Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Europe by Julie Stone Peters (review)

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• Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Europe by Julie Stone Peters
• Subha Mukherji (bio)

Julie Stone Peters. Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp xv + 368. £70.

Julie Stone Peters's expansive, exciting, and richly researched book, Law as Performance, opens arrestingly with an account of an aborted trial by combat at Tothill Fields, Westminster, in 1571. The truth was that the parties had settled their legal dispute the day before. But the Queen decreed that the ritual of the trial must go on nonetheless, and entertain the gathered audience—but only for the plaintiffs to fail to show up, and for the event to fail to deliver on the expectations aroused. "This was clearly theatre," Peters writes, "but it was also law" (3). This vivid recounting of a spectacular event simulating a judicial arbitration places law in the wider context of play and playing in London—the whole range from fencing to theatre—and takes us to the heart of her thesis: law as a performance practice, its history, and its varied manifestations. It shifts the common notion of law as doctrine and rules to make available an understanding of law as performative courtroom action. Thus, it effectively displaces logos with ethos and pathos at the centre of the legal scene. But it also demonstrates that legal performance is a "constitutive idea in western jurisprudence" (9), unearthing an array of sources, ancient to early modern, from which law derives sanction, authority, and guidelines.

At the same time, Peters brings alive the ambivalence around the theatrical in law—the simultaneous proximity and rivalry that Peter Goodrich so brilliantly excavated (and traced back to Plato) in his short piece on "Law" back in 2001, in the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Rhetoric edited by Thomas O. Sloane. As Kathy Eden pointed out in 1986, "the Renaissance hypocrite originates in the Greek theatre, the Renaissance actor in the Roman law court" (Legal and Poetic Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition, 5). The observation that law is both theatrical and antitheatrical is not, in fact, unfamiliar to the now mature field of law and literature (though it may yet come as a surprise to legal practitioners unaware of the long, intertwined traditions traced here). What Peters brings to the idea is a grippingly granular analysis of both Aristotle's own oscillations between a rejection of the emotional manipulation of the jury and his visceral intuition of its importance (46–47), and how this paradox plays out in the courtroom. Her account of the sixteenth-century French lawyer Etienne Pasquier's re-casting of the tears of Simon Bobie in chapter 4 (244–50) is a masterful example of her unpacking of the duality of hypocrisis, which focuses law's inextricability from rhetoric and its performative imperatives. Bobie is Pasquier's client Arconville's opponent: Pasquier presents his visible affect as a manipulative mask, and Arconville's dry eyes as a sign of masculine, Stoic veracity, while at the same time emplotting [End Page 299] Arconville's wife's tears as a sign of distress and a trigger of judicial pathos. It as if the layered performativity and self-reflexive impersonations written into legal practice—not to speak of its embeddedness in legal training, the mise-en-abime of which is brilliantly reconstructed in chapter 6 (esp. 273–80)—unmoored the very touchstones of sincerity. Even as Pasquier's command of the peripateia of his case is shown to be aimed at vivifying the "contrast between visible truth and concealed falsehood" (249), this purported theatre of exposure is also shown to stage his own consummate hypocrisis. One of the achievements of this book is to keep this irreducible ambiguity in view without losing sight of the ethical commitment of law. Peters probes the arguably self-evident moral agenda of law-courts through the ages to reveal dilemmas that go to the heart of the ethics of emotion at stake in legal representation. This comes through most interestingly in her exploration of advocacy in chapter 2, which puts the spotlight...