Faculty of Law University of Toronto
Law & Literature Workshop Series
presents
Lorna Hutson
University of St. Andrews
“ ‘Tis Probable, and Palpable to Thinking”: Law and Likelihood in Shakespeare
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
12:30 – 2:00
Solarium, Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park
Toronto Canada M5C 2C5
This paper begins by showing how the dramatic action of English Renaissance plays is, to an extent still largely unrecognized by criticism, shaped by the forms and procedures of sixteenth century common and canon law. It goes on to ask whether nineteenth-century 'character criticism' of Shakespeare, which insists on the plays' conformity to novelistic conventions of time and duration, may not be seen as a properly forensic response to the implication of Renaissance drama, and Shakespearean drama in particular, in the newly pervasive habits of evidential thinking in English legal culture. We can see, even in the earliest quartos of Shakespeare's earliest plays, the ways in which forensic rhetoric works to produce a complex, quasi-novelistic sense of temporal realism when characters narrate unstaged events as forms of 'circumstantial evidence' for their own particular cases.
Lorna Hutson is Berry Professor of English Literature at the University of St Andrews. She did her BA hons and Dphil at Oxford, and has taught at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of London. She is interested in the rhetorical bases of Renaissance fiction and drama, and particularly in the forensic or legal underpinnings of Renaissance poetic fictions. Her previous books include Thomas Nashe in Context (1989), The Usurer’s Daughter (1994) and, with Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe (2001). She is currently editing a special issue of the journal 'Representations' on the medieval historian Ernst Kantorowicz.
Co-sponsored by the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, the University of Toronto Department of English, and the Department of English and the Dean of Arts, York University.
A light lunch will be provided.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
