Quentin Skinner, Forensic Shakespeare. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014. Cloth, 368 pages.

Summary

At the heart of Quentin Skinner's impressively detailed Forensic Shakespeare is the contention that the dramaturgy of a number of Shakespeare's plays, including Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and All's Well That Ends Well (what he calls the forensic plays), is heavily drawn from classical and renaissance treatises of judicial rhetoric. Acknowledging that his critical focus privileges the page over the stage, Skinner meticulously dissects a series of key exchanges from these forensic plays to reveal that they are “constructed according to the classical rules governing the inventio and dispositio of judicial arguments” (66). Close reading of these passages, including Antony's “Noble Brutus” speech in Julius Caesar and selected dialogues between Othello and Iago, leaves no doubt as to the importance of classical rhetorical features within the dramaturgical structure of Shakespeare's “forensic plays”; however, Skinner downplays the importance of the dramatic conventions of Shakespeare's theater and the source material for a number of the plays, to the extent that they are viewed as only marginally significant to the creative process that allowed the bard to compose his “forensic plays.” From Skinner's extremely focused analysis, one could imagine Shakespeare writing Hamlet with one hand holding a quill and the other clutching a primer on rhetorical theory.

Forensic Shakespeare begins with an overview of the foundational teaching of classical rhetoric in the Tudor grammar school, particularly the work of Cicero and the Rhetorica ad Herennium. These texts, among others, would have been instrumental in Shakespeare's formal education to such an extent that Skinner can claim there is “nothing unhistorical about yoking Cicero and Quintilian together with the vernacular rhetoricians of Tudor England” (26).While this yoking may seem apropos considering the linguistic curriculum of the Tudor grammar school, the difficulty in demonstrating any type of direct influence on Shakespeare's dramatic technique is exacerbated by the lack of any verifiable confirmation. Skinner adroitly negotiates this potentially problematic element by laying the case that, while there may not be any historical documentation indicating the degree and depth of Shakespeare's mastery of classical rhetorical theory, his grammar school education would have adequately exposed the future playwright to the types of judicial arguments he would later mimic within his “forensic plays.”