Early modern notions of justice tended to be strongly linked to procedural ideals, casting the state rather than the individual as the guarantor of just order, even if specific officials and systems could be identified as falling short of those ideals. In this essay, I trace some early modern perceptions of the proper means of attaining justice and then explore how those means are represented in the period's drama. As I show, although Renaissance literature's supposedly "intima[te] . . . engagement with the law" has become a critical staple, there is a striking mismatch between the ways justice was done in early modern England and the judicial processes depicted on stage. I offer a number of explanations for why an accurate portrayal of English judicial procedure may have eluded Shakespeare and his contemporaries and delineate the (not necessarily detrimental) consequences of this misalignment for the dramatic representation of justice.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

The publication practices of early modern playwrights like John Marston or Ben Jonson have been widely misunderstood. Through these practices, dramatists did not attempt to distance their works from their theatrical origins, but rather intended to construct an alternative mode of theatricality, thereby reclaiming the visual as a positive force. Through a reconstruction of the relationships between those authors and their printers, and through analyses of their typographic strategies, the essay demonstrates how Jonson in particular made the book his theatre. What emerges is a narrative of Jonson's publishing activities that avoids the conventional, linear account: the playwright did not consistently seek to escape the theatre, but rather, after an initial attempt to associate his plays with classical drama and humanist scholarship, embarked on a decades‐long project of inventing a complex visual code of printed theatricality that culminated in the unfinished 1631 folio, and eventually collapsed, the same year, with the publication of The New Inn.