From the Domesday Book to Shakespeare’s Globe

The phrase ‘Jus Uncommon’ summarizes England’s claim to independence from Europe, a claim supported by its unique legal system and Elizabethan theatre, and their strong interconnexion. Elizabethan tragedy begins at the Inns of Court. It was no mere coincidence, but a result of the long history of intersecting processes of law, politics, and theatre. This book sets out to contextualize and explore such legal and literary intersections, charting the emergence of Elizabethan legal culture from its various English and European sources over the course of the four hundred years running from Magna Carta to Shakespeare. It encompasses the major strands of legal history and culture that formed the background to Elizabethan political drama, republican tradition, theories of monarchical sovereignty,　European and English theories of　imperium,　pedagogical and rhetorical practices of the Inns of Court,legal-antiquarian research, parliamentary privilege, and Tudor political pamphleteering.

Legal texts, discourses, and social practices constructed a pervasive intellectual culture from which Elizabethan drama – like Shakespeare’s – emerged. Shakespeare is not the central object of this study, but he is central to its argument. What he knew about law was what collective memory had stored from centuries past at home and abroad. The issues, characters, themes, theories, and metaphors dramatized by the Elizabethan playwrights followed the way opened at the Inns. Emblematic figures of lawyers-writers and their Senecan patterns paved the way to Gorboduc and to Shakespeare’s histories.