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FDU PRESS
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| Scholarly Review |
 | Justice, Women, and Power in English Renaissance Drama
ISBN# 9780838641699
Reviewed by: K. Farley, Virginia Commonwealth University
Choice, May 2010 |
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The interplay between Elizabethan and Jacobean law and Shakespearean drama has become a rich area of research... The unsettling nature of legal reasoning (and of so much else) in the period proved irresistible for dramatists, whose own theater was ill defined, indeterminate. Perhaps, as these essays argue, the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented the ambiguities of law that were just below the seemingly settled surface. Majeski (literature and law, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY) and Detmer-Goebel (English, Northern Kentucky University) contend that the law's very notion of justice was transformed in the 16th century and followed upheavals in gender status. Though all of Shakespeare's plays struggle to some degree with discovering justice, The Winter's Tale, The Merchant of Venice, and Measure for Measure are justly emphasized in this admirable collection of probing, thoughtful essays, which examine, especially, how women achieve their own legal agency. In her essay, Cristina Leon Alfar notes that the law seeks to define universals, but "contrary to the term, universals inevitably exclude those who do not, cannot identify with those truths and norms."
Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.
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