Review Essay

Stavreva, Kirilka. Words Like Daggers. Violent Female Speech in Early Modern England. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 202 pp.

Laroche, Rebeccca; Munroe, Jennifer. Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory. London: Bloomsbury. 195 pp.

Cormack, Bradin; Nussbaum, Martha C.; Strier, Richard (eds.). Shakespeare and the Law. A Conversation Among Disciplines and Professions. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 335 pp.

Beecher, Donald; DeCook, Travis; Wallace, Andrew; Williams, Grant (eds.). Taking Exception to the Law. Materializing Injustice in Early Modern English Literature. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press. 315 pp.

McLuskie, Kate; Rumbold, Kate. Cultural value in twenty-first-century England. The case of Shakespeare. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 264 pp.

New books bring us closer to understanding the meaning and importance of early modern literature and Shakespeare in the past and present. Words Like Daggers: Violent Female Speech in Early Modern England, by Kirilka Stavreva, brings us new and different women’s voices; Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory, by Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe, offers the history and practice of the most recently developed literary theory and its application to Shakespeare’s work; Shakespeare and the Law: A Conversation Among Disciplines and Professions, edited by Bradin Cormack, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Richard Strier, and Taking Exception to the Law: Materializing Injustice in Early Modern English Literature, edited by Donald Beecher, Travis DeCook, Andrew Wallace, and Grant Williams, show the pervasiveness of the law and legal thinking; and finally, Cultural Value in Twenty-First-Century England: The Case of Shakespeare, by Kate McLuskie and Kate Rumbold, describes Shakespeare’s various interpretations of value and discusses the different ways his value is recognized in the twenty-first century.

“Her voice was ever soft,/Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman” (King Lear 5.3.275–276): such lines echo in early modern literature and Shakespeare. Yet in Words Like Daggers Kirilka Stavreva wants to explore the opposite: violent female speech. She examines such speech in society, the church, and the courts; in pamphlets; and on the stage. She describes violent speech in its physical details: what it takes physically to produce it and what physical effects – both in the voice and on the body – accompany it. She delineates the ways it was punished in both women and men and shows its links with witchcraft in both England and America as the occupation with witches becomes pronounced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But most significantly, Stavreva argues that it often brought positive results and was in many instances valued.

Stavreva continually stresses several underlying ideas. First, she emphasizes the incorporation of women’s bold speech into the language of witches to become a significant source of their fearful power. She also wants to offer a dimension that she sees feminist historians as neglecting. Since they wish “to expose the full terror of female persecution that cemented the historical foundations of the modern nation-state and the reformed church,” feminist historians, Stavreva claims, underplay “the witches’ memorable performances in the local contestations of power” (73). Finally, and most importantly, Stavreva wishes to show how women’s bold speech undermined the binary of gender categories. In effect, the book cautions against easily associating the feminine in the early modern period with silence, reserve, and obedience.

The first two chapters of Words Like Daggers treat the associations of violent speech in Christian religion and church courts. Though violent speech was most often linked with women from the Middle Ages forward, both men and women could speak it. It was characteristically described as “hot” and “sharp,” and its enunciation was said to be “explosive, shrill, projective” (7). It was thought to have dire consequences, causing destruction and rupture of the social fabric. Furthermore, since it was discharged through the speaker’s breath, it was thought to be contagious and sometimes seen as like the plague. Described in extravagant terms, this “disease of the tongue” “is (as the lips are) uncircumcised, polluted and uncleane, and becommeth at the last, an unrule evill, full of deadly poison: so inflamed thereby, that it is set on fire of hell and setteth on fire the course of nature [italics in the original]” (11). Beyond simply describing violent speech, Stavreva points out, in addition, that such language indicated the failure of the patriarchy since it was supposed to control speech. She cites a sermon of Thomas Adams, preached in 1616, confirming that such speech undermined gender categories: “’The Proverb came not from nothing; when we say of a brawling man, he hath a womans tongue in his head’” (15).

Examining a plethora of court cases, Stavreva finds that “malicious slander, barratry, scolding, cursing, and prophesy continued as causes for legal action from the Elizabethan era through the Interregnum” (2). Defamation, often linked to scolding, was a leading cause of prosecution in church courts, but also in city, borough, and manorial courts, a continuation of legal practices in the late Middle Ages (17). She points out that sexual terms, like “rogue” and “knave” were not actionable; yet if they were used repeatedly in court, they could damage the reputations of married men or bachelors hoping to marry (21). In other words, the rhetoric used in court cases could be as damaging as facts. Those convicted of defamation or scolding, usually women, could be subjected to the torturous and public humiliations of ducking, carting, or bridling (37).

Importantly, Stavreva points to cases where outspoken women saw themselves as defenders of virtue. She sites the case of Londoner Mary Sadde who impugned her husband’s “whore.” Sadde apparently “portrayed herself as a protector of the economic well-being of her family (her husband was said to have pawned her goods and her [italics in the original] children’s clothes) and of the moral well-being of the neighborhood, which she promised to rid of the alleged ‘whore.’ Scolding, then, was Sadde’s means of making a public claim to economic and moral authority.” Stavreva sees their “fiery speech” as enabling women “to bring abusive and adulterous husbands to public accountability” (42). At the same time, they “claimed the high moral ground as champions of the Reformation ideology of the companionate marriage” (43).

Linking the performativity of these bold women and their undermining of binary gender distinctions as attractive to cross-dressers of the early modern stage, Stavreva devotes her third chapter to shrews and shrew-tamers with an especially good analysis of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew and modern productions of it and how current directors handle the ambiguities of the ending. Stavreva is particularly interested in the way this play and others disrupt gender binaries. She continues this interest in the fourth chapter, “Witch-Speak in Late Elizabethan Docufiction,” in which she discusses the ways witches were presented in pamphlets and the motivations of pamphleteers behind these presentations, including their wish to sell their pamphlets. Chapter 5 focuses on “Courtly Witch-Speak on the Elizabethan Stage.” Stavreva argues that histrionic nobles and royalty acted similarly to historic witches and that their rhetoric “was clearly indebted to the violent speech of low-born women accused of being witches” (203). She confirms her argument with discussions of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest; John Ford’s The Broken Heart; John Marston’s Tragedy of Sophronia; and Thomas Middleton’s The Witch. She concludes that “through their witch-speaking performatives these women shape the fates of dynasties and nations before they themselves collapse in madness or melancholy” (106).

Her last chapter and epilogue concentrate on early Quaker women and the character of Margaret of Anjou in Shakespeare’s Henry VI’s plays and Richard III. The stories she tells of Quaker women are striking. The fact that almost 375 Quaker women “prophesied publicly in the second half of the seventeenth century” (129) and that they confronted publicly men with extraordinary political power such as Oliver Cromwell and King Charles II is startling. Stavrera tells the story of Elizabeth Stirredge, who delivered a “written warning about the consequences of the persecution of the righteous.” Her warning did not follow the customary form of petitions, and she apparently delivered it with a prophetic voice, “Hear Oh! King, and fear the Lord God of Heaven and Earth.” According to Stirredge, Charles was moved, and she reports that “’paleness came to his Face, and with a mournful Voice he said, I thank you, Good Woman [italics in the original]’” (138).

Though Words Like Daggers offers a significant corrective, the punishment of clamorous speech was extreme and more frequently and torturously meted out to women than men. The research Stavreva has done is impressive, and her bibliography is useful to anyone who wants to study her subject further. The stories she uncovers are fascinating.

Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory, by Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe, are part of the Arden Shakespeare and Theory Series, edited by Evelyn Gajowski. In the book’s combination of ecocritical and feminist theory, it represents one of the newest perspectives on Shakespearean literature. The writers reject the hierarchies of the early modern period, which emphasized the superiority of the spirit and reason to the body and emotions and of both to animals and the inanimate. They see ecofeminist theory as evincing “compassion for all living things, human and nonhuman alike” (xii). Their book grows out of their scholarship and teaching at the Universities of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, as well as their involvement as co-Steering Committee members of the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC). Both authors specialize in early modern women writers and literature and the environment.

As they explain in their preface, they wish to link past and present, undermine gender stereotypes, traverse “the boundaries of household spaces, the human mouth and skin, the garden wall, boiling water and earth’s rich humus” and explore other forms of relatedness (xix). The Introduction and first chapter consider the history and theoretical basis of their book while the subsequent three chapters use various of Shakespeare’s plays and the Sonnets to demonstrate other principles of ecofeminist literary theory and the ways that literature embodies those principles as well as the ways those principles enhance our understanding of Shakespeare’s work.

The “Introduction: Ecofeminism and the seeds of time” provides a history of ecofeminist theory beginning with Annette Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters in 1975, at about the same time that William Reuckert proposed studying literature and ecology together and continuing to the time when “the term ‘ecocriticism’ was used to name the field two decades later.” They see ecocriticism and ecofeminism as having common interests, but argue that each has its “own unique trajectory” (1). Citing several theorists, Laroche and Munroe maintain that the work of theorists in these fields addresses “’the conceptual and structural interconnections between all [italics in the original] forms of domination.” They see the “subjection of women to men and nonhuman things to human” as “linked to ideas and practices” that would productively be examined and questioned together” (5).

In the following chapter, “Ecofeminism Matters,” they insist on the interrelatedness of all things: “Attempted acts of enclosure, whether of the garden, the (especially female) body, the pantry or the house, betray how the impulse to subject one force or body to another is futile” (20–21). They consider the human and the nonhuman to be “a composite, not a distinct thing” (21). In knowing or the acquisition of knowledge, they insist that there can be no divide between subject and object (26). In chapter 2, “Of mouseholes and housefires: Transcorporeal domesticity,” the writers delineate the ways Shakespeare’s plays refer to the animal’s penetration of the human world. For example, they consider the fear of fires, both house and forest, and the ways animals may be one of the causes of those fires. They discuss the various linking of women and cats in Shakespeare’s plays and the ways cats and their scratches may “infect” the human world. They look at the various metaphorical meanings in the ways, Kate, for example, in Taming of the Shrew, is associated with cats so that they usually intend to denigrate her. They discuss further the appearance of fleas, flies, and worms in Shakespeare’s plays and use books on household management and on garden and house pests to demonstrate various connections among all of them.

Chapter 3, “How we know any thing,” draws on King Lear, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Macbeth to demonstrate how “’knowing’ is akin to an experiential intraconnection between and among ‘things’, where what is ‘known’ is not quantified but ineffable, ephemeral” (78). The discussion of King Lear, for example, focuses on characters other than King Lear, Cordelia and Edgar as “Poor Tom particularly, who they argue understand what Lear must learn about the limits of his power. They see Lear’s belief in his power as an illusion to begin with and his state of madness as allowing him to see the world “as an integrated organic whole where human and nonhuman (and categories of class and gender) dissolve into one another, their boundaries indistinguishable” (87). They would emphasize not the fall of a king or the destruction of family bonds, but “the destabilization of a fundamental human arrogance that leads to a simultaneous domination of the nonhuman, the poor and women alike” (88). At the end of this chapter, the writers associate the ways of knowing the plays value with the kinds of knowledge and value of multiplicity that the Humanities advocate as opposed to the narrower emphases legislators across the United States foster in their insistence on vocational preparation for college undergraduates.

In Chapter 4, “The dynamic object,” the writers use The Winter’s Tale to demonstrate the way ecofeminism departs from feminist criticism, however forward looking, and undermines Petrarchan values, which they see as present even today in their objectification of women. They finally draw brief parallels, as they did in their previous chapter, between the cosmetic industry in its “horrific testing” to produce “idealized beauty” and the produce industry, which engages in bad labor and wasteful environmental practices to create perfect fruits and vegetables. Comparing what appears to be a statue of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale to a stone in its silence, Leontes praises the living Hermione who he says “was as tender / As infancy and grace (105).” Laroche and Monroe argue that while feminist literary critics point out that this comparison objectifies women, it also considers stones negative things (109). Following Jeffery Cohen in his An Ecology of the Inhuman, they point to each stone’s having “a dynamic relationship to its geological and historical context and cannot be reduced to a circumscribed concept, any more than a human, male or female, may be” (110). In the other part of the chapter, “Dynamism in the garden,” they go on to discuss the ways flowers and plants are treated similarly to stones and argue that Shakespeare presents the relationship between plants and flowers and humans in complex ways that show them as connected rather than in hierarchical relationships.

The “Conclusion: Nature, stir: Ecofeminists in the archive” asserts that within Shakespearean ecocriticism, “the authority of elite male voices such as Francis Bacon and Gervase Markham [author of The Second Booke of the English Husbandman, 1614, and Country Contentments, of The English Huswife, 1623] has skewed how we have come to see the ways the early moderns related to the environment.” On the other hand, “through the many voices of Shakespeare’s plays,” they have sought “to bring to the forefront other perspectives, those of labourers, women, the poor and the enslaved” (133). They emphasize the ways their research would explore texts “whose circulation and use was quite different from those sold on the streets of London” (140). They have found early modern recipe books especially useful and have studied those extensively.

Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory will be useful to those wanting to explore the history and current state of ecofeminist theory. The Appendix, “Excavating Nature” will be especially helpful to those who want to explore archives related to environmental life in England in the early modern period. Shakespearean scholars and teachers of Shakespeare will find only occasionally the readings of his work striking and original, but may find value in seeing the ways his work incorporates domestic culture at times. It would be useful for the authors of Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory to consider the women and characters described in Words Like Daggers since they seem mainly to consider women living in domestic settings rather than those women who resisted those settings and often ventured outside such containment. The brief sections at the end of chapters that draw parallels between ecofeminist concerns and contemporary life and values, particularly in the United States, while provocative are asserted rather than argued.

Shakespeare and the Law: A Conversation Among Disciplines and Professions, edited by Bradin Cormack, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Richard Strier; and Taking Exception to the Law: Materializing Injustice in Early Modern English Literature, edited by Donald Beecher, Travis DeCook, Andrew Wallace, and Grant Will are both collections of essays and would seem to be within the now well-established genre of literature and the law. Yet the editors of Shakespeare and the Law insist that their essays “proceed from particular and distinct disciplinary and professional perspectives rather than from a shared hybrid perspective.” The collection comes from a conference on “Shakespeare and the Law,” held at the University of Chicago in 2009, and organized by the editors who were all teachers in a co-taught seminar on Shakespeare at the University of Chicago. They explain their perspective: “The philosophers talk like philosophers, and the three different kinds of philosophers talk like different kinds of philosophers; the judges talk like (and as) judges; the legal scholar talks like a legal scholar doing literary criticism; and the literary critics talk like (different kinds of) literary critics” (6). The essays do not read like proceedings from a conference; but rather, their authors are in conversation with each other, as the title of the book suggests, considering such questions as whether it is useful to look at literature, in this case Shakespeare, through law at all. The book is unusual in containing the views of practicing judges, including a United States Supreme Court Justice, as well as traditional scholars.

The essays in Shakespeare and the Law are grouped into four parts: the first provides a framework for the essays that follow; the second concerns Shakespeare’s knowledge of law; the third focuses on Shakespeare’s attitude toward Law; and the fourth considers the effect of politics and the community on the law in Shakespeare. The essays in the first part describe commonalities and differences between the aims and efficacy of law and literature. Daniel Brudney, a professor of philosophy, stresses the differences between the two disciplines. The literary texts he considers are only those of “high aesthetic quality” (25), and he sees their authority as “direct” since it comes from the intrinsic value of the text itself. The authority of law, however, in a “sufficiently just society” is “derivative” in that it comes “from something external to the text [... such as] the fact that it was duly enacted in a particular way” (28–29). Brudney uses Macbeth to demonstrate some of his ideas about authority. Bradin Cormack, a professor of English, uses The Winter’s Tale and the Sonnets to demonstrate Shakespeare’s legal thinking. He differs from Brudney in wanting “to think of law and literature together without supposing that they are the same.” He argues that there is an “aesthetic dimension of a kind of category analysis that is as central to legal thinking as it is to complex literary production” (46). In the final essay in this section, Lorna Hutson, an English professor, shares Cormack’s view of the similarities between literary and legal thinking, concentrating on the plot of Othello. She looks at the classical and rhetorical traditions that inform Shakespeare as a playwright and discusses in detail what his departures from the sources of Othello suggest in the story he wishes to tell. She associates the play with contemporary legal developments in which trial juries were becoming increasingly common and the incorporation of a new kind of theatrical realism, in which enargeia or evidentia, “the power to makes readers and hearers feel that they can see in their mind’s eye what the words evoke” became essential (88).

Essays in the second section, by Constance Jordan, a professor of English, and Richard H. McAdams, a professor of law and economics, treat Shakespeare’s knowledge of the law. Drawing on earlier scholarship, both recognize that early modernists knew a great deal about the law; that Shakespeare knew people at the Inns of Court, where he often performed; and lawyers were often part of his audience (122). Jordan sees Measure for Measure as addressing “the nature of government itself” (117). She discusses in detail the characters of the Duke, Angelo, and Escalus and their attitudes toward the law as well as laws concerning fornication, prostitution, and the sexual relations of engaged couples in England. At the center of her discussion is whether the monarch is beyond judgment on earth since he is God’s lieutenant or must follow justly enacted law. Whereas the former idea is consistent with Scottish notions of the monarchy, the latter “runs counter to an [...] understanding of English law” (103). Jordan’s analysis assumes the context in which James I of England was also James VI of Scotland and an advocate for royal absolutism. McAdams sees Othello as engaging early modern legal culture. Claiming “that law has more to say about Othello (and vice versa) than has been previously understood,” he argues that the “play expresses the virtues of formal legal channels over private revenge as a way to deal with injury” (9) and that it is “a brilliant thought experiment for testing the limits of Elizabethan complicity law” (121).

Part 3 includes essays that deal with Shakespeare’s attitudes toward justice and features essays by two writers who have experience as judges: Richard A. Posner, who was a judge on the U. S. Court of Appeals in the Seventh Circuit (including districts in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin) and a founder of the law and literature movement; and Charles Fried, who served as Solicitor General of the United States under President Reagan, and associate justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Concentrating on The Merchant of Venice, Posner sees law in Venice and Portia as motivated by commercial interests, and similar to Shylock in that. He argues that Shylock’s property would not be legally forfeited because he does not violate the attempted-murder stature (151). Charles Fried cites a discussion of the play in Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, in which a Somali man suggests that Shylock could indeed have collected his pound of flesh by using a “‘red-hot knife,’” which “’brings out no blood’” (162). Fried’s point is that it would have been up to Shylock to propose this solution; it was not the business of the court to suggest it. He sees the success of Venice as their literalistic interpretation of the law, which he sees as essential so as to prevent creating a “discretionary, arbitrary, and unpredictable (or predictably hostile)” legal environments (160).

The last two essays in this section see Shakespeare as offering different views of the law. David Bevington, a professor emeritus of the Humanities, argues that Shakespeare takes a positive view of the law. Using Measure for Measure to make his case, as did Constance Jordan, he sees the play as suggesting the desirability of a middle way between Angelo’s strictness and the Duke’s permissiveness, the way justice is embodied in Escalus. Drawing on Henry IV, Part 2, Measure for Measure, and The Merchant of Venice, Richard Strier, Professor of English, concludes that whenever Shakespeare “thought hard about legal principles or legal systems, he found himself profoundly uncomfortable” (192).

The fourth section, “Law, Politics, and Community in Shakespeare” contains five essays. In the first, Kathy Eden, a professor of English and Classics, entitled “Liquid Fortification and the Law in King Lear,” does not focus on the fact that the British Isles are surrounded by water or mean that the essay is a riff on drinking. Instead, it concentrates on two words, legal and royal, which both begin with two liquid consonants “l” and “r”. She goes on to suggest that the meanings of these words are both intertwined and separate in French and English and historically. Claiming that Shakespeare uses these words “in a dazzlingly inventive way” (207), she uses King Lear to illustrate her point. At the same time, she sees this play and its underlying sense of community as depending on Cicero’s De officiis and Seneca’s De beneficiis, both of which, she points out, were best-sellers in the Renaissance. Both of these works insist that gratitude and giving are essential to community; but of course, characters in King Lear disrupt their community in their failure to observe such values.

Stanley Cavell, professor emeritus in Humanities, underscores that it is our use of language that makes us human and that law is one of the disciplines, along with literature and philosophy, that is invested in words. He examines The Merchant of Venice to understand why in two instances Shylock is at a loss for words: why he fails to challenge Portia for separating flesh and blood, when the idea of flesh assumes blood; and why at the end he describes himself as “contented.” Cavell argues that Shylock’s spiritual depletion at the last follows from his recognition that he did not want money in the first place, but Antonio’s life, an awareness that he did not have until Portia links flesh and blood. If Shylock murders Antonio, whatever his rights in Venetian law, he would be guilty of a terrible sin according to Jewish law. According to Cavell, then, Shylock must speak what he does not feel in claiming to be “contented” and with that loss of language he loses his place among the human, which in the world of Venice, he may never have had.

The essay of Maria Theresa O’Connor, a professor of English, views Shakespeare’s Cymbeline in the context of the historical moment when King James VI of Scotland was also King James I of England. Like Lorna Hutson, she considers the play as commenting on the desirability of the union of the separate England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales into a Great Britain. But she sees the question not as whether the union is desirable, but rather as what will the union be in terms of the equality of the countries or the dominance of England. She argues that the play takes the position of “pro-Union treatises that envisioned a British people enjoying equal liberties and equal access to opportunity” (252). Martha C. Nussbaum, a professor of law and ethics, uses Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to demonstrate the necessary connection between law or politics and emotion. Unlike so many of the writers in this collection, she takes issue with Shakespeare and sees Julius Caesar as a “misleading, even a dangerous work” (13). She argues that Brutus presents the rule of law as “abstract and remote” (276) and fails to understand the need for people to be passionately engaged with political ideas. Drawing on events surrounding the American Revolution, the American Civil War, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Barack Obama, she cites examples of the way political passion fosters political ideas. She sees Shakespeare as departing from his sources in his presentation in Julius Caesar as he implies that “republican values cannot succeed because people simply need to be taken care of” (277). He achieves this image of them in part by “representing the common people as bestial and herdlike” (278).

The final essay in this section is by Diane P. Wood, a judge on the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and Professor of International Legal Studies. Wood looks at the appearance of law in the comedies, pointing out that Shakespeare tends to represent the law as rigorous. She shows him portraying a more desirable view of justice as tempered with mercy and prosecutorial discretion. She points out that Shakespeare’s view is consistent with the history of the law in the common-law courts, which were coming to apply the law in an “ever-more-inflexible way.” This, in turn, “led to the growth of the chancellor’s court of equity, which eventually became a place where executive discretion was at its zenith” (282). Wood suggests that the questions that Shakespeare raises about the law are the same as they are today. She cites the parallels between the ways legal authorities in Shakespeare’s plays and judges today avoid following the letter of the law when it would seem to be unjust or to be applied unjustly. These include “prosecutorial discretion, the clemency power, and jury nullification” (283). To illustrate her argument, she discusses The Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and Measure for Measure.

The final section is a “Roundtable: Shakespeare’s Laws” and reports an edited conversation of Stephen Breyer, Richard Posner, Martha Nussbaum, and Richard Steier – a justice, a judge, a philosopher, and an English professor respectively. In this roundtable, they reproduce the idea of the conversation the book as a whole represents. They invite questions from the audience, some of which become part of this roundtable. The varying perspectives on Hamlet are especially engaging, and in this format, the reader of the edited transcript gleans a sense of the personalities of the speakers, of the humor of Justice Breyer, for example.

Shakespeare and the Law considers some foundational questions about law and literature and, at the same time, demonstrates how knowledgeable Shakespeare was about the law in his time and how legal thinking pervades his works. The book will enrich the understanding of anyone reading or teaching any of Shakespeare’s plays discussed. The writers also find fascinating parallels between law in the early modern period and law in our time, particularly in the United States.

Taking Exception to the Law: Materializing Injustice in Early Modern English Literature, as Grant Williams insists in his introductory essay, confirms that legal questions are essential to understanding early modern literature (3). He argues that while three of the pillars of education at Oxford and Cambridge – theology, philosophical liberal arts, and medicine – have long been studied, law – the fourth pillar – has now come more fully into its own. While Oxford and Cambridge taught only civil law, the Roman law tradition, the Inns of Court dealt mainly with English law, from which the common law derives. He sees law and literature as highlighting “the law’s explicit cultural and intellectual prominence in English Renaissance society” (4). He points out that Tudor authors acquired their schooling in rhetoric. In that tradition they studied “the classical judicial-political oratory promoted by the influential Roman lawyers Cicero and Quintilian.” Many Elizabethan and Jacobean writers attended the Inns of Court. The Inns, Williams points out, “immersed youths in a legal community with its own religious rituals, symbols, and entertainments that sought to legitimate the common law as representing the constitutional authority of the sovereign” (6). Furthermore, the law was prominent in daily life as “the Elizabethan period saw over a million claimants seeking litigation in England’s courts” (13). But “exception” in the book’s title, Williams explains, shows how various writers develop a “critical anti-jurisprudence,” hence take exception to the law. Several of the writers claim that Shakespeare was chief among those who take “a strong anti-jurisprudential stance” (15).

The essays in the volume are grouped in the four ways the editors argue the law materializes injustice: through “legal instruments such as statues, bonds, and writs”; “juridical administrations, whether the circumstances, language, or procedures of the trial”; “educational institutions and pedagogical discourses”; and “the Tyrant’s deployment of the law” (23). For the purposes of this review, I will consider one of the essays in each section that will demonstrate the kind of injustice the law materializes.

In the first section, Tim Stretton, a professor of history, uses The Merchant of Venice to consider a growing concern in this period about people’s failure to keep promises, resulting in an escalating lack of trust. The result was “the most dramatic litigation boom in English history”; one estimate “suggests that the English and Welsh courts were hearing over one million civil suits a year by 1588, most of them concerning debt” (74). Stretton argues that Portia’s evocation of mercy is undermined by her lack of mercy for Shylock. This uncompromising attitude he sees similarly in her treatment of Bassanio who disappoints his promise to her never to part with her ring. He views this apparent inconsistency in her character as deliberate, and through it Shakespeare’s participating in the “unresolved debate about promises, obligations, and law” apparent in Elizabethan society at the time of his writing the play. This debate finds a strong voice in litigant complaints about the “misuse of parchment and paper bonds that survive in the records of Chancery, the Court of Requests, and the Equity side of the Exchequer” (72). Stretton sees the emphasis not on the failure of debtors to pay their bills, but on creditors’ fraudulence and desire to punish those in debt to them. The Shylock-Bassanio-Antonio plot shows the complexities of obligations within the law while the ring plot emphasizes obligations involved with one’s promises outside of the law. Both engage the historical circumstances Stretton outlines. He concludes that Shakespeare implies that forgiveness is necessary in human relationships just as law that incorporates mercy is most just. From a legal perspective, he cites William Perkins in Hepieikeia: or, a Treatise of Christian Equitie and Moderation (1604): “’Justice will not stay where mercie is not’” (88).

In the second section, which focuses on injustice through trials gone awry, Debora Shuger uses the prison diaries of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, begun in 1641, to show the many ways injustice can occur even in trials of the most important people for the most important crimes (in this case treason) and with life or death at stake. But the essay I want to highlight is “Criminal Biography in Early Modern News Pamphlets,” by David Stymeist, a professor of English. Examining many pamphlets, he discusses their varying aims. For example, he points out that George Whetstone’s The Censure of a Loyal Subject was intended “to show Elizabeth in a positive light” when many saw negatively her brutal execution of Queen Mary’s collaborators who were alleged to plan to assassinate Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s chief advisor, Sir William Cecil, and Francis Walsingham, her secretary of state, helped to produce Whetstone’s pamphlet, “a piece of state propaganda” the purpose of which was “to contain potential public unrest surrounding the execution of the Catholic conspirators” (140). But many pamphlets, according to Stymeist’s sources, “interrogated ‘the overall context of inequalities of power, wealth, and authority’” (137). It is such pamphlets that provide readers with stories of criminals that attract readers with their sensationalism and at the same time highlight the social and individual circumstances that lead people to commit crimes. Such histories were not part of “either the public trial or the scaffold speech” (139). So comes the idea that the law was insufficient to render crime and justice in its fullness. Stymeist views the biographical contexts that pamphlets provided as generating “new ways of conceptualizing and discussing issues surrounding the administering of justice in early modern England” (153).

The third section treats injustice through educational institutions and pedagogical discourse. After drawing some contemporary parallels with “No Child Left Behind,” a program in the United States with parallels in Canada and the United Kingdom, Elizabeth Hanson analyzes documents that she sees as having similar importance: Desiderius Erasmus’s De Pueris Instituendis (published in1529; written in 1509) and Richard Mulcaster’s Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children (1581). She comments that “together they indicate the way that humanist pedagogical thought was haunted by a question of justice that it could not fully articulate, let alone resolve” (184). Erasmus’s De Pueris, addressed presumably to a patrician father, states that a father’s primary responsibility must be to develop the part of the son’s character “’which distinguishes him from the animals and comes closest to the divine’” (185). Erasmus, then, displaces the earlier connection between education and social status. Though he confirms extreme difference between human abilities, but considering that since elephants can walk a rope and other animals can perform other “human” feats, he asks rhetorically, “’Is there not anything we could not teach a human being?’” (187). Though he recognizes that some boys are good only for manual labor, he emphasizes the capacity and professionalism of the teacher. Hanson argues that Erasmus’s main aim is to produce a vision of the humanist teacher. A problem in Erasmus’s ideas of humanist education is that it requires “prolonged impractical schooling” in its requirement of the knowledge of dead languages and the classical canon. Clearly such an education would be possible only for families of means. Yet Erasmus sees humanist education as desirable for all men, including gifted poor children (189). The education of poor children was a prominent charitable practice in the sixteenth century, and Erasmus’s ideas evidently contributed to the fact that the number of boys who participated in the kind of education that Erasmus advocated expanded in the century that followed.

Richard Mulcaster published Positions on the Training Up of Children after he had been headmaster of the Merchant Taylor’s School for twenty years. The Company of Merchant Taylors proclaimed that the school was to accommodate the poor. There was a link between learning and Christian charity that continually became stronger. Unlike Erasmus, Mulcaster associated schooling with economic factors and saw the purpose of the grammar school as to train men to serve the commonwealth. Though he argued that access to a grammar-school education would necessarily be limited, he stipulated that places should be awarded “’where nature deserveth by abilitie and worth, not where fortune friendeth by byrth and boldness’” [italics in the original] (195). Hanson suggests that though Mulcaster did not foster schooling as universally accessible, it did encourage a heterogeneous school population, which she sees as similar to the modern educational interest in diversity (198).

The last three essays in the book deal with ways “legal and ecclesiastical mechanisms stigmatized as tyrannical and autocratic materialize injustice.” (30). In “Torture and the Tyrant’s Injustice from Foxe to King Lear,” John D. Staines, a professor of English, explains that the English did not use torture because English common law did not require a confession; English juries could rely on their judgment of the facts. On the other hand, to bring a trial to a successful close when the accused did not confess, European courts would resort to torture to produce a confession. What puzzled Staines was why torture appeared and disappeared in England in the 1630’s. He proposes that the Tutors embraced torture when their power was threatened and that James and Charles abandoned it when their thrones were secure. He also argues that the English public resisted the development of legal torture. Staines maintains that literature often associates tyrants with the use of torture, portraying those who use it unsympathetically. He cites John Foxe in the woodcuts he presents and stories he tells in Acts and Monuments as depicting Edmund Bonner, Catholic Bishop of London, as “a proud sadist, arrogant in his ignorance, quick to anger when his personal authority is challenged.” He sees Foxe’s martyrs as creating “a godly community that stands in opposition to the political and social establishment” (232). He suggests that the book urges its readers to oppose such a system. He argues that Shakespeare draws Cornwall in King Lear in the vein of Bonner and shows his servant as defending a sense of right, diminishing Cornwall and Regan even more since the servant had everything to lose by opposing them. He suggests that these literary depictions of tyrants and their use of torture as a sign of failed authority helped to prepare the beginning of revolution.

Taking Exception to the Law enriches our understanding of the law in the early modern period, how it changed through the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century, what it included or obscured, and what sources enriched it. This book takes its readers beyond what has become traditionally expected in works treating literature and the law.

Various academic institutions or humanities and arts organizations supported all of these books. The research and writing of most of the writers was fostered by the positions they hold in university departments. What is supported and how is the subject of Cultural Value in Twenty-First-Century England: The Case of Shakespeare, by Kate McLuskie and Kate Rumbold. The writers define the subject of the book as “value,” “culture,” and “Shakespeare,” and their stated purpose is to explore rather than confirm the cultural value of Shakespeare (1). Their investigation centers on England because of “the role of such publicly funded organizations such as the Arts Council England (ACE) and the institutions that it supports, in making and managing both culture and value” (4). The first several chapters of the book treat the theoretical and philosophical understandings of “value” and “culture.” These chapters underscore the main subject of the book: cultural value in twenty-first-century England. Shakespeare is only an example – in the writers’ words, a “case” – used to explore that subject. Importantly, Secretaries of State in England have an important role in determining this value and how it will be assessed. Tessa Jowell, Secretary of State for Culture, Media, and Sport from 2001–2007, linked the idea of culture to founding principles of the post-World-War-II labor movement’s commitment to “‘slaying the five giants of poverty – want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness.’” She added another giant: “the poverty of aspiration,” to which the idea of “the cultural life of the nation” was significant. She extended that idea to cover “‘the intellectual and emotional engagement of the people with all forms of art, from the simplest to the most abstruse’” (9). When it came to funding, however, the principles of selection had “more to do with the economics and politics of state support for the arts” than with the effects of works of arts on audiences (12). Ways of expressing cultural value could not be reconciled: governments and funding agencies wanted a return on investment while those advocating the cultural values of various arts saw cultural value as “about something else” (17). Shakespeare was considered a case that satisfied both ideas: his works represented cultural value that was about something other than economics and at the same time could bring a return on investment. Analyzing the meaning of value in Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear, and Merchant of Venice, the third chapter considers how Shakespeare understood value.

There is a chapter on “Making ‘Shakespeare’ Culture” that discusses the importance of Shakespeare in the twenty-first century. It envisions the end of debates about the cultural value of Shakespeare and concentrates on the “Cultural Olympiad” that accompanied the 2012 London Olympics. It outlines the myriad of activities focused on Shakespeare including the “Globe to Globe” festival in which international companies produced each of the plays. The significance of the event is confirmed by the 85,000 tickets sold, the large amount of money brought in, and the fact that 16 million people participated as volunteers or members of the audiences (119).

The last three chapters of the book consider the effects of new languages of value the Labor government used in the first decade of the twenty-first century emphasizing the “experience” of audiences and the post-2008 fiscal crisis; how institutions that focus on Shakespeare have responded both to government demands as well as those of audiences and the opportunities new media offer; and finally the complex relationship of Shakespeare to commerce. A number of things stand out. Crucially, the reduction in funding meant that in 2011 the Arts Council of England (ACE) turned down 638 applications, 206 of those from institutions that ACE regularly funded (144). Tessa Jowell’s location of cultural value “from cultural objects and events, and towards people’s experiences of them” (146) meant that institutions had to find ways of proving that they made a difference to people. The result was that the burden of proof shifted from the government (and their panels of experts) to the applicants for funding, that is, arts organizations. This shift meant that organizations would need help from consultants experienced in their knowledge of what arguments and information were successful and staff who could devote themselves to gathering such information. It is easy to see that the smaller an organization is, the harder it would become to allocate resources to this effort, and therefore, its competitive advantage would become less.

Economic considerations for those applying for funding and those granting funding never disappeared and became more prominent as resources became scarcer. In 2010, with the transition from a Labor government to a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, “the threat of severely reduced funding for the arts after the first comprehensive spending review, threw the focus even more squarely on the economic value of culture, and on the urgent need to prove it. [...] The 2010 ‘Measuring Cultural Value’ report [...] restored both the language of measurement, and the emphasis on the economic benefits that accrue to the country from the arts” (172).

Shakespeare has evidently been able to adapt to these changes more than some cultural institutions and particularly because of the medium in which the dramatist worked. “Shakespeare” has moved “from a valued object (a body of work, a First Folio, a birthplace, a theatre) to an experience [italics in the original], (live theatrical performance, emotional engagement) (176). In March 2012, Shakespeare was declared “‘one of the strongest brands in the world’” (210). In this “branding,” Shakespeare was estimated to be worth $ 600 million; Coca-Cola, $ 31,082 million; Apple, $ 70,605 million; Google, $ 47,463 million; and Microsoft, $ 45,8012 million (212). Though Shakespeare is not technically a brand, his name or face is often seen as a guarantor of high quality. McLuskie and Rumbold trace the history of Shakespeare as a kind of “trademark” from the publication of the 1623 First Folio, the jubilee celebrations staged by David Garrick in 1769, and to the present. In its use of the trading name “Shakespeare Country” for “South Warwickshire Tourism Ltd,” the tourist company demonstrates the lengths to which organizations will go in order to associate themselves with the cultural value Shakespeare has acquired. In its naming, the company links the attractions – castles, spas, shopping centers, green hills and grazing sheep, historic villages – with Shakespeare (218–219). Apart from Stratford-upon-Avon, it is not clear that Shakespeare spent time in the surrounding counties or the Cotswolds, or enjoyed anything remotely like the anachronistic experiences the company advertises. Furthermore, nothing that they describe has anything to do with literature. So it goes.

The writers see Shakespeare’s name as serving organizations by conferring prestige on products that have nothing to do with literature or drama; however, they also see “Shakespeare” as gaining from these organizations “a cumulative impression of continued currency and cultural centrality” (220–221). While Shakespeare has survived as a cultural value maintained in part by state funding, McLuskie and Rumbold cannot predict what the future holds given the state’s uncertain economic circumstances and the pressure to provide basic services for its people.

As I write this review, I am receiving countless emails urging me to support continued government funding for the United States National Endowment of the Arts and the National Endowment of the Humanities, under threat of denial of funding altogether or drastic reductions with the election of a new President and more conservative Congress which advocates using these funds for other purposes. All of the books reviewed here and the writers of them depend substantially on government support – federal, state, and local. Cultural Value in Twenty-First Century England offers analysis and experience in confronting issues that will become more pressing in those who understand the value of the arts and humanities in the life of a country and its people.