Forensic Shakespeare

<em>Forensic Shakespeare</em> illustrates Shakespeare's creative processes by revealing the intellectual materials out of which some of his most famous works were composed. Focusing on the narrative poem <em>Lucrece</em> on four of his late Elizabethan plays (<em>Romeo and Juliet The Merchant of Venice Julius</em> <em>Caesar</em> and <em>Hamlet</em>) and on three early Jacobean dramas (<em>Othello Measure for Measure</em> and <em>All's Well That Ends Well</em>) Quentin Skinner argues that major speeches and sometimes sequences of scenes are crafted according to a set of rhetorical precepts about how to develop a persuasive judicial case either in accusation or defence. Some of these works have traditionally been grouped together as 'problem plays' but here Skinner offers a different explanation for their frequent similarities of tone. There have been many studies of Shakespeare's rhetoric but they have generally concentrated on his wordplay and use of figures and tropes. By contrast this study concentrates on Shakespeare's use of judicial rhetoric as a method of argument. By approaching the plays from this perspective Skinner is able to account for some distinctive features of Shakespeare's vocabulary and also help to explain why certain scenes follow a recurrent pattern and arrangement. More broadly he is able to illustrate the extent of Shakespeare's engagement with an entire tradition of classical and Renaissance humanist thought.<br>