynthia Herrup, Malcolm Gaskill, John Langbein, Barbara Shapiro, and others have shown that the integrity of the citizen was—and indeed had to be—assumed in situations more deliberative than those requiring unofficial police power, namely, in the conduct of jury trials establishing the facts of a case.Hutson's final chapters on revenge tragedy and the treatment of suspicion in Shakespeare and Jonson focus on the challenge implicit in the interpretation of evidence. To begin with, evidence must be looked for and, in order to have probative value, must correlate with circumstance. Advising justices of the peace how to identify a person whose behavior is suspect prior to presenting the court with a “bil of Enditement,” William Lambarde, paraphrasing Cicero's directives in De inventio that are designed to instruct counsel how to argue a case, takes note of “what things be materiall to induce Suspicion.” I quote those covered as “present” or “subsequent” circumstance: “Time: as being very early or late which be fit for the doing of evuill that will not abide the light; Space sufficient to performe the feate; Place, conuenient & meete for the act as a Wood, Dale, house or other place of aduantage; Occasion, rightly taken, as which being omitted, the fact could not follow; Comparison, as that none but hee, or none so commodiously as hee, could commit the fact; Hope, to haue it concealed by these aduantages, or to escape with it” (Eirenarcha, 217–19). Beyond the determination of suspicious behavior, the Justice here acquires both the terms and an organization of topics suitable for the narrative he will need to construct when he takes the person he has arrested before a jury. Given these suggestive instructions, however, it is also clear that the Justice's narrative and the facts it purports to establish is sometimes never more than good enough—good enough perhaps to bring a case but not absolutely incontrovertible. In her discussion of Love's Labor's Lost (1595), Hutson concludes by observing that some cases, typically those involving promises, will be resolved rather than decided and will depend on what she terms “the risky extension of faith” (302). Jonson's comedies, the subject of Hutson's concluding pages, dramatize interpretations of evidence that are patently abusive. They become pretexts for calculating risk. In her words, probability is now “future-oriented” (333).Literary historians have increasingly accepted the invitation to read literature, especially the drama of early modern England and Shakespeare, as representing kinds of law and therefore to take critical account of more specialized kinds of literary analysis. This is not to say that such older studies as Edward J. White's Commentaries on the Law in Shakespeare, with Explanations of the Legal Terms Used in the Plays, Poems, and Sonnets, and a Consideration of the Criminal Types Presented (St. Louis: Thomas Law Book, 1913) have lost their interest or usefulness. Hutson's The Invention of Suspicion is, however, uniquely conceived and configured. Engaging multiple perspectives not only on relevant play texts but also on their extradramatic contexts, legal and critical, it situates our understanding of early modern English drama in the deep legal structures that both permitted and resolved the conflicts within society as well as promoted their transposition to the stage. Its method is dialogic: it identifies the rhetorical strategies and their sources in Cicero and Quintilian that make early modern English drama persuasive and moving; it reveals the significance of the legal texts that inform the law the plays dramatize; and it draws on, not without contesting, recent dramatic and historical criticism of the early modern period to further make its points. The Invention of Suspicion is a superbly conceived and executed book, offering readers new insights into the complex relationships that determined the character of legal and dramatic literature in early modern England. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 108, Number 4May 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/659616 Views: 34Total views on this site © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected] Crossref reports no articles citing this article." @default.
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