Moments of Intersection : Shakespeare’s plays and the operations of early modern law in cases of vagrancy, sexual deviancy and witchcraft

Johnson, David and Findlay, Alison and Egan, Clare (2025) Moments of Intersection : Shakespeare’s plays and the operations of early modern law in cases of vagrancy, sexual deviancy and witchcraft. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This thesis examines a selection of Shakespeare’s plays as critical representations of the multiple legal systems and jurisdictions that operated in early modern people’s everyday lives. Through the relationships between law and literature, the thesis reveals the incongruity that existed between the ordinary lives of the people as depicted in the plays and those that shaped the laws in early modern England. Instead of focusing on a single play as a moment captured in history, the thesis looks at the fictional representation of a crime from two Elizabethan plays, 2 Henry VI and The Merry Wives of Windsor, and four Jacobean plays, Measure for Measure, Macbeth, Coriolanus and The Winter’s Tale. It focuses on the representation of three crimes: masterlessness, sexual transgression and witchcraft. When taken together, this thesis suggests that these dramatic representations or moments of intersection between law and literature, offer us a glimpse into different localised attitudes about the dynamic early modern legal landscape. This thesis compares the plays’ representation of the law’s efficacy, its use of adjudication and punishment, with the real-world outcomes dictated by parliamentary legislation. It investigates how the law is represented as dysfunctional, unfair or inequitable while acknowledging the broader societal contexts in which the law operated. Through the crime of masterlessness, the thesis examines the divergence between an increasingly punitive legislative process and its representation in the plays. The crime of sexual transgression explores the intersections of secular, spiritual, and community self-regulatory jurisdictions. Finally, the crime of witchcraft is analysed in relation to the evolution of legal narratives in law and on stage. The thesis’s original argument is that each dramatized criminal act has to be investigated separately as independent moments of intersection between law, society and literature because each crime’s patterns of divergence, intersection or evolution is unique. It thus demonstrates that a new approach to investigating specific crimes and their temporal jurisdictions is required to provide us with a clearer glimpse at the different localised attitudes of the play writing community and their patrons.