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John Drakakis, Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama., Notes and Queries, Volume 60, Issue 4, December 2013, Pages 601–605, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjt177
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Extract
COMING in the wake of the demise, albeit exaggerated, of recent literary historicisms, Lorna Hutson’s The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama provides a thoroughgoing overhauling of the connections between the various strands in Renaissance culture and literary production. We have become accustomed to a particular narrative of the representations of ‘political theology’ and of ‘power’ through the writings of Ernst Kantorowicz and Michel Foucault, and of the relationship between Graeco-Roman classical writing and the drama and literature of the English Renaissance. But in Hutson’s view these narratives have obscured a series of surprising connections between what she calls ‘the rhetoric of dramatic narrative’ and ‘developments in popular legal culture’ in sixteenth-century England. The ‘invention’ of her title does not signal an essentialist quest for origins, since the evidence she adduces re-opens the vexed questions inherent in the concept of periodization. Rather, her concern is to investigate the forensic power of rhetoric as a tool for shaping narratives, and her insistence on the recovery of the term’s Latin root invenire or ‘finding’ and its connection with the Ciceronian concept of ‘invention’ (De Inventione), allows her to focus on the process of discovery of ‘the most appropriate arguments, figures of speech, and topics to use in a particular kind of oration, or persuasive discourse’ (1) that has significant implications for theatrical representation beyond the confines of judicial process. Hutson’s initial task is to recover from the classical rhetorics of Cicero and Quintillian a connection between their more general educative function and the ‘judicial or forensic oratory’ that was ‘designed to teach lawyers how to find arguments to prove the likely innocence or guilt of a defendant in a particular case’ (ibid.). Indeed, it is through an intricate investigation of the social, political, religious, and cultural ramifications of the juridical practices operating in Elizabethan England, and their transference to the sphere of theatrical plotting, that Hutson challenges a series of orthodoxies.
