Theaters of Pardoning , livre ebook

323

pages

English

Ebooks

2019

Écrit par
Bernadette Meyler

Publié par
Cornell University Press

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323

pages

English

Ebooks

2019

Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

Cornell University Press

Date de parution

15 septembre 2019

EAN13

9781501739392

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

3 Mo

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.

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Publié par

Cornell University Press

Date de parution

15 septembre 2019

EAN13

9781501739392

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

3 Mo

THEATERS OF PARDONING

Series editor: Elizabeth S. Anker, Cornell University

CORPUS JURIS: THE HUMANITIES IN POLITICS AND LAWBOOKS AT THE PUBLISHES INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN LAW, POLITICS, AND THE HUMANITIES—INCLUDING HIS-TORY, LITERARY CRITICISM, ANTHROPOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGIOUS STUDIES, AND

POLITICAL THEORY. BOOKS IN THIS SERIES TACKLE NEW OR UNDER-ANALYZED ISSUES

IN POLITICS AND LAW AND DEVELOP INNOVATIVE METHODS TO UNDERTAKE THOSE INQUIRIES. THE GOAL OF THE SERIES IS TO MULTIPLY THE INTERDISCIPLINARY JUNC-TURES AND CONVERSATIONS THAT SHAPE THE STUDY OF LAW.

THEATERS OF PARDONING

Bernadette Meyler

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

First published 2019 by Cornell University Press

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Names: Meyler, Bernadette, author. Title: Theaters of pardoning / Bernadette Meyler. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2019. | Series: Corpus juris : the humanities in politics and law | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identiﬁers: LCCN 2019007604 (print) | LCCN 2019011012 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501739392 (ebook pdf) | ISBN 9781501739408 (ebook epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501739330 | ISBN 9781501739330?(hardcover ;?alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501739347?(pbk. ;?alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Theater—Political aspects—England— History—17th century. | Clemency in literature. | Pardon— England—History—17th century. | Pardon. | English drama (Tragicomedy)—17th century—History and criticism. | Politics and literature—England—History—17th century. | Law and literature—England—History—17th century. | Political plays, English—History and criticism. | Politics in literature. Classiﬁcation: LCC PR678.L38 (ebook) | LCC PR678.L38 M49 2019 (print) | DDC 822/.409—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019007604

Cover image: Shylock, Portia, Bassanio, Antonio, Gratiano, and Nerissa. “In which predicament, I say, thou stand’st” (act 4, scene 1). FromShakespeare’s Comedy of the Merchant of Venice, ill. James D. Linton (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1909). Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

In memory of my mother, Joan Meyler, whose exceptional love, generosity, and forgiveness touched so many and so deeply

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 inThe Laws of Candy

FOUR From Sovereignty to the State: The Tragicomic Clemency of Massinger’sThe 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

111

143

175

197 249

275 279 281 301

vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In writing this book, I have made wonderful friends and incurred many debts, only the deepest of which I can acknowledge here. I began pondering the themes of pardoning and sovereignty as well as their connection to early modern drama while a graduate student in English at the University of California, Irvine. Julia Reinhard Lupton, J. Hillis Miller, and Jacques Derrida furnished extraordinarily generous and incisive mentorship, and I beneﬁted greatly from conversations with Wolfgang Iser, Victoria Kahn, and Richard Kroll along the way. Latenight confabulations with graduate school friends and colleagues Jason Smith, Steven Miller, and Jeff Atteberry have left their mark throughout this work. When my interests turned increasingly toward law, I found George Fisher, Tom Green, Bob Weisberg, Janet Halley, and Martin Stone invaluable interlocu tors, and I am extremely grateful for their efforts to bring me up to speed in mat ters of legal history and law and literature. During my time at Cornell University, Annelise Riles, Rayna Kalas, and Philip Lorenz provided suggestions that were key to the arguments of particular chapters. I was also fortunate to beneﬁt from the sustained advice of Peter Brooks, Daniel HellerRoazen, Hendrik Hartog, and Oliver Arnold during the year I spent as a fellow in the Law and Public Affairs Program at Princeton and am indebted to the program for the time and intellectual camaraderie it afforded me. As I completed the book at Stanford, I enjoyed the encouragement of David Sklansky, Rick Banks, Barbara Fried, and Rich Ford. A number of scholars whom I encountered at conferences or through other academic exchanges opened up new paths of thought and gave me valuable research suggestions; these include, among many others, Lorna Hutson, Bradin Cormack, Julie Stone Peters, and Kathy Eden. I could not have completed this book without the support of close friends and interlocutors, some of whom witnessed the birth of the project and others whom I met along the way. Amalia Kessler, Ben Heller, Elizabeth Anker, Kenji Yoshino, Amanda Claybaugh, Martin Puchner, Jim Whitman, Dan Edelstein, Robert Katzmann, Henry Turner, Alex Krulic, Susanna Blumenthal, and Avlana Eisenberg have all lent me their ears and imagination on topics both clearly ger mane and those seemingly more remote.

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