Judicial Rhetoric and Its Discontents: The Critique of Forensic Oratory in Shakespeare, Jonson, and Spenser

In the 16th and early 17th centuries, the heart of the renewed investment in rhetoric lay in the widely available classical rhetorical manuals De Inventione (Cicero), Institutio Oratoria (Quintilian), the Rhetorica ad Herennium (anonymous), and Aristotle’s Rhetoric. These manuals, the majority of whose prescriptions concerned judicial rhetoric, laid out a complex, multi-faceted method for determining key issues in dispute, finding evidence, and organizing arguments into persuasive oratory to be deployed in a court of law. Despite scholars’ familiarity with the pervasiveness of classical judicial rhetoric in the Renaissance – or perhaps because of it – the way in which Renaissance writers engaged not just with the prescriptions but especially with the presuppositions of classical judicial oratory in its most paradigmatic site, the law court, has not been sufficiently explored. In this study, I investigate the ways in which Shakespeare, Jonson, and Spenser question the presuppositions and theories underlying the deployment of classical judicial oratory even as they draw on these manuals’ prescriptions for shaping and forming legal arguments in key trial scenes in their works. These writers recognized how the practice of early modern law diverged from the classical legal setting for which the manuals had been written in the first place, and accordingly situate a complex response to the deployment of classical judicial oratory within the context of early modern criminal and civil law. My dissertation therefore explores the ways that, in specific trial scenes in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Jonson’s Volpone, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, these writers articulate radically distinctive critiques of the implicit civic ideals that underpin the deployment of judicial oratory in early modern legal jurisdictions. I thus show how Shakespeare, Jonson, and Spenser present judicial oratory not simply as a useful rhetorical form deployed to elicit judgement in a legal case but, more crucially, as a form that constitutes legal judgement in ways that call into question the law’s civic and civilizing ideals.

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