Law, Probability and Character in Shakespeare

Abstract

This chapter explores the overlap between legal and rhetorical definitions of ‘probability’ or ‘probable cause’ in sixteenth-century England, and the emergence of a kind of theatrical realism based not on the vividness of what is seen or enacted on stage, but on precisely those hidden, causal or motivational elements of dramatic action that are merely inferred from dialogue and narrative, and which encourage us to think of dramatis personae as real people who precede and outlast the story in which they act. To those readers of this interdisciplinary collection who come from fields other than that of literary criticism, the idea that this approach might be at all unusual, or controversial, will probably come as a surprise. Exploring the motives of characters in Shakespeare’s plays has long been, as a recent study of Shakespearean character has put it, ‘a vernacular intuition’.¹ Indeed, in the earliest study of a Shakespearean ‘character’ as such, Maurice Morgann’s 1777 defence of Falstaff, the author justified his investigation into the evidence for Falstaff’s not being a coward by