With Shakespeare’s Strangers and English Law, Paul Raffield brings to a close his series of monographs on law and Shakespeare. Like its predecessors, this new book sets out to cast new light on particular plays by juxtaposing those plays with aspects of law and legal culture (broadly defined). The juxtaposition enables Raffield to suggest echoes, parallels, allusions and contexts which mutually illuminate the plays and the law.
In Shakespeare’s Strangers the five central plays are Measure for Measure, The Comedy of Errors, Troilus and Cressida, The Merchant of Venice and King Lear. The unifying theme is “what it meant to be a ‘stranger’ to English law in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period” (p. i). However, the book does not confine itself to these plays – indeed, some if its most engaging discussion is prompted by The Book of Sir Thomas More; nor does it limit itself to strangers – there is a very valuable analysis of the likely first performance of Troilus and Cressida at an Inn of Court (pp. 141–50), for instance. This is not a book that announces a thesis, then proceeds to demonstrate it. It is, rather, a series of wide-ranging reflections on, and responses to, the selected plays. This review highlights some of the most striking and interesting of these reflections and responses.
Raffield’s point of departure is Shakespeare’s contribution to the multi-authored The Book of Sir Thomas More (c. 1600), in which Sir Thomas More is shown attempting to quell civil disorder provoked by resentment at the influx of foreigners to London. More addresses the mob, putting to them “the stranger’s case”: if they were, for some reason, banished from their homeland, they would become strangers, reliant on the hospitality of their host nation. It is essentially a plea for empathy, consideration and a reminder of how easily a person might become a stranger. Raffield persuasively argues that Shakespeare’s depiction of these events of 1517 would surely have been shaped by the very similar apprentices’ riots of the 1590s. He also makes a connection between the riots and The Comedy of Errors. There, in material that has no parallel in the Roman source (Plautus, The Menaechmi), Shakespeare makes it a capital offence for an Ephesian citizen to be present in Syracuse, and, vice versa, for a Syracusian to be in Ephesus: the play opens with the Duke of Ephesus pronouncing a death sentence on the Syracusian merchant Egeon, unless a ransom be paid by five o’clock that day. This is the ultimate, the terminal, rejection of the stranger.
The Comedy of Errors also provides the opportunity for Raffield to develop another important theme, which is the pervasive influence of Aristotle. The play is very unusual in the Shakespearian canon for its compliance with the Aristotelean unities of place, time, and action (Aristotle, Poetics). Raffield proposes that it is also Aristotelean in a different, political, sense, namely, that it emphasises that harmony in a community requires friendship in the creation and maintenance of society (Aristotle, The Politics and The Nicomachean Ethics) (p. 87). Certainly the play is full of discord, cross-purposes and misunderstandings; and its resolution involves the dropping of the death sentence imposed at the start of the first scene, even though Egeon’s sons can now pay the ransom. Raffield also makes the point that the closing image of the play – as the twin servants, just reunited, leave hand in hand – is a perfect picture of friendship. In addition, he proposes a symbolic reading of the gold chain which is a crucial plot device, arguing that it has “powerful juristic connotations, traceable to the Platonic description of public law as a ‘golden and holy’ cord or chain, attached to citizens and connected to the gods, ‘tugging’ at the populace to make it compliant with a prescribed and divinely ordained legal order” (p. 76).
Although the gold chain does not feature in other plays, the themes of discord, harmony and friendship do recur, and Raffield makes particularly good use of them in his treatment of The Merchant of Venice. He sets out to make the case for the value of Act V, which critics have tended to regard as, at best, “a thematic appendix” (F. Kermode, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays (Abingdon 1971), 214). Shylock’s trial, humiliation and departure have all been completed in Act IV, and there is a palpable drop in intensity in Act V as the focus moves to the lovers Lorenzo and Jessica, Portia and Bassanio, and Gratiano and Nerissa. Raffield argues that Act V’s thematic significance is disharmony. We might conventionally expect the united lovers at the end of a comedy – The Comical History of the Merchant of Venice is the play’s full title – to be in harmony, but these lovers clearly are not. Raffield tellingly points out that of the three pairs of lovers mentioned in the dialogue between Lorenzo and Jessica, at V.1.1-14, one relationship is destroyed by infidelity, and in the other two one of the lovers commits suicide. These are hardly good omens. Nor is it encouraging to have the concluding, obscene, words of the play spoken by Gratiano, whom Raffield describes, politely, as “one of the foremost voices of discord in the play” (p. 204). He is a violent, obnoxious antisemite. Harmony and the resolution of discord has plainly not been achieved here.
This review has only touched on some of the most interesting themes of a wide-ranging and thought-provoking book. The book avoids a general conclusion, or statement of Shakespeare’s “position” on strangers, but it has a very clear, and explicit, ethical concern with the treatment of strangers, both in Shakespeare’s time and the present day. One leaves the book with the sense that Shakespeare’s attitude is more ambivalent: the moral high points of The Book of Sir Thomas More and The Comedy of Errors have to be set against the dispiriting conclusion of The Merchant of Venice. There is, similarly, little cause for optimism in the conclusion of Measure for Measure – things seem likely to continue, with the same hypocritical disdain for “strangers”, as before (p. 40). Elsewhere, in plays that Raffield can only touch on in passing, such as Henry V, the portrayal of the French seems rather less sympathetic than Raffield suggests when he says that “they are never denigrated, and nor are they despised” (p. 67) – the French nobility are shown as arrogant, conceited and complacent (see for instance, III.7, IV.2, alternating with scenes showing the humility and bravery of the English army). Shakespeare was clearly alert to the processes, dynamics, dangers and, above all, the dramatic potential of “strangeness”; Raffield’s study invites, and encourages, us to reflect on Shakespeare’s multifaceted, opportunistic exploitation of this powerfully divisive concept.
