Junior Faculty Fellow 2002-03
Brian Lockey (Literature)
San Francisco State University
Conquest and English Legal Identity
in the Early Modern Romance
My research looks at how the early modern genre of
romance played a significant role in the discursive formation of legal
imperialism. While many English subjects held tenaciously to the tradition
of common law—a legal system grounded in immemorial English custom—as
a way of distinguishing England from its Catholic aggressors, such legal
claims put the English at a distinct disadvantage in foreign contexts
where England itself was the aggressor. How could English writers insist
on the implementation of English common law in Ireland, for example,
when the common law was, according to Edmund Spenser, uniquely suited
to "the kingdom for which it was devised"?
As I show, prominent early modern writers of romance,
such as Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and
Lady Mary Wroth, employed narrative and poetic strategies in order to
resolve this difficulty. These writers posited Catholic natural-law
and civil-law traditions as alternatives to native legal discourse,
thereby laying an ethical basis for English conquest. In The Arcadia,
Sidney overcomes his misgivings about the Spanish source of recent Catholic
natural-law doctrine and uses natural-law foundations in order to offer
an alternative to the violent form of conquest that Spain had pursued.
In Book Six of The Faerie Queene, Spenser explores a possible foreign
policy in Ireland based on a compromise between the competing legal
discourses of natural law and common law, a compromise that Spenser
was unable to accomplish in his prose tract on Ireland. Finally, Shakespeare's
Cymbeline and Wroth's Urania suggest that natural law and common law
were separately necessary to British imperialism. In contrast to Spenser's
attempt to resolve the conflict between these two legal discourses,
Shakespeare and Wroth present the British sovereign as responsible for
imposing natural law on other nations while at the same time justifying
Britain's own retention of native legal traditions. In each of these
literary texts, then, I explore how early modern writers employed romance
conventions in order to negotiate a coherent legal rationale for English
expansion.
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