In a new edition of The SOF Interviews, Roger Stritmatter talks with Bob Meyers about Shakespeare and the Law: How the Bard’s Legal Knowledge Affects the Authorship Question.
The eleven essays in this comprehensive book, collected and edited by Professor Stritmatter, date between 1916 and 2013, and supply a detailed history of a controversial and consequential aspect of Shakespeare studies: the substantial scholarship establishing the bard’s frequent upcycling of the ideas and language of the law. This topic, explicitly or implicitly, has long been tied to the history of doubt about the authorship of the plays:
Did Shakespeare serve an apprenticeship as a law clerk during the “lost years?”
Why is legal discourse such a densely integrated aspect of his works?
As Oxfordian and legal scholar Mark Andre Alexander concludes in the volume, “what distinguishes Shakespeare’s use of legal terms has nothing to do with the quantity of terms he uses or his merely technical usage in legal matters: Shakespeare had a wide-ranging legal understanding integrated into his consciousness” (emphasis added).
Dedicated to the late Tom Regnier (1950-2020), past president of the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, Shakespeare and the Law contains three of Tom’s essays, as well as those of Mark Andre Alexander, the late Justice John Paul Stevens, Sir George Greenwood, Charlton Greenwood Ogburn, Jack L. B. Gohn, J. Anthony Burton, Sir Arthur Underwood, and Roger Stritmatter.
The book is 311 pages long, with a 13-page index. It is available in a softcover edition from Amazon.com.
Learn more about Shakespeare and the Law and the process of its creation – watch the interview now!
