Shakespeare, Law, and Marriage.(Elizabethan Literature and the Law of Fraudulent Conveyance: Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare)(Book Review)

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-APR-05

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COPYRIGHT 2005 Modern Humanities Research Association

Shakespeare, Law, and Marriage. By B. J. SOKOL and MARY SOKOL. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003. x+262 pp. [pounds sterling]45. ISBN o-521-82263-7.

Elizabethan Literature and the Law of Fraudulent Conveyance: Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare. Ed. by CHARLES Ross. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2003. xx + 142 pp. [pounds sterling]37-50. ISBN 0-7546-3263-6.

The quartet of provocative Shakespeare plays that for many current audiences and students occupy that elastic generic box labelled 'problem play' -Measure for Measure, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello-all feature, and in some cases hinge on, points of law. While the recent approach to these plays, for many, has been through discussion of race and gender, with the 'problem' perceived as the unpalatable outcome of the transgression of a restrictive balance of power, such a focus has excluded (been ignorant of?) the institutions that were the very visible manifestation of that power. The two full-length studies reviewed here extend the transparent late Elizabethan, early Jacobean interest in legal issues evidenced in the four plays to the rest of the canon. For legal disputes and arrangements, over property, inheritance, marriage, feature in the narrative or...

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