Review
Reviewed Work(s): Solon and Thespis: Law and Theater in the English Renaissance by
Dennis D Kezar
Review by: Jonathan Hart
Source: Renaissance Quarterly , Vol. 60, No. 3 (Fall 2007), pp. 1028-1030
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of
America
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1353/ren.2007.0277
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Dennis D. Kezar, ed. Solon and Thespis: Law and Theater in the English
Renaissance.
Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. viii + 294 pp. index. $37.50. ISBN:
978–0–268–03313–2.
An ambivalent attitude to the law and to theater has occurred since antiquity.
The Platonic Socrates explored the fraught relation between law and justice and
between the poet and the republic. How could human laws be just and representation
embody wisdom and knowledge? Theatrical and legal representation posed
problems for the philosopher, who loved truth, and not the seductive ways of
forensic argument or illusory role-playing.
Like Plato, Isocrates and Aristophanes commented on the theater. Aristophanes
attacked the theater and philosophy in his Old Comedy satire, taking Socrates to
task in The Clouds and taking a run at Euripides in The Archanians and Peace. In
The Frogs, Aristophanes set up a debate between Aeschylus and Euripides, the one
defending the poet as a teacher of morals and the other saying that the poet
represents reality. Plato takes up this question in book 10 of Republic in the quarrel
between philosophy and poetry. Plays have a specific power: “Dramatic poetry has
a most formidable power of corrupting even men of high character, with a few
exception” (605c, Cornford trans. 337). Such performance moves people in the
audience to give themselves up to sympathy for actions that in life would be
scorned, so that feeling overwhelms reason. Passion, language, and role-playing
can, in drama or in law, obscure reality and the path to truth, knowledge, and
wisdom. Although being more favorable to poetry and drama than Plato is,
Aristotle still places philosophy above poetry, which is above history, because of its
universal nature. In the Renaissance, however, Philip Sidney placed poetry over
philosophy. And so the ancient world and its revision framed the debate of law and
theater in the Renaissance.
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This is one of the contexts for the volume Dennis Kezar has edited. The
collection explores the relation between law and drama in the plays of Shakespeare,
Jonson, Marston, and others. The title of the collection comes from a meeting
between Solon, an Athenian lawmaker, and Thespis, a Greek poet and actor, over
whether lies in a play lead to falsehood in society. Role-playing and the relation
between art and life are central in this debate. Why is the law real and drama a
fiction? Why the friction between law and drama in early modern England when
they shared spaces and rhetoric and both interpreted the social and the imaginary?
Both involve fictions, so why are legal fictions of any more worth than dramatic
ones?
The three parts of the Kezar’s collection help approach some of these problems.
In the first part, “Jonson and the Tribe of Law,” Matthew Greenfield notes
that the War of the Poets shows the tension between Roman law (Jonson) and
common law (Dekker’s use of a jury). Dekker trusted juries and the audience while
Jonson did not. Paul Cantor argues that the seeming artlessness in form of
Bartholomew Fair actually allows it to develop characters and content. The tension
between law and spontaneity in this representation of the marketplace is one
important manifestation of the relation between law and theatre. According to
Frances Teague, setting Volpone in Venice rather than in London freed it from
topicality, especially of the recent investigation and prosecution of those involved
in the Gunpowder Plot. The law could be errant and assinine, badly conceived and
full of perjury, and the consideration of the relations among law and lawlessness,
nation and providence, is something that Teague draws out in drawing comparisons
between the Gunpowder Plot and the plot of Volpone.
The second part, “Legal Rhetoric and Theatrical Pressure,” begins with
Heather Dubrow’s discussion of land law in Shakespeare’s King Lear and in his
culture. Arguing for more notice of workaday law, such as land law, and in
particular rules surrounding property disputes, Dubrow seeks to interpret the
lawless world of this great play, invoking tensions over property as illuminations of
anxieties over housing and being dislodged, as well as fears of trespass, which occur
when Gloucester is driven from his house. Ernest B. Gilman discusses the law in
The Tempest, especially in the buried story, or excluded trial, of Sycorax. This
submerged world of Sycorax is something that Prospero and the audience need to
consider in the birth of colonialism. Dennis Kezar, who also contributes a useful
introduction to this collection, avers that in The Witch of Edmonton Thomas
Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley produced challenges to representing
witches in the Renaissance. This work plays on its own text, a drama that possesses
its audience’s desire as if a material possession.
In “Law Staged and Theory Troubled,” the third part, Debora Shuger examines
texts, lies, and censorship. She sees censorship as seeking to check falsehood
rather than uncomfortable truths for those in power. While not defending censorship,
Shuger raises questions about the purveyance of falsehood and fear in
oppositional writing in Tudor and Stuart England. Karen J. Cunningham brings
together the Inns of Court and Gorbuduc and tries to draw attention away from
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court to mooting and to the Inns. Sackville, Norton, and the Inns of Court
represent struggle in fictions in order to anticipate and prevent foreign reign. The
law and theater secure the nation in the imagination. Luke Wilson analyzes corruption
in seventeenth-century England and focuses on Chapman’s Tragedy of
Chabot and the case against Bacon for bribery. This play explores the connection
between corruption in public office and the bond between king and subject
founded in generosity and dependence.
In the epilogue, Deak Nabers offers ideas about legal theory, for instance how
Lear and Gloucester raise the issue of natural law at 4.6.148–56. In summing up,
Nabers points out, as the collection does, that the law is the center of the world and
of its disappearance, which is a little like theater. They represent the world in a
fiction of the world that claims truth. They have integrity and question it. This
tension is one of the reasons the collection that Kezar has shaped is worth explor-
ing.
JONATHAN HART
University of Alberta
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