Legal Themes In The Merchnat Of Venice And Dou'e Yuan

Dou'e Yuan and The Merchant of Venice are two excellent plays at home and abroad, which share the common legal themes such as the conflict on the trial scene. Literature is of the mentality in pursuit of the true, the good and the beautiful while law boasts of the rationality to crack down on the faked, the ugly and the wicked. The discussion to have both in consideration and comparison shall provide us with a brand horizon to examine the confrontation between the literary value and the legal value of the same subject. The past relative study of the legal themes in both plays has paid most attention to the legal world from the legal perspective considering literature as a tool to examine legal system. However, few have considered the study of legal themes as an independent subject from the literary perspective. The thesis, based on the belief of the significance of literary study of legal themes, is to make efforts to set an example for such a literary review of legal themes, that is, to utilize legal thoughts to comprehend the literary conflicts and romanticism value.The thesis, making use of knowledge of literature and law, focuses on the literary overview of the legal themes in two plays, analyzes the humane consideration of literature over the social life through its value of literary romanticism embodied in description of legal world. In other words, it is to emphasize the great social significance of poetic justice in literature of legal themes as well as literary comprehension and evaluation over the current legal system in a certain period. The main body of the thesis consists of three parts. The introduction reviews the Law and Literature Movement, going deep into the association and common qualities shared by law and literature and confirming the major approach of literary perspective. Chapter one dwells on major legal themes in respective plays with different descriptions of social life and legal world. Chapter two, on the basis of the formal analysis, brings forward the poetic justice which shows the literary value over legal system as well as the literary romanticism which exerts great influence in the management of legal technical details. Chapter three is devoted to the great significance of legal themes in literature. The conclusion of the thesis summarizes the main significance of such a literary study of legal themes in literature.