Judicial Rhetoric and Its Discontents: The Critique of Forensic Oratory in Shakespeare, Jonson, and Spenser
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.022 | 0.033 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.098 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".