Thanks to Mary Dudziak, I see that Carla Spivack's new article on Law in Hamlet is up on ssrn. It looks downright terrific. Here's her abstract:
Many readers have noted the abundant references to law in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Indeed, a whole sub-genre of criticism has developed around the question of whether Shakespeare's knowledge of law, as reflected in this play and others, is detailed and extensive enough to indicate legal training. These critics, however, have so far lacked scholarly backgrounds in Early Modern English literature and culture, and thus fail to connect the legal language and themes of the play to its other concerns about gender and rule. By the same token, literature scholars writing about the play have lacked backgrounds in English legal history. Bringing both perspectives to bear, I show that the play's legal allusions are closely related to its other concerns about gender, and that these themes in turn partake of changes in the broader culture, namely, the end of the forty-year reign of Elizabeth, a woman ruler, and an ensuing backlash against female political power. In sum, I will show that placing the play's legal references in context reveals that they are part of a process of ejecting the feminine from the political realm.
All of this reminds me again how common references to law were in literature, at least through the middle of the nineteenth century. You may recall that I wrote recently of Emerson talking of the warranty deeds and landscape.
As for inheritance law in Hamlet--soon I'll be talking about a paper that Stephen Davis and I are writing about inheritance in antebellum Greene County, Alabama--where some of the wealthiest people in our country lived--and its implications for our understanding of shifting attitudes towards inheritance.
Alfred Brophy
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