ABSTRACT
Taking as my cue the Introduction to the First Folio edition of his plays, I examine Shakespeare's particular interest in English law and juridical procedure. It is likely that his considerable, detailed knowledge of law derived at least in part from his association with the Middle Temple, whose members included neighbours and friends from Stratford-upon-Avon. I proceed to consider the profound influence of The Commentaries or Reports of Edmund Plowden (Plowden himself was a member of the Middle Temple) over the content of his plays, notably Plowden’s report of Hales v Petit to Shakespeare’s depiction of the death by suicide of Ophelia in Hamlet. I develop the thematic link with the Middle Temple by interrogating the thesis, proposed by various scholars, that an early version of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida was given a performance there during the revels of 1597–98. The theatrical transplantation of the city of Troy to London, described by writers and lawyers alike as Troynovant, the utopian city of commerce and the mythical birthplace of English law, leads me to analyze the predominant tropes of the marketplace which populate Troilus and Cressida. I conclude with the observation that in his epilogue to the play, Pandarus addresses in appropriately base terms the very people (lawyers) whose skills were supposed to redress the injustices engendered by commerce and the marketplace, but who failed to acknowledge the relevance of ethics and community to the attainment of societal cohesion.
1. Introduction
And though you be a Magistrate of wit, and sit on the Stage at Black-Friers, or the Cock-pit, to arraigne Playes dailie, know, these Playes have had their triall alreadie, and stood out all Appeales; and do now come forth quitted rather by a Decree of Court, then any purchas’d Letters of commendation.
The insistent use by Condell and Heminges of metaphor drawn exclusively from the quotidian dealings of judges, lawyers, and their clients, recalls the inventory of juridical minutiae and legal artefacts, cited by Hamlet as he contemplates the erstwhile profession of the person whose skull he handles in the graveyard prior to his more famous encounter with Yorick’s skull. If the skull belonged to a counsellor or an attorney, then for all the lawyer’s acquired experience in cases, tenures, and tricks, and his familiarity with technical arcana such as recognisances, vouchers and fines, the end or ‘fine of his fines’ was ‘to have his fine pate full of fine dirt’ (5.1.105–106).Footnote3 The language of early modern English law was exclusive: its technical terms were comprehensible only to early modern English lawyers. To complicate matters further, its juridical procedures were implemented in three languages: English, Latin, and a bastardized form of Norman French, known as law-French.Footnote4 Thorough knowledge of common law was the product of many years’ study at the Inns of Court, during which time (according to the judge and MP Sir John Doddridge) ‘the attaining whereof will waste the greatest part of the verdour and vigour of our youth’.Footnote5
William Shakespeare was not a member of an Inn of Court, although he appeared to have a strong personal connection with the Middle Temple. There were links between Shakespeare’s neighbours in Stratford and the Middle Temple: Lesley Hotson notes that the chambers of ‘William Combe, M.P., of Warwick, Stratford, and London’ (a Bencher of the Middle Temple) were ‘taken over by his great-nephews, Shakespeare’s neighbours and friends, William and Thomas Combe’, and that Shakespeare’s ‘cousin’ Thomas Greene, a member of the Middle Temple since 1595, became Treasurer of the Middle Temple in 1629.Footnote6 It is the purpose of this article to explore the connection between William Shakespeare and the legal institution of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. I start by analyzing Shakespeare’s knowledge of law, much of it acquired through a close reading of The Commentaries or Reports of Edmund Plowden. Following this, I interrogate the thesis that Troilus and Cressida was given one of its first performances by members of the Middle Temple in early 1598. In addition, my intention is to identify and examine some of the juristic themes and tropes which populate Troilus and Cressida, and the texts and events which inspired these. I conclude with consideration of the ethical deficit in late Elizabethan law, as noted by polemicists such as Abraham Fraunce and Thomas Nashe. Contemporaneous critique of juridical procedure and the legal profession was reflected in the cynical and satirical tone of Troilus and Cressida.
2. Shakespeare and The Commentaries or Reports of Edmund Plowden
In the plays of Shakespeare, law (especially in its juridical context) and drama appear to be indivisible phenomena, linked by their shared rhetorical schemes. There is no evidence in any of the records of the Inns of Court that Shakespeare had enrolled as a student there, but his plays repeatedly demonstrate that the institutional heart of the legal community in London was a place with which he was familiar. The hapless Sir Andrew Aguecheek tells Sir Toby Belch that he ‘delight[s] in masques and revels sometimes altogether’ (Twelfth Night, 1.3.107–8), a reference to the seasonal revels of the Inns and a line that would have had comic resonance when Twelfth Night was performed at Middle Temple Hall in February 1602.Footnote7 In the bucolic surroundings of his Gloucestershire estate, Justice Shallow fondly reminisces that he ‘was once of Clements-inn; where I think they will talk of mad Shallow yet’ (Henry IV, Pt. 2, 3.2.15–16), an allusion to the raucous behaviour of law students, of which there are numerous accounts in the records of the Inns.Footnote8
These literary allusions notwithstanding, it is with reference to The Commentaries or Reports of Edmund Plowden (first published in 1571 by Richard Tottel as Les Commentaries, ou Reports de Edmund Plowden un Apprentice de le common Ley), that I wish to explore at first instance the inextricable connection between Shakespeare and the law, and specifically between Shakespeare and the law reports of Plowden. Edmund Plowden was born in Shropshire in 1519 or 1520 and died in 1585, and it was unlikely that he met Shakespeare (b. 1564); but their institutional affiliations were notable. Plowden was a devout Roman Catholic, a fact which adversely affected his prospects for judicial advancement in the Elizabethan legal profession (although it is at least possible that Elizabeth I wished to promote Plowden to the office of Lord Chancellor).Footnote9 By contrast, during the reign of Elizabeth’s predecessor, the Roman Catholic Queen Mary, he was appointed to the Council in the Marches of Wales, and became a member of the Commission of the Peace for Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Shropshire, and Worcestershire. It is less clear whether Shakespeare was a recusant, although speculation as to his faith is and always has been rife.Footnote10 Like many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries and neighbours in Stratford-upon-Avon who entered the legal profession, Plowden (like Shakespeare, from the West Midlands) was a member of Middle Temple:Footnote11 his effigy resides to this day in Temple Church. The dedication of Shakespeare to Plowden’s Reports is evidenced by his close reference to a particular case reported by Plowden and his reinterpretation of the case in Hamlet. Catholicism is relevant not only to a biography of Plowden himself but also to the facts of a case he reported from 1562: Hales v Petit. Catholic theology functions as a central motif in Shakespeare’s Hamlet,Footnote12 and allusion by its author to Hales v Petit provides irrefutable evidence of the influence of Plowden over the plot of Shakespeare’s play.
It seems that direct reference by a dramatist to Plowden’s Reports had first been made in the anonymous play Thomas of Woodstock, written between 1591 and 1595. The manuscript of Thomas of Woodstock, one of the sources of Shakespeare’s Richard II (1595), ends abruptly with a flurry of references to common law and the Elizabethan legal institution.Footnote13 Nimble, the treacherous servant to the corrupt Lord Chief Justice, Sir Robert Tresilian, claims that he ‘was once a trampler in the law’ (5.6.23), ‘trampler’ being one of many contemporary and derogatory slang words for an attorney (an inferior member of the legal profession, and member of one of the Inns of Chancery, affiliated to one of the Inns of Court).Footnote14 In the following speech Nimble refers to the writs of Habeas Corpus and Certiorari (or ‘Habis Corpus’ and ‘Surssararis’ as he terms them): ‘I have removed it with a Habis Corpus, and then I took him with a Surssararis’ (5.6.27–28), and alludes to the law courts at Westminster Hall and the legal community in the Temple: ‘There was not a stone between Westminster Hall and Temple Bar but I have told them every morning’ (5.6.30–32). The play ends precipitately, with Nimble informing the Earl of Arundel: ‘for I have plodded in Plowden and can find no law … ’ (5.6.35–36). Whether Nimble would have gone on to explain that he arrested the fugitive Tresilian because he could find no statute or case to which Plowden refers that prevented him from lawfully so doing, we shall probably never know: the loss of the last sheet of the manuscript prevents our certain knowledge. Frustrating though this loss is, the reference to Plowden in the accidental last lines of the play demonstrates to some extent the extraordinary importance of The Commentaries or Reports of Edmund Plowden to the Elizabethan writers of political drama.
That Shakespeare was familiar with Plowden is evident from his informed allusion to Hales v Petit (1562) in the graveyard scene in Hamlet (Act 5, scene 1). The case of Hales v Petit concerned an action for trespass brought by Margaret Hales against Cyriack Petit, on the grounds that he, ‘with force and arms’ (vi et armis), caused damage to ‘her grass to the value of 40l. there lately growing with certain cattle, eat up, trod down, and consumed, and other wrongs to her did, to the great damage of the said Margaret’.Footnote15 But this was not a simple case of trespass. The decision of the court of Common Pleas was determined by the suicide of Margaret Hales’s husband Sir James Hales, in August 1554. Hales had been a successful barrister and was appointed serjeant-at-law in November 1544. In May 1549 he was elevated to the bench, as Justice of the Common Pleas. The dates are significant: Hales became a serjeant during the reign of Henry VIII and a judge during the reign of Edward VI. Hales was a devout Protestant. Upon the accession of the Catholic Mary I to the English throne in 1553, Hales directed the grand jury at the Kent assizes that the statutes of Henry VIII and Edward VI against nonconformists should continue to be enforced and that Roman Catholics should remain subject to their strictures. As far as the Queen was concerned, this was an act of unacceptable provocation, and Hales was subsequently imprisoned, first at the King’s Bench prison and then at the Fleet. While imprisoned, he attempted suicide. The attempt failed and Hales was released at the Queen’s command in April 1554. His second attempt at suicide was successful: he drowned in a stream near Canterbury on 4 August 1554. The coroner recorded a verdict of felonious suicide, as Plowden notes in his report of the case: ‘ … the same day all this matter was found accordingly before the coroner upon the view of the body there lying dead’.Footnote16
According to Plowden’s report, Hales ‘voluntarily entered into the said river and himself therein then feloniously and voluntarily drowned’. The issue at law was whether, suicide being a felony, his estate was forfeit to the crown (by escheat), thereby depriving his widow of any legal interest which she might have had in the land (she held the lease jointly with her husband and had rights of survivorship). In their pleadings, counsel for Margaret Hales, Serjeants Southcote and Puttrel, devised (in the opinion of Andrew Zurcher) ‘elaborate, even absurd, reasonings’.Footnote17 These included the metaphysical argument that an instant of time could be divided into two parts: the instant of Hales’s death was the simultaneous instant at which Margaret Hales succeeded in her seizure of the joint tenancy of the land, before forfeiture of the land to the crown eventuated. As an example of the elaboration and (arguable) absurdity to which Zurcher refers above, see the following extract from the argument of counsel for the plaintiff:
… the forfeiture comes at the same instant that he dies, yet in things of an instant there is a priority of time in consideration of law, and the one shall be said to precede the other, altho’ both shall be said to happen at one instant, for every instant contains the end of one time, and the commencement of another.Footnote18
The more general, philosophical theme of action and meditation in relation to the act of suicide is considered at some length in Hales v Petit. Indeed, the particular arguments of counsel, which dwell on the mental state of Sir James Hales and the possible link between his introspection and the fatal action which he took, have strong echoes of thoughts expressed by Hamlet. Serjeant Walsh, counsel for the defendant, argued that the act of suicide had three constituent parts:
The first is the imagination, which is a reflection or meditation of the mind, whether or not it is convenient for him to destroy himself, and what way it can be done. The second is the resolution, which is a determination of the mind to destroy himself, and to do it in this or that particular way. The third is the perfection, which is the execution of what the mind has resolved to do. And this perfection consists of two parts, viz the beginning and the end. The beginning is the doing of the act which causes the death, and the end is the death, which is only a sequel to the act.Footnote21
3. Troilus and Cressida and the Middle Temple
The connection between Shakespeare and the Middle Temple did not start with the performance of Twelfth Night on 2 February 1602, famously recorded by John Manningham in his diary.Footnote24 As noted above, some of Shakespeare’s neighbours in Stratford were resident at the Middle Temple from the late sixteenth century onwards and had become citizens of London. For Elizabethans, London was Troia Nova, Troynovant, or the New Troy: the utopian capital of commerce, which the Elizabethan satirist Thomas Nashe described as ‘this great Grandmother of Corporations Madam Troynovant’.Footnote25 In the minds of jurists as well as poets it was also the place where English law was founded by Brutus of Troy.Footnote26 With the first performance of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida the walls of the mythical city were physically transplanted to London, albeit in theatrical form; but mystery surrounds the exact location of the first performance of this play, and the lack of certainty has been a subject of considerable scholarly conjecture. Troilus and Cressida was registered with the Stationers’ Office on 7 February 1603 and documentation therein includes a reference to performance by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. It appears that nothing more was heard of the play until in 1609 it was published in two different Quarto editions by the same publisher. The first of these claimed that it had been ‘acted by the Kings Maiesties servants at the Globe’ (the King’s Men, and therefore performed after the accession of James I to the English throne in 1603);Footnote27 the other, that it was ‘a new play, never stal’d with the Stage, never clapper-clawd with the palmes of the vulgar’.Footnote28 The purported distinction between the two editions is (to say the least) strange, especially as the differing claims were made by the same publisher. It is a conundrum to which I shall return.
Among certain critics, there is shared belief that the play received its first performance at one of the Inns of Court. Frank Kermode notes that the Inns ‘may have been the better suited to the play, which contains an unusual amount of disputation’;Footnote29 while AD Nuttall cautiously suggests that ‘Troilus and Cressida was probably written for a student audience, for one of the Inns of Court’.Footnote30 Lesley Hotson was far less circumspect, arguing for a first performance of the play at the Middle Temple, ‘at least as far as the first half of 1598’.Footnote31 He claims that Troilus and Cressida was the alternative title to the ‘missing’ play of Shakespeare’s, namely Love’s Labour’s Won: ‘it is “labour” in the sense of trouble or sorrow which is gained or won in unhappy love’.Footnote32 In Palladis Tamia, published in 1598, Francis Mere included Love labours wonne in a list of ‘the most excellent’ six comedies by Shakespeare.Footnote33 Obviously, this links the play with the earlier Love’s Labour’s Lost, written in the mid-1590s and first published in a Quarto edition of 1598.Footnote34 Both plays are set in exclusively male environments: Love’s Labour’s Lost in a cloistered academy, from which women are prohibited; Troilus and Cressida in the battlefields and encampments of the Trojan War. The ‘little academe’ (1.1.13) of the former play bears more than a passing resemblance to the enclosed world of the Inns of Court. The complex linguistic structure of Love’s Labour’s Lost is steeped in the arcane language of law (and includes a highly technical, legal dispute over the terms of a mortgage between the King of Navarre as mortgagee and the King of France as mortgagor: 2.1.125–134).Footnote35 One scene – an entertainment for the Princess of France and her companions, in which Navarre and his friends are dressed ‘Like Muscovites or Russians’ (5.2.121) – appears to be an explicit homage to the Gray’s Inn revels of 1594–95, at which (on Twelfth Night 1595) an ambassador arrived at the court of the Prince of Purpoole, sent from ‘the mighty Emperor of Russia and Moscovy’. He ‘came in Attire of Russia, accompanied with two of his own Country, in like Habit’.Footnote36
Whether or not Troilus and Cressida was the missing play, entitled Love’s Labour’s Won, may never be known for certain. It is plausible that it is the missing play, but Hotson does not prove irrefutably that it was. His claim that the play had been written in or before 1598 is based partly on the inclusion by Francis Meres of Love labours wonne in Palladis Tamia, published in 1598. There is circumstantial evidence to suggest that an early version of Troilus and Cressida was performed in that year. Hotson cites the evidence provided by the performance of John Marston’s Histrio-Mastix at the Middle Temple ‘the following year’,Footnote37 with its none-too-veiled reference to Shakespeare and Troilus and Cressida, performed (according to Hotson) in 1598 at the Middle Temple:
The intimate links of Marston with the Middle Temple (Marston shared chambers at the Inn with his father, until the latter’s death in 1599)Footnote40 makes this Inn of Court the most likely venue for a performance of Histrio-Mastix: with about 150 inner barristers at this time, it was able to provide the manpower required to make up the large cast, which was somewhere in the region of 120. Given the seditious subject-matter of the play – the London riots – it is extremely unlikely that Marston would have obtained a licence from the Master of the Revels for performance in one of the public playhouses; and as far as alternative companies and venues are concerned, it was written before ‘the first of the boys’ companies, the Children of Paul’s, was revived’ (in 1599–1600).Footnote41
I refer above to the performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night at the Middle Temple on Candlemas Day 1602. This performance was almost certainly given (like the performance of The Comedy of Errors at Gray’s Inn in December 1594) by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, of which Shakespeare was a ‘sharer’ or part-owner. But there is no record of these specific performances in the official records of the Inns: ‘comedies’ were performed on a quotidian basis, as a regular part of the Inns of Court revels, and generally their titles were not documented. Therefore, it is unlikely that any performance of Troilus and Cressida would have been formally noted. But Troilus and Cressida was a very different type of play, either to The Comedy of Errors or Twelfth Night. As Hotson observes of both Love’s Labour’s Lost and Troilus and Cressida, they ‘are highly “intellectual”, witty, argumentative, and satirical, and patently aimed at a select, academic audience’.Footnote42 In London, this audience must have been made up of the lawyers at the Inns of Court. Given Shakespeare’s personal connection with the Middle Temple, this Inn was the obvious contender, especially if (as seems possible) it was originally performed by members of the Inn.
Apart from anything else, it seems that Troilus and Cressida was aimed at pleasing an audience of lawyers: from the start, the Prologue promises to deliver ‘corresponsive and fulfilling bolts’ (Prologue.18) – a bolt being the less formal form of the moot, the principal form of adversarial, oral education for inner barristers at the Inns of Court. ‘Bolt’ derives from a thirteenth-century, old-French word, ‘bulter’, meaning to examine, separate, and sift.Footnote43 As far as the exclusive language of English law is concerned it is also worth noting that the play includes the only reference in all of Shakespeare’s plays to one of the more technical areas of English jurisprudence, the law of Tort: Agamemnon, commander of the Greeks, reminds his jaundiced generals (using an arboricultural metaphor) that ‘Checks and disasters’ (1.3.5), like knots in the otherwise healthy pine tree, ‘diverts his grain / Tortive and errant from his course of growth’. (1.3.8–9) Later in the play (2.2), a moot is enacted in which Troilus, Paris, and Hector each present an argument before the King of Troy Priam, who poses them a political, moral, and legal dilemma: should the Trojans deliver up Helen to the Greeks? Characters offer advice on the practical skills of public speaking and the importance of these in facilitating the maintenance of order in society. A complex rhetorical device, the poetic drama, was thereby employed to persuade participants and audience alike of the practical importance and social significance of the orator’s craft.
Evidence that the play may originally have been performed by members of the Middle Temple is provided in oblique form by the title page and ‘The Epistle’ of the 1609 edition, entitled The Famous Historie of Troylus and Cresseid (as opposed to the edition, published in the same year by the same publisher, entitled The Historie of Troylus and Cresseida). As I have noted above, ‘The Epistle’ informs the reader that it is ‘a new play, never stal’d with the Stage, never clapper-clawd with the palmes of the vulgar’. The claim that the play had not been ‘stal’d with the Stage’ conflicts with information on the title page of the alternative edition, which states (immediately underneath the title of the play): ‘As it was acted by the Kings Maiesties servants at the Globe’. The contradiction persists on the second page of ‘The Epistle’ (there is no Epistle in the alternative version), where the sense that the play was originally intended for an exclusive, elite audience and cast is compounded by the following injunction:
… nor like this the lesse. For not being sullied, with the smoaky breath of the multitude; but thanke fortune for the scape it hath made amongst you. Since by the grand possessors wills I believe you should have prayd for them rather than beene prayd.Footnote44
There are further clues in ‘The Epistle’ to suggest that the play originally ‘belonged’ to the Middle Temple, for example that ‘it [the play] is a birth of your braine, that never under-tooke any thing commicall, vainely’. Entertainments at the revels were unquestionably the product of their creators’ ‘brains’. We know, from evidence provided by accounts of the Inns of Court revels, that members ‘undertooke’ the performance of comedy ‘seriously’ rather than ‘vainely’, as the published version of the Middle Temple revels of 1597–98 – Le Prince d’Amour; or the Prince of Love – amply demonstrates.Footnote46 It is at least possible that ‘The Epistle’ was written by a Middle Templar: Hotson suggests that it may have been written by the lawyer Richard Martin, who had been enthroned as Prince d’Amour in the revels of 1597–98 (the anonymous author of ‘The Epistle’ describes himself to the reader as ‘A never writer, to an ever reader’, suggesting that he did not earn his living from writing).Footnote47 The word ‘Commedies’ or ‘Commedie’ occurs no fewer than ten times in ‘The Epistle’, apparently echoing the devotion to ‘comedies’ instanced in the record of events at the 1597–98 Middle Temple revels: ‘Wednesday night [28 December 1597] there was a Comedy’,Footnote48 and ‘Upon Munday [2 January 1598] at night there happened a Comedy’.Footnote49 A further hint that the lawyers of the Middle Temple were the play’s ‘grand possessors’ may be gleaned from the suggestion that:
were but the vaine names of comedies changed for the title of Commodities, or of Playes for Pleas; you should see all those grand censors, that now stile them such vanities, flock to them for the maine grace of their gravities.Footnote50
There is also a possible reference in ‘The Epistle’ to the performance of The Comedy of Errors at the Gray’s Inn revels of 1594–95. The author of ‘The Epistle’ states that ‘It [The Famous Historie of Troylus and Cresseid] deserves such a labour [an allusion perhaps to Love’s Labour’s Won?], as well as the best Commedy in Terence or Plautus’.Footnote52 The Comedy of Errors was of course an ingenious reimagining of Plautus’s Menaechmi. Finally, it is to the title page of The Famous Historie that we must turn for evidence that the play was explicitly associated with the legal profession. The full title is The Famous Historie of Troylus and Cresseid. Excellently expressing the beginning of their loves, with the conceited wooing of Pandarus Prince of Licia. The second sentence in the above title is missing from the title of the alternative edition, The Historie of Troylus and Cresseida. In the ancient world, Licia (in Anatolia, southern Turkey) was unique for the preservation of its own language, Lycian (a later form of the Luwian language), in the face of incursions by Persians and subsequently Greeks. After its assimilation into the Roman republic, Lycia became a Roman protectorate in 168 BC, and although never a sovereign nation-state it enjoyed effective home rule (governing in accordance with republican principles) as a federal member of the Lycian league. It remained heavily influenced by the culture and language of ancient Greece, which eventually replaced the Lycian language.Footnote53
The above salient facts about the history of Lycia should direct the reader of the title page of The Famous Historie (with its reference to the ‘Prince of Licia’) to the possibility that the play was first performed at one of the Inns of Court. Of great importance, as far as the metaphoric correlation between Lycia and the Inns is concerned, is the autonomous, independent status of the Inns in relation to the City of London and the City of Westminster. In effect, they were sovereign municipal authorities, which (like Lycia) governed according to classical republican principles.Footnote54 Finally, there is the issue of language. As stated above, the Lycians were noted for their distinct language, Lycian. A major, defining feature of the legal profession was its use of a unique language, law-French. Following enactment of a statute in 1363 (36 Ed III cap 15), English replaced law-French as the language of pleadings, oral argument, and disputations. While Latin was the formal language in which judgments were recorded, law-French was an inelegant form of Norman French, unique to the quotidian practice of common law since the thirteenth century. Doddridge noted that law-French was ‘a badge of the Norman Captivity’, and that the main objective of the statute 36 Ed III cap 15 was further to anglicise common law, confining the use of law-French for the most part to ‘such French Arguments as are used for exercise in the Houses, and Societies of Court and Chancery’.Footnote55 The statutory attempt to extricate English law from the Norman yoke palpably failed. Law-French was still used in exercises at the Inns of Court and Chancery throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As Sir William Dugdale noted of the Grand Vacation Moots undertaken by inner barristers, these were ‘pleadyd and declared in homely Law-french’.Footnote56 That a form of Norman French should have been the quotidian language of an extremely nationalist (at times xenophobic) legal profession, members of whom continually expounded its legitimacy, antiquity, and racial purity, is of course paradoxical. The fact remains that the language of English law was as distinctive as Lycian, and the writer of the title page of The Famous Historie may well have had this in mind when he included the reference to the ‘Prince of Licia’.
Troilus and Cressida includes 24 named, male characters (and four female characters, all of whom would have been played by young men),Footnote57 as well as numerous ‘Other Trojans’ and ‘Other Greeks’ who filled the stage when necessary with attendants and soldiers (notably in the procession of ‘Common Soldiers’ at 1.2.231, and as the Myrmidons who kill the unarmed Hector at 5.9.10). Quite apart from the sheer size of the cast, in literary terms the satirical tone and disputatious style of the play is suggestive of a work at least partly intended for an audience made up of well-educated young men within an academic institution. In this respect, it resembles the dramatic entertainments known as ‘academic plays’, performed during this period at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge by members of their respective colleges.Footnote58 If, as seems likely, Marston’s Histrio-Mastix (with its reference to Troilus and Cressida and Shakespeare: ‘when he shakes his furious Speare’) was performed at the Middle Temple during the revels of 1598–99, then it is plausible that Troilus and Cressida was performed there during the revels of 1597–98. The play’s cynical take on courtly love certainly accords with the theme of the irreconcilability of chivalric romance and sexual desire, which predominated that season’s revels:
For who of late hath taken the honourable course of Love, or so much as set foot in the pathway of Chivalry? Easie and low-prized Venery hath been basely pursued, whilst desires illuminated by the Celestial flame of Beauty, have been accounted either Fiction or Frenzies … Footnote59
4. Troilus and Cressida and the Pedlars of goods
Lawyers of this period had a vested interest in the commercial affairs of the expanding city of Troynovant. Their expertise in facilitating mercantile and corporate relations between business enterprises was in demand (especially regarding the rapidly developing area of contract law).Footnote60 The tropes employed by Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida, most of which derive from the world of commerce, would have resonated strongly with the cast of lawyers and law students at the Middle Temple. When Ulysses declares that ‘Our project’s life this shape of sense assumes’ (1.3.386), an astute audience would have associated the claim not only with the military strategy of the Greeks, but also with a contemporaneous reference to ‘projectors’: imaginative entrepreneurs, who sought to obtain parliamentary approval or royal patents, enabling them to create monopolies for the marketing and selling of their innovative products.Footnote61 In Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare, Douglas Bruster reminds readers that while Homer portrayed ‘an epic Odysseus, counsellor and warrior’,Footnote62 the Elizabethan dramatist George Peele depicted the Greek hero in a tawdry light, as a pedlar of goods: ‘with his toyes and tryfles trim, / Full like a Pedler can decipher him’.Footnote63 As Bruster notes, Peele’s depiction prefigures ‘Shakespeare’s Autolycus – maternal grandfather of Ulysses – in The Winter’s Tale (1610)’.Footnote64 There, Autolycus memorably describes himself as ‘a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’ (4.3.25–26), recalling with extraordinary precision the above description of Ulysses by Peele. Shakespeare’s Ulysses is a consummate politician, and it is not unreasonable to suggest that Ulysses, the great storyteller and liar (in Peele’s portrayal of the Homeric hero), provided the template for the prototypical Elizabethan lawyer, who (according to critics such as Fraunce and Thomas Nashe) peddled his rhetorical toys and snapped up unconsidered trifles in the form of briefs, opinions, and pleadings.
In Troilus and Cressida, the language of projects and goods pervades the play. The overarching project is the siege of Troy by the Greeks; a military endeavour initiated by the abduction of Helen (married to Menelaus, King of Sparta, brother of the Greek commander, Agamemnon) by Paris (son of Priam, King of Troy). The currency of the project is people: characters are commodified and each person is assessed according to their material worth. The ‘Common Soldiers’ who ‘pass over the stage’ at 1.2.231, observed from above by Cressida and Pandarus (her uncle), serve the purpose there of physical objects,Footnote65 described by Pandarus as ‘chaff and bran, chaff and bran; porridge after meat’ (1.2.233–35).Footnote66 In the ‘moot’ scene (2.2), in which the issue of whether or not Helen of Troy should be returned to the Greeks is debated, Hector employs the metaphor of tithes to evaluate the cost to Troy of lives lost in war: ‘Every tithe soul ‘mongst many thousand dismes / Hath been as dear as Helen’ (2.2.19–20). He questions her ‘worth’ (2.2.22), her ‘value’ (2.2.23), and her ‘merit’ (2.2.24). He concludes that ‘she is not worth what she doth cost’ (2.2.52). Troilus opposes the motion that Helen should be returned to the Greeks, but still the pragmatic language of trade, commerce, and value suffuses his peroration: ‘We turn not back the silks upon the merchant / When we have soiled them’ (2.2.69–70). He further objectifies Helen by asking the question: ‘Is she worth keeping?’ (2.2.81) before immediately answering his own question, with the reply: ‘Why, she is a pearl / Whose price hath launched a thousand ships / And turned crowned kings to merchants’ (2.2.81–83). It is noteworthy that Shakespeare substituted the word ‘price’ for ‘face’ in Marlowe’s immortal ‘Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?’ (Doctor Faustus 12.81–82) It is her price, rather than her face, which is of ultimate importance to the Trojans in Shakespeare’s play. Helen may be a thing of beauty; but more important for the Trojans, she is a thing of questionable worth.
Cressida is similarly commodified. Her uncle Pandarus uses the language of property law to describe her first kiss with Troilus: ‘How now, a kiss in fee-farm?’ (3.2.48–49) The fee farm was a similar form of estate to the fee simple, insofar as the owner had a permanent tenure in the property, the only difference between the two forms of ownership being that the owner of a fee farm paid a perpetual rent to the crown.Footnote67 A few lines later, when Troilus confesses to being bereft of words, Pandarus persists with the metaphor of property ownership: ‘Words pay no debts; give her deeds. But she’ll bereave you of the deeds too’ (3.2.54–55). When the lovers kiss again he invokes a complicated legal formula – ‘Here’s “In witness whereof the parties interchangeably”’ (3.2.56–57) – expressive of a ritual enacted in the drawing up of indentures, whereby a contract between two parties was roughly torn so that only the original halves could be joined; the two parties then set their seals on each half, thus preventing the reproduction of the contract on a forged document. Shakespeare’s Pandarus is a far cry from the Pandarus of The Iliad: a powerful and renowned archer and warrior. In Troilus and Cressida Pandarus is more akin to a pimp. In the action of the play the audience sees him arrange access for Troilus to the sexual favours of Cressida: ‘I will show you a chamber with a bed; which bed, because it shall not speak of your pretty encounters, press it to death’ (3.2.202–204). He is degenerate, licentious, and diseased. In the epilogue he refers to his syphilitic condition, his ‘aching bones’ (5.11.35), and in the last lines of the play he informs the audience that ‘I’ll sweat and seek about for eases, / And at that time bequeath you my diseases’ (5.11.55–56).Footnote68 Pandarus describes himself as a ‘trader’ and complains at the ingratitude of a society for whom he provides valued services: ‘Why should our endeavour be so desired and the performance so loathed?’ (5.11.38–39) He is after all only one of many ‘Good traders in the flesh’ (5.11.45).
Pandarus’s complaint would have resonated with the audience of lawyers at the Middle Temple, especially his lament that ‘Thus is the poor agent despised’ (5.11.36). Lawyers were acting as agents for their clients; in this respect, they could fairly be described as ‘Good traders in the flesh’. Their endeavours may well have been desired, but it is well-documented that their performances were loathed by many. Only a decade before Troilus and Cressida was written, Fraunce – lawyer, poet, and scholar – had published his coruscating attack on the shortcomings of common lawyers, entitled The Lawiers Logike. There, he described lawyers as ‘so many upstart Rabulæ Forenses, which under a prætence of Lawe, become altogeather lawlesse’.Footnote69 Rabulæ Forenses translates as ‘Wrangling lawyers of the marketplace’ or ‘forensic rabble’, depending on which translation is preferred. Either way, lawyers do not emerge from Fraunce’s analysis in a flattering light. Fraunce considered the study of law at the Inns of Court to be ‘hard, harsh, unpleasant, unsavory, rude and barbarous’ and that the language of English law was ‘Hotchpot French, stufft up with such variety of borrowed words, wherein our law is written’.Footnote70 The same resistance to and resentment of foreign influences over English language and English culture had been shown by the poet Edmund Spenser, who used the same term ‘hodgepodge’ in his preface to The Shepherd’s Calendar (first published in 1579) with reference to the corruption of the English language:
… our Mother tonge, which truly of it selfe is both full enough for prose and stately enough for verse, hath long time ben counted most bare & barren of both. Which default when as some endevoured to salve and recure, they patched up the holes with peeces and rags of other languages, borrowing here of the French, there of the Italian, every where of the Latine, not weighing how il, those tongues accord with themselves, but much worse with ours: So now they have made our English tongue, a gallimaufray or hodgepodge of all other speeches.
The playwright Thomas Heywood made much the same claim for the recently built public playhouses in London. According to Heywood, these spaces facilitated the emergence of a ‘pure’ form of English, and the adulation of other nations ensued:
… our English tongue, which hath ben the most harsh, uneven, and broken language of the world, part Dutch, part Irish, Saxon, Scotch, Welsh, and indeed a gallimaffry of many, but perfect in none, is now by this secondary meanes of playing, continually refined, every writer striving in himselfe to adde a new florish unto it … Footnote72
Despite the nationalistic rhetoric deployed by English jurists of the late medieval and early modern periods, which insisted on the excellence, antiquity, and unassailable purity of English law,Footnote75 the most obvious idiosyncrasy of common law was the influence of two foreign languages – Latin and French – over its juridical procedures. A contemporary of Fraunce, Spenser, and Jonson – the satirist and pamphleteer Thomas Nashe – had complained in Lenten Stuffe (published in 1599) of the ‘mercenary tongues’ of common lawyers.Footnote76 The mercenary tongues in which they spoke were the bastardized tongues of law-French. Elsewhere Nashe compared lawyers to devils, hovering in their thousands, like moths (‘moates’) in the juridical marketplace of Westminster Hall:
If in one man a whole legion of divells have bin billetted? how manie hundred thousand legions retaine to a Tearme at London. If I said but to a Taverne, it were an infinite thing. In Westminster Hall a man can scarce breath for them: for in every corner they hover as thick as moates in the sunne.Footnote77
Towards the end of the epilogue to Troilus and Cressida, Pandarus expresses his fear that ‘Some galled goose of Winchester would hiss’ (5.11.54). In other words, that a client of a prostitute on the south bank of the Thames, in the Liberty of the Clink (under the peculiar jurisdiction of the Bishops of Winchester), infected with venereal disease (‘galled’), might criticise Pandarus for his forthright remarks about agency, prostitution, and disease. It so happened that the playhouses, brothels, and other places of entertainment (including those provided for bear-baiting, bull-baiting, dog-fighting, and cock-fighting), on the south bank of the Thames, were situated diagonally opposite two of the actual and spiritual homes of the legal profession – the Inner Temple and the Middle Temple (the others being Gray’s Inn and Lincoln’s Inn) – only a few minutes by boat from their members’ place of work, study, sleep, and worship. In 1599, the late Elizabethan Middle Templar John Davies had articulated in epigrammatic form the relationship between junior members of the legal profession and the various agents of pleasure on the south bank of the Thames.Footnote78 The 44 epigrams written by Davies were published in a volume which also included a translation by Christopher Marlowe of Ovid’s Elegies. That their publication was illegal is certain: Epigrammes and Elegies contains very few publication details, and the place of publication is given only as ‘At Middleborugh’. Neither the date of publication nor the name of the publisher is included on the title page, suggesting that the work was not licensed for publication by the Stationers’ Company. It is probable that the named place of publication of Epigrammes and Elegies refers to Middleburg: the capital city of the province of Zeeland in the south-western Netherlands, and a notable centre of science and technology in the late sixteenth century. It is not unreasonable to suggest that, given the stringent state-censorship endemic to England in the 1590s, English authors should have looked across the North Sea for publication of their works.Footnote79 The ‘Bishops’ Ban’ of June 1599 included a list of satires, already published, which were to ‘bee presentlye broughte to the Bishop of London to be burnte’. One of the satires included in the list was ‘Davyes Epigrams, with marlowes Elegyes’.Footnote80 Given the scurrilous content and perceived seditious intent of the epigrams, in which pseudonymous lawyers are depicted as subverting the laws they are meant to uphold, the ban was to be expected.
The epigrams provide a useful insight into the lives of law students attending the Inns of Court and their quotidian activities, most of which (according to Davies) were of an extracurricular nature:
5. Conclusion
In the epilogue to Troilus and Cressida, Pandarus alludes to customers such as ‘Publius’ and ‘Fuscus’ and the prostitutes of the Paris Garden, describing them with mock-gentility as ‘Brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade’ (5.11.51). The point is that Troy has been relocated to a dystopian Troynovant on the south bank of the Thames. In the last scene of the play, Pandarus addresses in appropriately base terms the very people (lawyers) whose skills were supposed to redress the injustices engendered by commerce and the marketplace, but who failed to acknowledge the relevance of ethics and community to the attainment of societal cohesion. The transgressive acts committed by members of the legal profession (as reported by Davies in his Epigrammes) were symbolic and symptomatic of a corrupt and diseased society, the direction of which was uncertain at the tail-end of a dying political regime. Increasingly, the rationale of the English legal institution was perceived by its critics to be predicated upon the primacy of commercial enterprise and the negation of political and social community. For the late Elizabethan legal profession, the Aristotelian bonds of friendship upon which the foundations of the ideal polis are supposedly built were no more than an antique, Attic dream.
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Notes
1 Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. Published according to the true Originall Copies (Isaac Iaggard and Ed. Blount 1623) sig. A3r. As well as being actors in the King’s Men (known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men prior to the accession of James I in 1603), Condell and Heminges (various spellings of his name include ‘Heminge’ and ‘Hemmings’) were sharers in the Globe and Blackfriars Theatres. See Charles Connell, They gave us Shakespeare: John Heminge and Henry Condell (Oriel Press 1982); KE Pogue, Shakespeare’s Friends (Praeger 2006) 129–31; EK Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Clarendon Press 1923) 2: 310–11, 320–23.
2 For an account of these riots, initiated by gangs of apprentices, see Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642 (CUP 1992) 14–15.
3 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, (ed) Harold Jenkins (The Arden Shakespeare 1982): all quotations from the play are from this edition. The legal terms to which Hamlet refers in the above passage would have been familiar to any lawyer of the early modern period: ‘quiddities’, ‘quillities’: quibbling arguments; ‘tenures’: terms on which property was held, eg freehold or leasehold; ‘statutes’: a ‘statute staple’ secured a debt on the debtor’s lands; ‘recognisances’: bonds acknowledging a debt; ‘fines’, ‘recoveries’: legal procedures for enabling transfer of estates when obstacles such as entails prevented sale; ‘voucher’, ‘double voucher’: guarantor and second guarantor of the holder’s title to the property in an action for recovery. For explanation of legal terms in the plays of Shakespeare, see BJ Sokol and Mary Sokol, Shakespeare’s Legal Language: A Dictionary (Continuum 2004). On ‘Hamlet’s list’ of legal terms in the context of the private ownership of land in early modern England, see Andro Linklater, Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership (Bloomsbury 2013) 34.
4 While Latin was the formal language in which judgments were recorded, law-French had been unique to the quotidian practice of common law since the thirteenth century and was described by JH Baker as ‘the foremost of the three languages of English law’ during the period under discussion: JH Baker, ‘The Three Languages of the Common Law’ (1998) 43 McGill Law Journal 5, 16.
5 Sir John Doderidge, The English Lawyer. Describing A Method for the managing of the Lawes of this Land (I More 1631) 29.
6 Lesley Hotson, Shakespeare’s Sonnets Dated (Hart-Davis 1949) 44; see also, Stanley Wells, ‘A Close Family Connection: The Combes’ in Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells (eds), The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Biography (CUP 2015) 149–60; for evidence which suggests that Greene lodged for a while at New Place, Shakespeare’s home in Stratford-upon-Avon, see Tara Hamling, ‘His “Cousin”: Thomas Greene’ in ibid 135–48.
7 In the entry to his diary for 2 February 1602, John Manningham of the Middle Temple records that ‘At our feast wee had a play called “Twelve Night, or What you Will”, much like the Commedy of Errores, or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian called Inganni’: BL MS Harleian 5353 fo 12v.
8 For example, the records of Council at Lincoln’s Inn for 1550 include the following entry: [15 May] ‘Dodmer fined 5s for striking the Steward in Hall. Southewell fined 6s 8d for drawing his dagger on the Steward’: William Paley Baildon, James Douglas Walker, Sir Ronald Roxburgh (eds), The Black Books of Lincoln’s Inn, 6 vols (Lincoln’s Inn 1897) 1: 293. Clement’s Inn was one of the ‘inferior’ Inns of Chancery (where attorneys, as opposed to barristers, were trained) and was affiliated to the Inner Temple. On Justice Shallow and the education of attorneys at the Inns of Chancery, see Paul Raffield, Shakespeare’s Imaginary Constitution: Late Elizabethan Politics and the Theatre of Law (Hart Publishing 2010) 166–68.
9 ‘The family tradition that Elizabeth once offered Plowden the office of lord chancellor if he would renounce Catholicism is probably unfounded, but it is a fair reflection of his reputation as a lawyer, despite the disabilities caused by his faith’: Christopher W Brooks, Plowden, Edmund (c. 1518-1585): https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/22389 (2008).
10 See for example, Clare Asquith, Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare (PublicAffairs 2006); David Scott Kastan, A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion (OUP 2014); Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (MUP 2004).
11 During this period, many members of the Middle Temple had familial or professional connections with the Midlands. The dramatist John Marston was born in the North Oxfordshire village of Wardington, on the border with Northamptonshire: he became a member of Middle Temple in 1595. His father, also a Middle Templar, became legal counsel and eventually steward to the city of Coventry. In his will, John Marston senior lamented the reluctance of his son to enter the legal profession, as the following passage testifies: ‘to my second son John my furniture &c. in my chambers in the Middle Temple my law books &c. to my second son whom I hoped would have profited by them in the study of the law but man proposeth and God disposeth’, quoted in Philip J Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple: An Elizabethan Dramatist in His Social Setting (Harvard University Press 1969) 84.
12 When he first speaks, the Ghost of Hamlet’s father refers to the ‘sulph’rous and tormenting flames’ (1.5.3) to which he must submit and alludes to the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory: ‘Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purg’d away’ (1.5.12–13).
13 The manuscript is in a collection of 15 playbooks: BL MS Egerton 1994; see Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge (eds), Thomas of Woodstock, or King Richard the Second, Part One (MUP 2002) Introduction 4–8.
14 ibid 186 (n 23). It is not clear whether Fulbecke was alluding to ‘tramplers’ and the unethical practices of some lawyers when he wrote that justice and law ‘are together trodde under foote by such as neither care for God, nor goodness’: William Fulbecke, A Direction or Preparative to the study of the Lawe (T Wight 1600) sig Bv.
15 Hales v Petit, The Commentaries or Reports of Edmund Plowden, 2 vols (H Watts 1792) 1: 253.
16 Ibid 1: 257; see JH Baker, Hales, Sir James (c. 1500-1554): https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/11911 (2015).
17 Andrew Zurcher, Shakespeare and Law (The Arden Shakespeare 2010) (n 15) 259.
18 Hales v Petit 1: 258.
19 ibid 1: 255.
20 ibid 1: 258.
21 ibid 1: 259.
22 ibid 1: 261. Regarding Hales’s suicide, Dyer stated (reflecting contemporary legal opinion) that ‘the quality of the offence is murder’, ibid; in his discourse to the court on the constituent parts of a felony, Serjeant Walsh argued that ‘the doing of the act is the only point which the law regards; for until the act is done, it cannot be an offence to the world, and when the act is done it is punishable’, ibid 1: 259. The allusion to murder and the repeated use of the word ‘done’ recall Macbeth’s: ‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly’ (1.7.1–2). On St Augustine and Macbeth’s ‘need to do in order to possess what is by that act done’, see Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (Penguin 2001) 208.
23 Kantorowicz makes a similar observation about the corpus mysticum, quoting Sir Edward Coke’s remark in Postnati. Calvin’s Case that the body politic of the king is ‘called a mystical body’: EH Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton UP 1957) 15; note also the observation made by Kantorowicz that ‘finally the sacerdotium had an imperial appearance and the regnum a clerical touch’: ibid 193.
24 See (n 7), above.
25 Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse his Supplication to the Divell (Richard Jhones, 1592) 12v.
26 The myth of Brutus first appeared in the ninth-century Historia Britonum, attributed to the Welsh monk Nennius, but is more widely known from the twelfth-century account, narrated by Geoffrey of Monmouth in Historia Regum Britanniae. See Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, (trans) Lewis Thorpe (Penguin 1966) 71–74, Pt i.15–18. Sir Edward Coke rehearsed the theory propounded by his judicial predecessor Sir John Fortescue that ‘Brutus the first King of this land, as soon as he had settled himself in his kingdom, for the safe and peaceable government of his people, wrote a book in the Greek tongue, calling it the Laws of the Britons, and he collected the same out of the laws of the Trojans’: Part 3 (1602) of The Reports of Sir Edward Coke, Knt. In English, G Wilson (ed), 7 vols (Rivington, 1777) 2: ‘To the Reader’, viiia.
27 William Shakespeare, The Historie of Troylus and Cresseida (G Eld for R Bonian and H Walley 1609) title page.
28 William Shakespeare, The Famous Historie of Troylus and Cresseid (G Eld for R Bonian and H Walley 1609) ‘The Epistle’, sig ¶2r. See William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (ed) David Bevington (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare 2015) Introduction, 1–3; subsequent quotations from the play are from this edition.
29 Kermode (n 22) 128.
30 AD Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker (Yale University Press 2007) 207.
31 Hotson (n 6) 42.
32 ibid 41.
33 Quoted in ibid 37.
34 William Shakespere, A Pleasant Conceited Comedie Called Loves Labors Lost (Cutbert Burby 1598).
35 On the relevance of the ‘mortgage’ in Love’s Labour’s Lost to late Elizabethan law, see Catrin Fflur Huws, ‘What is the Significance of the Mortgage in Love’s Labour’s Lost?’ (2011) 5 Law and Humanities 385.
36 Desmond Bland (ed), Gesta Grayorum or The History of The High and Mighty Prince Henry Prince of Purpoole Anno Domini 1594 (Liverpool UP 1968) 59.
37 Hotson (n 6) 46.
38 John Marston, Histrio-Mastix. Or, The Player Whipt! (T Thorp 1610) sig C4r (2.1).
39 Finkelpearl (n 11) 119–22. The inept players in Histrio-Mastix appear to derive from the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There is an allusion to the rebels of Henry VI, Part 2, and Jack the Butcher’s famous injunction to ‘kill all the lawyers’, in the rebellion scene (Act 5) of Histrio-Mastix, in which three of the rioting ‘Russetings and Mechanichalls’ conduct the following dialogue:
40 According to the record of a Middle Temple Parliament held on 8 February 1600, ‘Mr. John Marston was readmitted to the chamber to which his father was lately admitted with Mr. Haule’: CH Hopwood (ed), Calendar of the Middle Temple Records, 4 vols (Butterworth 1904) 1: 401.
41 Finkelpearl (n 11) 120.
42 Hotson (n 6) 43.
43 See Paul Raffield, Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England: Justice and Political Power, 1558–1660 (CUP 2004) 32. In A Survey of London, John Stow notes the practice of ‘bolting’ at the Inns of Chancery and the Inns of Court: John Stow, A Survey of London, Written in the Year 1598 (Sutton Publishing 2005) 84. Shakespeare refers to bolts, and the requirement of ‘sifting’ an argument, in Coriolanus: ‘Consider this: he has been bred i’th’ wars / Since a could draw a sword, and is ill-schooled / In bolted language. Meal and bran together / He throws without distinction’ (3.1.322–25).
44 Shakespeare (n 28) sig ¶2v.
45 Hotson (n 6) 51.
46 For discussion of Le Prince d’Amour and the revels of 1597–98, see Paul Raffield, The Art of Law in Shakespeare (Hart Publishing 2017) 35–41.
47 Shakespeare (n 28) sig ¶2r.
48 Benjamin Rudyerd et al., Le Prince d’Amour, or the Prince of Love (William Leake 1660) 83.
49 ibid 85.
50 Shakespeare (n 28) sig ¶2r. Hotson notes of these lines that ‘the address betrays its author as a lawyer-wit: its gentle girding at the grave magistrates as “those grand censors” who (though they “now stile them such vanities”) would flock to hear Plays if they were called Pleas’: Hotson (n 6) 51.
51 Shakespeare, The Famous Historie sig ¶2r.
52 ibid ¶sig 2v.
53 See AG Keen, Dynastic Lycia: A Political History of the Lycians and their Relations with Foreign Powers, c 545–362 BC (Brill 1998).
54 See Paul Raffield, ‘The Elizabethan Rhetoric of Signs: Representations of Res Publica at the Early Modern Inns of Court’ (2011) 7 Law, Culture and the Humanities 244; also, JH Baker, The Inner Temple, A Brief Historical Description (The Honourable Society of the Inner Temple 1991); D Evans, ‘Theatre of Deferral: The Image of the Law and the Architecture of the Inns of Court’ (1999) 10 Law and Critique 1.
55 Doderidge (n 5) 51.
56 William Dugdale (Sir), Origines Juridiciales, or Historical Memorials of the English Laws (F and T Warren, 1666) 193.
57 Hotson notes that the play, ‘with twenty-four parts for men and four for boy-actresses, was evidently prepared not for Shakespeare’s company but for a large group of able amateurs’: Hotson (n 6) 46; the ‘boy-actresses’ in Troilus and Cressida would have been young men, rather than boys. On the boys’ companies of Elizabethan London, see Lucy Munro, Children of the Queen's Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (CUP 2005).
58 Examples of academic plays of this period include Ignoramus by George Ruggle (1615), Richardius Tertius by Thomas Legge (1579), Bellum Grammaticale by Leonard Hutten (1581); see Chambers (n 1) 4: 350, 407–408. On the genre of academic plays, see FS Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age (Clarendon Press, 1914).
59 Rudyerd et al. (n 48) 7.
60 On the development of contract law during this period, and the modernising effect of Slade’s Case, see JH Baker, ‘New Light on Slade’s Case’ in JH Baker, The Legal Profession and the Common Law: Historical Essays (Hambledon 1986) 393; David Ibbetson, ‘Sixteenth Century Contract Law: Slade’s Case in Context’ (1984) 4 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 295; Slade’s Case (1602), Coke, 4 Reports 2: 91a.
61 See Koji Yamamoto, Taming Capitalism Before its Triumph: Public Service, Distrust, & ‘Projecting’ in Early Modern England (OUP 2018).
62 Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (CUP 1992) 100.
63 George Peele, A Tale of Troy (W Wright 1589) 14. Peele collaborated with Shakespeare on the first two Acts of Titus Andronicus (c 1594): see Brian Vickers, ‘Titus Andronicus with George Peele’ in Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (OUP 2002) 148.
64 Bruster (n 62) 100; the author notes that the reference by Ulysses to a ‘project’ reveals ‘at least a nominal kinship with a host of projectors in comedies dealing with urban intrigue’: ibid 106.
65 The physical object or artefact, which contributes to the action of the play, is a notable feature of Shakespearean comedy; see, eg, the ‘carcanet’ (a necklace or chain), which drives the frenetic plot of The Comedy of Errors; ‘Comedy generally, and farce in particular, often feature a misplaced object or objects, the finding of which leads to a recognition and brings on, finally, the story’s dénouement’: Bruster (n 62) 63.
66 Bevington notes of this scene that it is based partly on one in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, but also that it ‘recalls the teichoscopia in 3.161–258 of Homer’s Iliad … when Helen and Priam view the Greek chieftains from the walls of Troy. Both accounts are subjected to satiric deflation in the present scene’: Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (n 28) 380.
67 The market for fee farms increased in the 1590s as the crown sought to raise revenue to finance war against Spain. In the early 1590s, the crown sold lands worth a total of £15,593. This compares to sales of land worth £11,711 between 1559 and 1565; figures are from RW Hoyle, ‘Introduction: aspects of the Crown’s Estate, c. 1558–1640’ in RW Hoyle (ed), The Estates of the English Crown, 1558–1640 (CUP 1992) 29. This theme is echoed in Richard II, where John of Gaunt declares that England ‘Is now leased out – I die pronouncing it – / Like to a tenement or pelting farm’ (2.1.59–60). In Thomas of Woodstock, Richard II boasts that ‘to ease our wanton youth’ he will ‘Become a landlord to this warlike realm, / Rent out our kingdom like a pelting farm’ (4.1.146–48); see Corbin and Sedge (eds) (n 13) Introduction 4–8.
68 Aching bones were symptomatic of syphilis, the conventional treatment for which was ‘sweating’. Earlier in the play, Thersites describes syphilis as ‘the Neapolitan bone-ache!’ (2.3.17–18)
69 Abraham Fraunce, The Lawiers Logike, Exemplifying the Præcepts of Logike by the Practise of the Common Lawe (Thomas Gubbin and T Newman 1588) sig 4r. For a discussion of Fraunce and the ‘failure’ of common law, see Peter Goodrich, Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1990) 15–52.
70 Fraunce (n 69) sigs 2v, 3v.
71 Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender Conteining twelve æglogues proportionable to the twelve Monethes (Iohn Harison the younger 1581) ‘Epistle’, sig ***ii.v.
72 Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (Nicholas Okes 1612) sig F3r.
73 Ben Jonson, Poetaster or The Arraignment (M Lownes 1602) sig M3r (5.3). Other Latinate words, vomited onto the stage by Crispinus, include ‘Incubus’, ‘Magnificate’, and ‘Spurious’. On the performance of Poetaster in 1601, see Chambers (n 1) 3: 364–66. ‘Retrograde’ is derived from Latin retro (backwards) and gradus (step); ‘Reciprocal’ from Latin reciprocare (to move to and fro).
74 In Hamlet, Claudius informs the Prince: ‘For your intent / In going back to school in Wittenberg, / It is most retrograde to our desire’ (1.2.112–114); in King Lear, Edgar reads a letter from Goneril to Edmund, which includes the line: ‘Let our reciprocal vows be remembered’ (4.6.262).
75 See, eg, Fortescue on the antiquity of English law: ‘neither the civil laws of the Romans, so deeply rooted by the usage of so many ages, nor the laws of the Venetians, which are renowned above others for their antiquity - though their Island was uninhabited, and Rome unbuilt at the time of the origins of the Britons – nor the laws of any Christian kingdom, are so rooted in antiquity. Hence there is no gainsaying nor legitimate doubt but that the customs of the English are not only good but the best’. John Fortescue (Sir), De Laudibus Legum Angliae, (ed and trans) SB Chrimes (CUP 1942) 39–41, c XVII.
76 Thomas Nashe, Nashes Lenten Stuffe (Nicholas Ling and Cuthbert Burby 1599) 64. For a study of Nashe and the genre of the pamphlet in late Elizabethan England, see Lorna Hutson, Thomas Nashe in Context (Clarendon Press 1989).
77 Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the night Or, A Discourse of Apparitions (William Iones 1594) sig B4r.
78 On Davies, his poetic works, and his connections with the Middle Temple, see Raffield (n 46) 34–47.
79 On state-enforced censorship in sixteenth-century England, see CS Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (CUP 1987); also, PWM Blayney, The Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London: 1501–57, 2 vols (CUP 2013).
80 The Stationers’ Register, Register C, ff 316r, 316v. On the ‘Bishops’ Ban’, see RA McCabe, ‘Elizabethan Satire and the Bishops’ Ban of 1599’ (1981) 11 The Yearbook of English Studies 188.
81 ‘In Publium 43’ in Epigrammes and Elegies. By I.D. and C.M. (Middleborugh 1599) sig D2r–v.
82 In Troilus and Cressida, Thersites puns on the name of the Trojan prince Paris, alluding to the Paris Garden: ‘Now, bull! Now, dog! ’Loo, Paris, ’loo!’ (5.8.2) Dogs were used in bullbaiting, another popular pastime in the Paris Garden. As Bevington notes, ‘Paris is the cuckolder “worrying” the horned Menelaus’: Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (n 28) 369, note to 5.8.2.
83 ‘In Fuscum 39’ in Davies, Epigrammes, sig Dr.