LibGuides: Shakespeare Across Subject Areas: Law

Finding Articles

Database Searches:

Search the databases below for texts of Shakespeare's poetry (primary sources) or literary criticism about it (secondary sources). Possible keyword searches include the following:

Shakespeare AND law
law AND early modern England
law and literature AND Shakespeare
search by specific plays (Merchant of Venice AND law)

Criminal Justice Database
Articles from criminal justice journals and magazines with limited full text. Subjects include corrections, drug enforcement, rehabilitation, family law, and industrial security.
JSTOR Arts & Sciences Archive Collection
Full text articles from approximately 640 journals within the Humanities, Social Sciences and Sciences. JSTOR serves as a journal back file and does not contain the most recent years of the subscribed journals. Subscriptions to Arts & Sciences Archival Collections I, III, V & XIV.
Literature Resource Center
Articles from scholarly journals and literary magazines, biographies, and literary criticism and overview essays on books, authors, and literary topics. Includes full text of some poems and short stories.
Sage Journals Online
Full text articles from scholarly journals in business, humanities, and social sciences.

Shakespeare and Lawyers

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." Dick the Butcher in Henry VI, Part II, Act IV, Scene II, Line 73

Did Shakespeare hate lawyers? That's what this (in)famous line would lead us to believe, and scholars have gone back and forth about what it really means for years. Some think its akin to a joke about lawyers, and others believe that it is a compliment to lawyers who instill justice--considering the character who says the line is a henchman for the rebel Jack Cade. These articles explore the topic so you can come to your own conclusion.

Selected eBooks

Shakespeare and Philosophy by Raymond Angelo Belliotti
Publication Date: 2012-01-01
This book is an interdisciplinary work that weaves literary interpretation, legal theory, and philosophical doctrine about sex and love into a coherent mosaic in the context of two of Shakespeare's plays: "The Merchant of Venice "and "Measure for Measure." The aim is partly theoretical but mostly practical: to demonstrate what we can learn about living a robustly meaningful and significant human life by taking Shakespeare's work seriously from contemporary philosophical and legal vantage points. Shakespeare does not reveal a tightly defined moral system that he is trying to urge upon his audience. Instead, Shakespeare challenges his audience to struggle with moral complexity as they confront conflicting elements surrounding legal and moral issues presented in his work and within the souls of his characters.
Shakespeare's Imaginary Constitution by Paul Raffield
Publication Date: 2010-10-29
Through an examination of six plays by Shakespeare, the author presents an innovative analysis of political developments in the last decade of Elizabethan rule and their representation in poetic drama of the period. The playhouses of London in the 1590s provided a distinctive forum for discourse and dissemination of nascent political ideas. Shakespeare exploited the unique capacity of theatre to humanise contemporary debate concerning the powers of the crown and the extent to which these were limited by law. The autonomous subject of law is represented in the plays considered here as a sentient political being whose natural rights and liberties found an analogue in the narratives of common law, as recorded in juristic texts and law reports of the early modern era.
Eternal Bonds, True Contracts by A. G. Harmon
Publication Date: 2004-07-15
Uses legal and literary resources to explore Shakespeare's use of the law and its instruments in the problem plays.