Kill All the Lawyers? Shakespeare's Legal Appeal.

Daniel J. Kornstein's title suggests the multiple purposes behind his study of legal motifs in Shakespeare's plays. By converting to a question Dick the butcher's exuberant contribution to Jack Cade's utopia in 2 Henry VI -"First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" - he indicates his desire to reassess Shakespeare's alleged hostility to lawyers and rebut populist lawyer bashing. The pun on "appeal" emphasizes both the humanistic value of Shakespeare's texts and the need to reheat the case against including literary analysis in law studies. Kornstein engages Richard Posner's argument in Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation (Harvard University Press, 1988) that the study of literature and the interpretation of statutes are very different activities that have little to contribute to one another. On the contrary, Kornstein argues, Shakespeare came from a particularly litigious family in a litigious age, and his plays contain an astonishing number of legal references and trial scenes. Not only do the plays provide good "cases" for aspiring lawyers to study (such as Shylock v. Antonio), they also inform the law as it is practiced today (Measure for Measure having much to say about dead-letter statutes, King Lear about inheritance law).

A practicing attorney, Kornstein writes primarily for the legal community: lawyers, educators, and law students. The book also speaks to Renaissance scholars and literature teachers because law figures so prominently in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Rather than argue Elizabethan legal points, however, he relates the plays to issues in American law. For example, he compares agrarian protest in Jack Cade's rebellion to Shay's Rebellion, the eighteenth-century agrarian protest in western Massachusetts, and, more predictably but no less ironically, Othello to Clarence Thomas. These anachronisms limit the scholarly usefulness of Kill All the Lawyers?, but they create provocative analogies that insist on Shakespeare's currency and that should stimulate discussion in courses devoted to Shakespeare as well as literature and law.

The analyses and applications vary in perspicacity. Hamlet as a study in the evolution of law is a persuasive angle, although the portrait of Hamlet as a melancholic law student is not. Othello as a litigant in a slander suit against Iago seems reductive. The idea that Nick Bottom is a prototypical Jeffersonian idealist, a harbinger of egalitarian democracy, and that A Midsummer Night's Dream is a persuasive example of an activist theory of legal interpretation, is both instructive and delightful. Not surprisingly, Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice are key texts, both for illustrating Shakespeare's complex treatment of law and justice, and for engaging students in legal debate. I think the chapter on Merchant is the best because it subjects Portia to vituperative cross examination, suggesting a number of ways she could have defended Antonio without punishing Shylock so cruelly. The discussion insightfully reopens the play's painful legal and ethnic issues.

In addition to the plays mentioned, Kornstein discusses Julius Caesar, Henry IV, Richard III, Much Ado About Nothing, The Winter's Tale, Richard II, and King Lear. The organization is by legal issue rather than by chronology. He speculates about how Shakespeare came to be so preoccupied with law but concludes that Shakespeare probably was not a scrivener during his so-called lost years. Kornstein eschews jargon and ideology (although his own liberalism is apparent), and so his book never gets abstract. Conversely, it doesn't engage theoretical-political issues in Shakespeare's treatment of power or in literature's place in law studies. Kornstein's style is always lucid and often witty. The bibliography is very useful, especially for references to Shakespeare in law journals.

RICHARD BRUCHER University of Maine, Orono