Murder in Shakespeare's England.

Murder in Shakespeare's England. By Vanessa McMahon (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2004) x plus 285pp. $29.95).

"For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak/ With most miraculous organ" (Hamlet, Act ii. Sc. 2). Although the serious study of crime as a social and cultural phenomenon is relatively recent, historians have come to rely on its silver-tongued eloquence. Murder, its investigation, the testimony of witnesses and suspects, and depositions, provide scholars with a rich range of evidence that illuminates not only the dark troubled corners the killers of yesteryear inhabited, but also reveals the deeper anatomy of life in the past. Vanessa McMahon's slightly mistitled Murder in Shakespeare's England is a impressive addition to the literature of "history from crime." (1) The book is not in fact about murder in Shakespeare's time, for the author reaches considerably beyond the span of the bard's life and most evidence dates from after his death in 1616.

Like other historians who have turned their attention to crime, McMahon cares little about the dastardly deed itself. She prudently eschews attempting any "abstract decisions about guilt and innocence" as "irrelevant," preferring to use murder (and all the vast documentation that accompanies it) to reveal "what it was like to live in the past, what it was like to be male to female, and the kinds of difference other categories, like age, religion, social status and ethnicity, really had on everyday life." (xxv) She, therefore, employs murder--in the historical forms of criminal investigations and murder narratives--as a vade mecum to late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English society. While some scholar s have raised objections to using the extraordinary to explain the ordinary, the method is by now so well-established that there seems little need to rehash the arguments for and against. However, it does seem legitimate to query: what's new here? What can yet another study of crime in England tell us that we don't already know about crime or about early modern English society? First, few studies of crime have so painstakingly and creatively exploited such a formidable range of printed and archival materials. Sessions papers, indictments, depositions, and a rich pamphlet literature allow McMahon to measure reality (such as frequency of particular crimes and the social identity of their perpetrators) against perceptions and to assess the role crime played in and on the imagination. Her contrapuntal handling of sources endows the study with persuasiveness and immediacy, while rooting it firmly in a unique time and place. This is important, because so much about crime patterns seems depressingly persistent. In the United States, for instance, in the closing decade of the twentieth century, we know that "males are overwhelmingly the victims and perpetrators of violence ... and six out of every ten women murdered in the United State are killed by someone they know, about half of them by a spouse or an intimate acquaintance." (2) Little on the surface distinguishes those depressing statistics from the experience of sixteenth and seventeenth-century England.

Yet statistics are often illusory, or misleading, as McMahon recognizes. Not the numbers but the effect of murder on social perceptions and, conversely, social perceptions on the understanding of murder and murderers, is her focus. Nonetheless, she considers whether early modern people really were more violent than we are today. Over twenty years ago, Lawrence Stone famously suggested that early modern homicide rates were "five to ten times higher than those today." (3) McMahon (rightly) voices the skepticism that many scholars have raised about his numbers, but additionally argues that numbers alone are not enough for "[h]omicide had a greater impact, in terms of notoriety and of terror, than bare statistics allow." (198). Here McMahon pursues a rather different line of investigation than many scholars who have devoted themselves to the historical study of crime. She fixes on group psychology, especially fear: how particular fears--of disorderly society, of strangers, of witches, of papists, of bastardy, of foreigners--crystallized the image of the "usual suspects" and conjured in peoples' minds those horrible forms that shook them to the very core. Whereas "statistics agreed that a killer was more likely to be a neighbour or family member than a stranger, soldier or secret papist," (199) that was not what mattered, for "fear is not based on experience, but imagination." (119) Thus although the usual suspects were not the real killers, it was they who "terrif[ied] and threaten[ed] the imaginations of early modern people." (221) The weight of that menace can be observed most clearly in the pamphlet literature that indulged and excited the imagination. But while the mental images of early modern peoples are not identical to ours, there are some eery parallels. We, too, fear the stranger who rarely harms us. The figure of the sexual predator and serial killer that haunts us, however, disturbed the dreams of our early modern ancestors not one whit: that horror could only arise in a world where psychology probed the frightening depths of the subconscious and created the psychopathic "Ripper."

Exploring the mental world of early modern Englishmen- and women is important to McMahon, but it is not her only brief. Equally impressive is her careful analysis of how definitions of murder shifted even when law did not. Statute law remained essentially the same from the 1624 Murder Act until 1752, but "the way these laws were applied changed significantly." (xxi) McMahon demonstrates how delicts were fashioned, sustained, and then eventually discarded. Infanticide became a crime, for instance, in 1624 as a response to a perceived (and by no means real) rise in rates of bastardy (although McMahon leaves unexplained why fears of bastardy should have peaked then). Here, too, we are introduced to fascinating material documenting changing perceptions of evidence, as the author traces how bodies (and thus forensic medicine) came to "[define] the nature of the crime and [provide] the key proof for conviction". (29) One substantial result of this shift was the weakening and then the disappearance of women's authority as experts.

Every chapter begins with a vignette detailing a particular episode from the annals of crime. Yet, McMahon has no intention of trying to deduce a world from an incident nor does she seek to typify any. Rather she uses the individual case--whether the poisoning of a husband by his wife or the death of a Yorkshireman in a brawl--to reveal the historically rooted issues each crime presented. She then adduces additional material to explain how circumstances altered chains of events and outcomes, to separate fact from myth, and to arrange a singular occurrence within a broader frame. Thus, she tests common assumptions as to, for instance, whether poison really was a "woman's weapon" (it was not). While one might doubt the validity of the divisions she postulates (one is a little put off by chapters ahistorically titled "supernatural sleuths" or "the usual suspects" and one might wonder about the decision to treat murderous mothers, infant corpses, and infanticide in separate chapters), this strategy allows McMahon to isolate substantive issues and treat them sequentially. In discussing the disrupted households in which servants sometimes fell afoul of their masters leading to the death of one or the other or both, for example, the real focus is on disorder in the community for "[a]fter all, order in the household reflected on wider society. By protecting the family, the community was protecting itself." (105) All this is very persuasive, although this reader occasionally had the feeling that murder was not revealing society, but rather the other way around. Still, these quibbles in no way diminish the value of this tightly-argued, robustly written, and richly documented study.

Mary Lindemann

University of Miami 

ENDNOTES

1. See, for instance, Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, History from Crime: Selections from Quaderni Storici) (Baltimore, 1994).

2. Trauma Foundation report, "Violence Facts," http://www.tf.org/tf/violence/vp/facts/violenc2.shtml

3. Lawrence Stone, "Interpersonal Violence in English Society, 1300-18980," Past and Present 103 (1983): 25.