The Invention of Suspicion

The Invention of Suspicion
Author :
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Total Pages : 1309
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780191615894
ISBN-13 : 0191615897
Rating : 4/5 (94 Downloads)

Book Synopsis The Invention of Suspicion by : Lorna Hutson

Download or read book The Invention of Suspicion written by Lorna Hutson and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2011-04-14 with total page 1309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Invention of Suspicion argues that the English justice system underwent changes in the sixteenth century that, because of the system's participatory nature, had a widespread effect and a decisive impact on the development of English Renaissance drama. These changes gradually made evidence evaluation a popular skill: justices of peace and juries were increasingly required to weigh up the probabilities of competing narratives of facts. At precisely the same time, English dramatists were absorbing, from Latin legal rhetoric and from Latin comedy, poetic strategies that enabled them to make their plays more persuasively realistic, more 'probable'. The result of this enormously rich conjunction of popular legal culture and ancient forensic rhetoric was a drama in which dramatis personae habitually gather evidence and 'invent' arguments of suspicion and conjecture about one another, thus prompting us, as readers and audience, to reconstruct this 'evidence' as stories of characters' private histories and inner lives. In this drama, people act in uncertainty, inferring one another's motives and testing evidence for their conclusions. As well as offering an overarching account of how changes in juridical epistemology relate to post-Reformation drama, this book examines comic dramatic writing associated with the Inns of Court in the overlooked decades of the 1560s and 70s. It argues that these experiments constituted an influential sub-genre, assimilating the structures of Roman comedy to current civic and political concerns with the administration of justice. This sub-genre's impact may be seen in Shakespeare's early experiments in revenge tragedy, history play and romance comedy, in Titus Andronicus, Henry VI and The Comedy of Errors, as well as Jonson's Every Man in his Humour, Bartholomew Fair and The Alchemist. The book ranges from mid-fifteenth century drama, through sixteenth century interludes to the drama of the 1590s and 1600s. It draws on recent research by legal historians, and on a range of legal-historical sources in print and manuscript.


The Invention of Suspicion Related Books

The Invention of Suspicion
Language: en
Pages: 1309
Authors: Lorna Hutson
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2011-04-14 - Publisher: OUP Oxford

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Invention of Suspicion argues that the English justice system underwent changes in the sixteenth century that, because of the system's participatory nature,
The Invention of Love
Language: en
Pages: 116
Authors: Tom Stoppard
Categories: Drama
Type: BOOK - Published: 1998 - Publisher: Grove Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Poetry, scholarship, and love are entwined in Tom Stoppard's new play about A.E. Housman, which "Variety" has called "vintage Stoppard in its intelligence and w
Restless Genius
Language: en
Pages: 288
Authors: Richard J. Tofel
Categories: Biography & Autobiography
Type: BOOK - Published: 2009-02-03 - Publisher: St. Martin's Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The story of the man who transformed The Wall Street Journal and modern media In 1929, Barney Kilgore, fresh from college in small-town Indiana, took a sleepy,
The Invention of Everything Else
Language: en
Pages: 273
Authors: Samantha Hunt
Categories: Fiction
Type: BOOK - Published: 2009 - Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Hunt's novel is a wondrous imagining of an unlikely friendship between theeccentric inventor Nikola Tesla and a young chambermaid in the Hotel New Yorker, where
Inventing the Cotton Gin
Language: en
Pages: 256
Authors: Angela Lakwete
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2005-09-16 - Publisher: JHU Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Lakwete shows how indentured British, and later enslaved Africans, built and used foot-powered models to process the cotton they grew for export. After Eli Whit