Corpus Juris: The Humanities in Politics and Law

Bernadette Meyler

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501739408
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

From Gerald Ford's preemptive pardon of Richard Nixon and Donald Trump's claims that as president he could pardon himself to the posthumous royal pardon of Alan Turing, the power of the pardon has a powerful hold on the political and cultural imagination. In Theaters of Pardoning, Bernadette Meyler traces the roots of contemporary understandings of pardoning to tragicomic "theaters of pardoning" in the drama and politics of seventeenth-century England. Shifts in how pardoning was represented on the stage and discussed in political tracts and in Parliament reflected the transition from a more monarchical and judgment-focused form of the concept to an increasingly parliamentary and legislative vision of sovereignty.

Meyler shows that on the English stage, individual pardons of revenge subtly transformed into more sweeping pardons of revolution, from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, where a series of final pardons interrupts what might otherwise have been a cycle of revenge, to later works like John Ford's The Laws of Candy and Philip Massinger's The Bondman, in which the exercise of mercy prevents the overturn of the state itself. In the political arena, the pardon as a right of kingship evolved into a legal concept, culminating in the idea of a general amnesty, the "Act of Oblivion, " for actions taken during the English Civil War. Reconceiving pardoning as law-giving effectively displaced sovereignty from king to legislature, a shift that continues to attract suspicion about the exercise of pardoning. Only by breaking the connection between pardoning and sovereignty that was cemented in seventeenth-century England, Meyler concludes, can we reinvigorate the pardon as a democratic practice.

Index

Act of Oblivion (1563), 177, 181–82

Act of Oblivion (1660), 31, 167, 169, 174, 188, 195, 197–204, 234–35, 238–47, 255n17

acts of oblivion, 29–31, 165, 168, 177–87, 200n6, 241. See also amnesty

Aeschylus, 60; Agamemnon, 65, 68–69; Eumenides, 37, 38, 69, 71; The Libation Bearers, 65, 69; Oresteia, 27, 35, 36, 40–42, 64–65, 68–73, 89n40, 269

Agamben, Giorgio, 89–90, 102n76, 151, 200n6, 257n21

Albrecht, Louis, 43n11

aliens, 113–14, 117, 120, 122, 136–37, 139

ambition, 138, 139

American Revolution, 268, 270n56

amnesty, 3, 177–80, 249, 255–56, 255n17. See also acts of oblivion

Antichrist, 91–93, 95–96, 97, 100, 102n76, 109

apocalypticism, 28, 76, 84, 84n, 86n31, 91–109

Arendt, Hannah, 174, 201, 250, 267–72; The Human Condition, 267–68, 272; On Revolution, 268–72

Aristophanes, 65–66, 66n55; Frogs, 66–68, 66n57; Plutus, 66

Aristotle, 16–17, 19–25, 94, 99–100, 146–48, 211, 224n69; Poetics, 16–17, 19; Rhetoric, 19

Arpaio, Joe, 1

Arundell, Earl of, 127

audiences: commonalities of legal and theatrical, 6–8; at conclusion of theaters of pardoning, 123; for English drama, 8–10; judgments rendered by, 9–12, 41; for Measure for Measure, 41, 44

Augustine, 46n15

Bacon, Francis, 131, 134, 145

Bailey, Rebecca, 10

Bale, John, 92

Barbour, Reid, 145

Barton, Dunbar Plunket, 5n11

Beattie, Luke, 176, 279

Beaumont, Francis, 14, 111, 169

Bellarmine, Cardinal, 104

Benjamin, Walter, 259

Bernard, Richard, 95

Bernthal, Craig,...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Theaters of Pardoning
• One Dramatic Judgments: Measure for Measure, Revenge, and the Institution of the Law
• Two Emplotting Politics: James I and the “Powder Treason”
• Three Non-Sovereign Forgiveness: Mercy among Equals in The Laws of Candy
• Four From Sovereignty to the State: The Tragicomic Clemency of Massinger’s The Bondman
• Five Between Royal Pardons and Acts of Oblivion: The Transitional Justice of Cosmo Manuche and James Compton, Earl of Northampton
• Six Pardoning Revolution: The 1660 Act of Oblivion and Hobbes’s Recentering of Sovereignty
• Postlude: Pardoning and Liberal Constitutionalism
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Bibliography
• Index