{"title":"ONE. Dramatic Judgments: Measure for Measure, Revenge, and the Institution of the Law","authors":"Bernadette A. Meyler","doi":"10.7591/9781501739392-003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501739392-003","url":null,"abstract":"Analyzing William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure as the paradigm for theaters of pardoning, this chapter examines the relationships among judgment, pardoning and sovereignty in the play. It posits that Measure for Measure relies on a judicial model of pardoning and at the same time pits a more bureaucratic, institutional form of judgment against a vision of judgment as emanating from a sovereign decision on both the law and its application. The chapter further explains the connection between the institutional form of judgment staged in Measure for Measure and the work of early modern jurist Sir Edward Coke, who promoted a form of common law that he suggested derived from ancient Greek sources rather than the inheritance of Roman law from the Norman conquest. Drawing on this link with ancient Greece, the chapter then concludes with a comparison between Aeschylus’s Oresteia and Measure for Measure, contrasting both their genres and visions of justice.","PeriodicalId":221195,"journal":{"name":"Theaters of Pardoning","volume":"199 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115718982","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Index","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9781501739392-013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501739392-013","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":221195,"journal":{"name":"Theaters of Pardoning","volume":"196 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115487031","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Acknowledgments","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9781501739392-001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501739392-001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":221195,"journal":{"name":"Theaters of Pardoning","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128162148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Theaters of Pardoning","authors":"Bernadette A. Meyler","doi":"10.7591/9781501739392-002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501739392-002","url":null,"abstract":"The introduction draws on theories of genre and existing work in early modern law and literature to define the attributes and explain the significance of theaters of pardoning. Demonstrating the surprisingly significant number of seventeenth-century English plays that end with pardons, the introduction identifies these forms of tragicomedy as theaters of pardoning. It also emphasizes how the historical interrelations among the institutions and actors of law, drama, and politics in seventeenth-century England brought conceptions of pardoning from theater to law court to palace and back.","PeriodicalId":221195,"journal":{"name":"Theaters of Pardoning","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131615770","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"SIX. Pardoning Revolution: The 1660 Act of Oblivion and Hobbes’s Recentering of Sovereignty","authors":"Bernadette A. Meyler","doi":"10.7591/9781501739392-008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501739392-008","url":null,"abstract":"The philosopher Thomas Hobbes turned the conception of sovereignty toward the generality of lawgiving rather than the singularity of judgment, a displacement that paved the path for the transfer of sovereignty from king to Parliament. Hobbes’s conception of equity and critique of the common law played an important role in this alteration. The Act of Oblivion passed by Parliament after the Restoration, which Hobbes himself analyzed in his Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Lawes, provides a particularly striking example of how the change unfolded on a conceptual level; in this instance, something like the pardon, which represented the act of sovereignty most closely linked with the singularity of the monarch, was itself generalized and transferred to Parliament instead of being exercised exclusively by the king.","PeriodicalId":221195,"journal":{"name":"Theaters of Pardoning","volume":"154 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133945079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"FOUR. From Sovereignty to the State: The Tragicomic Clemency of Massinger’s The Bondman","authors":"Bernadette A. Meyler","doi":"10.1515/9781501739392-006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501739392-006","url":null,"abstract":"Philip Massinger’s 1623 play The Bondman appealed to a number of very different audiences, from King Charles I, to republicans resisting Charles II’s return to England, to spectators after the Restoration. This chapter argues that the play proved so versatile because it placed priority on the preservation of the state over any particular form of sovereignty. This political orientation derives in part from The Bondman’s debt to Senecan stoicism. Stoicism shapes the play’s approach to mercy as well. Rather than relying on a sovereign pardon, the play emphasizes a kind of rule based on equity as well as a variety of clemency derived from Lucius Annaeus Seneca’s De Clementia. Clemency as presented by the play entails preservation of the body politic through enlargement of the sovereign’s compass of concern.","PeriodicalId":221195,"journal":{"name":"Theaters of Pardoning","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116070156","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}