Abstract
Conflicts over property occur in courtly, urban, and rural settings in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI (1590–92) and As You Like It (1599).1 In the history play, grievances about landed property, varying from the enclosure of common lands to the loss of English territory to France, inspire laborers and nobles to rebel. Jack Cade, an urban laborer, leads a short-lived rebellion with the radical aim of abolishing all private property in order to eliminate the social hierarchy that differentiates poor laboring men from nobles and gentry. Nobles, who unite in order to defeat Cade’s rebellion and drive him from London, do so out of self-interest, which ultimately inspires their own rebellion against the king. Similarly, in As You Like It self-interest undermines social relationships. Frederick, the younger brother in a noble family, usurps its dukedom from the legitimate heir, Duke Senior, and Oliver, the eldest brother in a gentry family, not only neglects his responsibilities to Orlando, his youngest brother, but also threatens his life. In both plays characters flee from the city and the court to find protection from unruliness in secluded retreats: the Garden of Iden in 2 Henry VI and the Forest of Arden in As You Like It. It is these pleasant landscapes, modulations of the rhetorical and poetic convention of the locus amoenus, which explicate a nexus of property issues.2
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Notes
Citations are taken from William Shakespeare, As You Like It and The Second Part of Henry VI, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), pp. 365–402, 630–70.
Place was a topos of proof in judicial rhetoric and praise in epideictic rhetoric. In classical Greek and Roman poetry as well as the Latin poetry of the middle ages, these topoi informed a variety of literary genres, including epic and geor-gic, which included description and praise of a “pleasant place” or locus amoenus. See Ernst Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 195–202.
On enclosure in 2 Henry VI see Thomas Cartelli, “Jack Cade in the Garden: Class Consciousness and Class Conflict in the Tudor-Stuart Period,” in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John M. Archer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 48–67
Stephen Greenblatt, “Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion,” Representations 1 (1983), 23–25
Michael Hattaway, “Rebellion, Class Consciousness, and Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI,” Cahiers Elizabethans 33 (1988), 13–22
Richard Wilson, Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1993), pp. 63–82.
On the consequences of enclosure for agrarian relations in England see Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood, The Trumpet of Sedition: Political Theory and the Rise of Capitalism, 1509–1688 (London: Pluto Press, 1999), p. 15.
Timothy Kenyon, Utopian Communism and Political Thought in Early Modern England (London: Pinter Publishers, 1989), p. 30.
St. Augustine, “Contra Adimantum Manichaei discipulum”, xx.2, cited in A.J. Carlyle, “The Theory of Property in Medieval Theology,” in Property: Its Duties and Rights, ed. Charles Gore (London: Macmillan, 1915), p. 122
Richard Schlatter, Private Property: The History of an Idea (London: Allen & Unwin, 1951), p. 35.
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 28 (London: Blackfriars, 1964–76), pp. la, 2ae, 95, 2.
See R.S. White, Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 29–36, 44–71.
The biblical account of the Fall provided English writers with an “authority” for their assertions about property law and inheritance customs, as explained by Nancy E. Wright with Margaret W. Ferguson, “Introduction,” in Women, Property and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England, ed. Nancy E. Wright, Margaret W. Ferguson, and A.R. Buck (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), p. 4.
Citations are taken from Thomas Starkey, A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, ed. Thomas Mayer (London: Royal Historical Society, 1989). Spelling in all quotations from Starkey has been modernized. The value of Starkey’s Dialogue to critical study, Neal Wood explains, lies in the fact that it “reflected some of the most significant intellectual trends of the age. Many of its social and political ideas can be traced to humanist and classical sources, but the impress of [More’s] Utopia is unmistakable”; see Foundations of Political Economy: Some Early Tudor Views on State and Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 153–54. On property law in Starkey’s Dialogue,
see A.R. Buck, “Rhetoric and Real Property in Tudor England: Thomas Starkey’s Dialogue between Pole and Lupset,” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 4 (1992), 27–44.
Keith Wrightson, “Estates, Degrees and Sorts in Tudor and Stuart England,” History Today 37 (1987), 21.
R.W. Hoyle, “The Land-Family Bond in England,” Past and Present 146 (1995), 151–73.
See A.R. Buck, “The Politics of the Land Law in Tudor England, 1529–1540,” Journal of Legal History 11 (1990), 200–15.
G.L. Harriss, “Medieval Doctrines in the Debates on Supply, 1610–1629,” in Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History, ed. Kevin Sharpe (London: Methuen, 1978), pp. 75–76.
Louise Montrose, “The Place of a Brother in As You Like It: Social Processes and Comic Form,” Shakespeare Quarterly 32 (1981), 28–54.
See Leonard Cantor, “Forests, Chases, Parks and Warrens,” in The English Medieval Landscape, ed. Leonard Cantor (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), p. 56.
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© 2007 Nancy E. Wright and A. R. Buck
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Wright, N.E., Buck, A.R. (2007). Cast out of Eden: Property and Inheritance in Shakespearean Drama. In: Jordan, C., Cunningham, K. (eds) The Law in Shakespeare. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230626348_5
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