Figuring the law: Legal bodies and legal spaces on the early modern stage

This project examines how law "travels" between legal and dramatic texts in early modern England via corporeal and spatial tropes. Such tropes, I argue, are deployed in legal texts by jurists intent on naturalizing the relationship between law and authority: hence, in many legal texts the body becomes a site where divine (and English) law is inscribed while the written corpus of the law itself is posited as a space that contains a secret depth of equity and justice. In the hands of English playwrights these figures become less a celebration of English law than a grotesque parody of juristic mystification.;Focusing on common lawyers' opposition between written and "unwritten" (customary) law, I demonstrate in my first chapter that for both jurists and dramatists writing represented an alien and alienating part of the law that must be naturalized by inscription on the English body. Legal concerns over writing are bodied forth on the stage in such domestic tragedies as A Warning for Fair Women, which is the subject of chapter two. I argue that insofar as this play represents criminal evidence as a grotesque kind of writing on the body, it aligns law with allegory and in so doing implicitly questions early modern legal hermeneutics. The secret spaces of the English body (the conscience, the heart) are posited for the corpus of the English law as well in the form of equity, which was figured as occupying a hidden space either within or without the law. The plays I examine in the final chapters question the law's ability to measure and control these inner spaces. After a discussion of early modern notions of equity in chapter three, I suggest in chapter four that Measure for Measure stages a connection between sexual license and the law's inner spaces. Finally, I show in chapter five how these spatial metaphors play out in the legal satire of John Day's Law-Tricks, which parodies the idea developed by some common lawyers that the law was a sacred space of memory by figuring the law as the Cretan labyrinth, a profane space of forgetting.