Abstract
This thesis proposes a new approach to early modern English theatrical history through the legal record, resulting in new understandings of how common law shaped theatrical consciousness during a period of extraordinary and still unsurpassed litigiousness. Focused on civil procedures in the common law courts, the thesis uncovers the ways in which theatre practitioners made use of legal processes in their daily lives as well as to conceptualise commercial processes of theatrical representation. The project does so by marrying the sources of Theatre History with the methodologies of 'Law and Literature', arguing that common law sources should be analysed not as ostensibly objective data, but interpreted critically as sites of fiction. To such an end, the project grounds its study of early-seventeenth-century plays, practitioners, and playhouses in an innovative literary-critical analysis of procedural formulae and technical legal dialects. Through this approach, the thesis not only reveals the fictionality inherent in the common law’s formulaic system of writs, but the ways in which this fictive potential was used creatively by theatre practitioners and informed the composition of early modern plays.The project draws upon close readings of hundreds of entries in the plea rolls of early modern England’s busiest courts: the common law courts of Common Pleas and King’s Bench. It brings these largely uncatalogued sources into conversation with plays by Jonson, Beaumont, Middleton, and others, as well as with petitions, letters, case reports, and books of accounts. Through attention to legal trope, form, and plot in these documents, the thesis excavates vital and hitherto overlooked aspects of early modern theatrical lives lived through the forms and structures of the common law. This includes the recovery of the voices and experiences of several previously invisible women as they were constituted in relation to the jurisdiction's procedural and fictive norms. Moreover, in tracing the emigration of words such as nuisance, mischief, and performance from law-French into vernacular English, the thesis argues for a new way of locating and thinking about the presence of legal vocabulary in theatrical contexts. The thesis, then, not only uncovers fresh evidence, bringing to light cases and names previously unknown to historians of the legal and theatrical cultures of early modern England, but presents new historical perspectives on these cultures and their entwinement, correcting a number of long- standing biases and errors.
Through analysis of a series of local engagements with the common law’s strict formulary framework, and the fictive processes the chapter excavates within these procedural forms, Chapter One serves to establish the integration of process and procedure into day-to-day theatrical life. Building on these fictive and formal insights, Chapter Two explores the experiences of a young woman, Thomasine Ostler, in the Court of King’s Bench, arguing for a fundamentally new way of working with the formulaic, law-Latin records of early modern England’s common law courts. If the first chapter establishes the place of the fictive within the strict forms of the common law, and the second uncovers the telling of stories through the narrative contours of different technical procedures, then the final two chapters show theatre practitioners as imaginatively engaged in making and re-making these same procedural forms. Taken as a whole, the central argument of the thesis is, thus, two-fold. First, I argue that seemingly complicated common law processes were, through their recurrence and repetition, embedded into the personal and professional lives of theatre practitioners in early modern England. Second, that paying attention to questions of trope, narrative, language, and plot can make visible to us aspects of a broader discursive shift in the period, in which plays, players, and playing spaces were increasingly being conceived through common law frames, forms, and terms.
| Date of Award | 1 Sept 2023 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Lucy Munro (Supervisor), Gordon McMullan (Supervisor) & Hannah Crawforth (Supervisor) |