Professor Lorna Hutson: List of publications

The collection includes essays by leading international scholars and early career researchers in the fields of economic and social history, legal history, literary criticism, and philosophy on such subjects as trust and belief; risk; ...

This paper analyzes the fullest theoretical elaboration of the doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies in the Elizabethan period, Edmund Plowden’s Treatise on the Succession (1567). It argues that Plowden here deploys the King’s Two Bodies not, as has been thought, as a legal proof against the foreign birth of Mary Queen of Scots, but as a way of embodying and sacralizing the disputed historical relations of England and Scotland. Plowden’s sacralizing metaphors of embodiment transform the highly contentious English claim of Scotland’s historic vassalage into the indisputable and timeless truth of political theology.

Shakespeare's characters are thought to be his greatest achievement―imaginatively autonomous, possessed of depth and individuality, while his plots are said to be second-hand and careless of details of time and place. . This view has survived the assaults of various literary theories and has even, surprisingly, been revitalized by the recent emphasis on the collaborative nature of early modern theatre. But belief in the autonomous imaginative life of Shakespeare's characters depends on another unexamined myth: the myth that Shakespeare rejected neoclassicism, playing freely with theatrical time and place. Circumstantial Shakespeare explodes these venerable critical commonplaces. Drawing on sixteenth-century rhetorical pedagogy, it reveals the importance of topics of circumstance (of Time, Place and Motive, etc.) in the conjuring of compelling narratives and vivid mental images. 'Circumstances'―which we now think of as incalculable contingencies―were originally topics of forensic inquiry into human intention or passion. In drawing on the Roman forensic tradition of circumstantial proof, Shakespeare did not ignore time and place. His brilliant innovation was to use the topics of circumstance to imply offstage actions, times and places in terms of the motives and desires we attribute to the characters. His plays thus create both their own vivid and coherent dramatic worlds and a sense of the unconscious feelings of characters inhabiting them. Circumstantial Shakespeare offers new readings of Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Lucrece, Two Gentlemen of Verona and Macbeth, as well as new interpretations of Sackville and Norton's Gorboduc and Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy. It engages with eighteenth-century Shakespeare criticism, contemporary Shakespeare criticism, semiotics of theatre, Roman forensic rhetoric, humanist pedagogy, the prehistory of modern probability, psychoanalytic criticism and sixteenth-century constitutional thought.

This collection of essays by twenty-two prominent scholars from literature departments and law schools showcases the vibrancy of recent work in law and literature and highlights its many new directions since the field's heyday in the 1970s ...

Post-Freudian and post-Foucauldian readings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream assume that the play celebrates the freeing-up of female sexual desire from neurotic inhibitions or disciplinary norms. But this is incompatible with what we know historically about 16th-century society’s investment in female chastity. This paper addresses the problem of this incompatibility by turning to Shakespeare’s use of forensic or legal rhetoric. In the Roman forensic rhetoric underlying 16th-century poetics, probable arguments of guilt or innocence are ‘invented’ from topics of circumstance, such as the Time, Place or Manner of the deed. The mysterious Night, Wood and Moonlight of Shakespeare’s play can be seen as making sexual crimes (violence, stealth, infidelity) take on the form of probability and fairy agency. The play thus brilliantly represents the stories of Theseus’s notorious rapes, abandonments and perjuries as fearful ‘phantasies’ or imaginings experienced by Hermia and Helena. This explains how the Victorians could interpret the play as a chaste, childlike ballet, while moderns and postmoderns take it to be a play about psychological repressions working against the free play of sexual desire.

In the 1980s, New Historicist critics suggested that Renaissance theater was marked by the Reformation; specifically, that it expressed the vanishing of ritual and sacrament from ordinary people’s lives. More recently, critics like Sarah Beckwith have shown how pre-Reformation theater worked as ritual and sacrament by revealing the extent to which it was implicated in the jurisdiction of confession, penance and absolution for sin. This article revisits the question of how the Reformation abolition of annual mandatory confession affected theater. It qualifies both the New Historicist view of Renaissance theater as evacuated ritual and Beckwith’s view of the Protestant abolition of confession as an exteriorization of penance. Reading the first English Renaissance neoclassical comedy in English, Gammer Gurton’s Needle (c.1553-60), the article shows how profoundly its neoclassical concern with proof and evidence is tied in with a rejection of priestly confession and an invitation to parishioners and neighbors to be more skeptical and less credulous in believing the worst of one another.

This book proposes that certain qualities for which English Renaissance drama is famous, such as what Dryden called its ‘variety and greatness of characters’ and its ‘copiousness and well-knitting of intrigue’, may be in part attributable to the close relationship in this period between developments in English legal culture and those in dramatic writing. The book shows how the English justice system underwent changes in the 16th century that, because of the system's participatory nature, had a widespread effect. These changes gradually made evidence evaluation a popular skill: justices of peace and juries were increasingly required to weigh up the probabilities of competing narratives of facts. At the same time, English dramatists were absorbing, from Latin legal rhetoric and from Latin comedy, poetic strategies that enabled them to make their plays more persuasively realistic, more ‘probable’. The result of this enormously rich conjunction of popular legal culture and ancient forensic rhetoric was a drama in which dramatis personae habitually gather evidence and ‘invent’ arguments of suspicion and conjecture about one another, thus prompting us, as readers and audience, to reconstruct this ‘evidence’ as stories of characters' private histories and inner lives. In this drama, people act in uncertainty, inferring one another's motives and testing evidence for their conclusions. This book thus provides an account of the transformation from allegorical to mimetic modes of drama that associates the latter with the gradual shift, in the judicial sphere, from penitential to evidential models of justice.

This collection features the work of both established and up-and-coming scholars in the UK and US, with contributors including Peter Goodrich, Lorna Hutson, Erica Sheen and David Colclough studying the period of the English Renaissance from ...