A power to do justice: Jurisdiction and royal authority in English literature and law, 1509--1625 (John Skelton, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare)

The institutional history of law contains a history of suppressed communities, languages and jurisdictions alternative to the dominant, because successful, ones. In order to recover the shape of that suppression, this dissertation focuses on jurisdiction as a culturally significant category for the English sixteenth century, a period in which the common law dramatically extended its reach. The jurisdictional limit is an analytically important locus of legal change, since it is there, where courts or laws meet, that the law's artifice becomes most visible. Focusing on literary engagements with particular jurisdictional crises, the dissertation argues that the poems and plays under consideration trace a more complex history than that remembered by the rationalized law; and it suggests that the literary text's own competence emerges in oblique reaction to jurisdictional reconfiguration and the centralization of legal interpretive authority.; Addressing the problem of Henrician literary topicality, the first chapter analyzes Skelton's Magnyfycence as a response to bureaucratic centralization and the Tudors' vigorous exploitation of the royal prerogative. Usually read as a warning about excessive royal expenditure, Skelton's play emerges instead as a meditation on royal identity, as shaped by an intimate household bureaucracy and by newly charged models of legal delegation, writing and intention.; The remaining chapters explore, as the legacy of this centralization, the central law's later suppression of meanings in three jurisdictional contexts. Chapter 2 analyzes pastoral and allegory in Spenser's Faerie Queene in light of the difficulties involved with planting English common law in Ireland. It focuses specifically on the pressure exerted on the idea of "custom" and "common" when English colonists attempted to use English customary law exactly to suppress Gaelic custom and corporate identity. Chapters 3 and 4 address the nationalism of Shakespeare's English histories by exploring the place of France in late Elizabethan culture. As a jurisdictional space simultaneously external and internal to English legal consciousness, France embodied both a troubling (Norman) historical legacy and a civilian legal textuality alternative to the emerging textuality and authority of English case-law. Chapters 5 and 6 argue that Shakespeare's Cymbeline and Pericles rehearse the jurisdictional difficulties of accommodating a territorial law and an autonomous sovereign self to James I's conception of Britain and to an emerging body of international law governing fishing rights and East Indian trade. Having begun with the Tudor transformation of medieval kingship, the dissertation closes with empire.