In The Invention of Suspicion (2007), Lorna Hutson convincingly identified the shaping role of participatory justice on early modern English literature. Through her reexamination of the concurrent centralization and professionalization of law, Penelope Geng builds from this work in Communal Justice in Shakespeare's England, breaking new ground by bringing affect to bear. Adding to a growing body of scholarship that explores the lesser-acknowledged affective dimensions of the “love-triangle” of law, literature, and history—to borrow Bernadette Meyler's phrase (New Directions in Law and Literature, 2017)—Geng turns to consider “the cultural value of fictions and fantasies of communal justice” (11).
For Geng, the preoccupation with collaborative legal practice that propels early modern English literature lies, as the book's title suggests, in community as a practical unit, theoretical ideal, and affective body. In its claim that the power of early modern fictions of communal justice “lies in their romantic and idealistic depiction of what law could be” (11), this book propounds the reassuring utopian vision of modern humanist thought that “literature could save law from itself by reminding it of its lost humanity” (Julie Stone Peters, “Law, Literature, and the Vanishing Real,” PMLA 120.2 [2005]: 445). As so often elsewhere in law and literature studies, Geng credits drama with a unique ability to engage with law, here to act as a participatory community in which the audience engages in “embodied” rather than merely “imagined” (21) lay magistracy.
Showing the pervasiveness of the idea that “God hath established an assize for judgement within our selves” (Robert Abbot, The Assize at Home [1623], E8r), chapter 1, “From Assise to the Assize at Home,” convincingly connects the operations of lay magistracy and conscience. Chapter 2, “Judicature in Crisis: Henry IV, Part 2,” takes on the Platonic presumption that justice requires “emotional and physical distance” (50) to attain reasoned judgment. Using Shakespeare's Chief Justice as her touchstone, Geng contends that his legal characterization at once engages “popular notions of magistracy” and contrarily suggests “a link between a judge's capacity for fellow-feeling and his power to do justice” (56).
In chapter 3, “Neighbourliness and the Coroner's Inquest in English Domestic Tragedies,” Geng compellingly considers domestic tragedy as “a moral-legal instrument” (93) that works on the conscience of its audience. Affect here becomes a legal remedy as, not unlike golden age crime fiction, the Miss Marple figures of early modern drama band together against community-threatening death and danger to justly prevail in the end. Likewise, chapter 4, “Repairing Community: Empathetic Witnessing in King Lear,” considers the reparative potential of theater to build community through “intersubjective witnessing” (117). Geng here shows, through an attentive reading of Edgar's verge speech, the comfort to be found in description and vivid imagination (although we see these methods working to dangerously different ends in Shakespeare's Othello).
Chapter 5, “Communal Shaming and the Limitations of Legal Forms: Henry VI, Part 2 and Macbeth,” takes as its foundation the premise that drama is able to engage in “emotional labour” (124) that law cannot. Exploring dramatic depictions of penitents Eleanor Cobham and Jane Shore, Geng deftly shows how the taper of their penitential perambulations is taken up by Lady Macbeth. Reading the sleepwalking scene to great effect, Geng convincingly contends that the remorse we discern therein is a mere fiction “whose existence depends on the imagination of the spectator” (141) or, we might say, witness. Connecting this affective witnessing to the communal need to feel “that the offender is sincerely sorry” (143), Geng exposes the workings of remorse as a legal fiction.
Building into the monograph's postscript, Communal Justice achieves its payoff as Geng reaches forward to the later seventeenth century and beyond to emphasize the way law has historically obscured its own communal investments in its efforts to perpetuate a veneer of unquestionable and reasonable, rather than passionate, judgment. Sir Matthew Hale argues that judges are “a great advantage and light to laymen” (History of the Common Law of England [1713], 292). But, as our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man reminds us, with great power comes great responsibility, responsibility that Geng—building from a theoretical foundation in Sara Ahmed's work on community and self-care—locates in our own critical pursuit of communal justice.
