Shakespeare's Legal Ecologies

Front matter

SHAKESPEARE'S LEGAL ECOLOGIES

RETHINKING THE EARLY MODERN

Series Editors Marcus Keller, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Ellen McClure, University of Illinois, Chicago Feisal Mohamed, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Pm still a bit shocked by how much I enjoyed writing this book, and especially by how consistent that enjoyment has been over the last seven years. There’s a good explanation, though. Unlike my first book, a largely solitary undertaking, Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies has developed at every stage out of conversation and exchange. It’s a pleasure finally to be able to thank some of these interlocutors here.

Two colleagues deserve special mention. Julia Reinhard Lupton was one of the project’s earliest supporters and has remained a model of critical rigor and intellectual generosity ever since. Her advice has been invaluable, and her uniquely collaborative approach to scholarly and professional practice has had a shaping influence on the way I’ve gone about my work on this book. Garrett Sullivan provided much-needed guidance and encouragement during the latter stages of the project. I’m very grateful for the detailed feedback he offered on draft chapters and especially for the pointed questions that helped me nuance some of the book’s claims. I’m also thankful for the larger network of friends and colleagues whose willingness to collaborate on various ventures has formed the critical (and social) bedrock on which this project was assembled. In this group I include Stephanie Elsky, James Kearney, James Knapp, Madhavi Menon, Carolyn Sale, Bruce Smith, Virginia Lee Strain, Richard Strier, Henry Turner, Jennifer Waldron, Luke Wilson, Kelly Wisecup, Michael Witmore, and Paul Yachnin. I’ve also learned a great deal from conversations with Dympna Callaghan, Joseph Campana, Heidi Cephus, Gabriel Cervantes, Lars Engle, Andrew Escobedo, Nora Gilbert, David Goldstein, Stephanie Hawkins, Heather Hirschfeld, Amanda Kellogg, William Kerwin, Harry Keyishian, James Kuzner (whose excellent book, Shakespeare as a Way of Life, came out too late for me to discuss here), Sean Lawrence, Kent Lehnhof, Jim Marino, Corey Marks, Katherine Eisaman Maus, Jenny Molberg, Steven Mullaney, Dahlia Porter, Ayesha Ramachandran, Lauren Rogener, David Schalkwyck, Laurie Shannon, Ryan Skinnell, Matthew Smith, Amy Tigner, William West, Chelsea Woodard, and Julian Yates.

The professional support and friendship of colleagues at the University of North Texas and the University of Lausanne have been extremely valuable, as have the opportunities for discussion and debate offered by the x Acknowledgments annual meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America, the Modern Language Association, and the Renaissance Society of America. Many of these conferences I now recognize as watershed moments in the development of my thinking on Shakespeare, law, and selfhood. I also feel very fortunate to have conducted research at a number of superb institutions over the last several years. Much of the historical work for this book was undertaken at the British Library in London, The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C., the Newberry Library in Chicago, and the Harry Ransom Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin. I’m grateful for the patience and expertise of the staff at each of these libraries. Finally, the Northwestern University Press has been great to work with. Henry Carrigan, Gianna F. Mosser, Maggie Grossman, Anne Gendler, Marianne Jankowski, and Feisal Mohamed have been enthusiastic, efficient, and wise at every stage of the process.

A portion of chapter 2 appeared as “Hospitable Justice: Law and Selfhood in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Law, Culture, and the Humanities 9 (2013): 295-310, reproduced in revised form by permission of Sage Publishing. A small section of chapter 3 was published as “Feeling Criminal in Macbeth,” Criticism 54 (2012): 391-401, reproduced in revised form by permission of Wayne State University Press. I’m grateful to be able to reuse these materials as part of this book.

Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies is dedicated to Pauline and Stone, and they deserve the biggest thanks of all. It’s not easy living with an academic. A bad writing day can plunge us into the depths of despair while one decent transition sentence can propel us into a state of euphoric elation. Both are hard to explain or justify. Im very lucky to have two people who can coax me out of this strange universe from time to time and remind me how wonderful life is on the other side.

SHAKESPEARE'S LEGAL ECOLOGIES

INTRODUCTION

Imagine York’s surprise when in act 2 of Richard II, the recently exiled Henry Bullingbrook shows up in England to claim his inheritance in the wake of his father’s death. The situation is unimaginable: Bullingbrook is “a banish’d man” and it is “before the expiration of [his] time” (2.3.110, 111).! But when York accuses him of “gross rebellion and detested treason” (2.3.109), Bullingbrook offers this simple rebuttal: “As I was banish’d, I was banish’d Herford, / But as I come, I come for Lancaster” (2.3.113- 14). Two legal facts underpin the retort: (1) Bullingbrook is, and has been, the Duke of Herford; (2) the death of his father makes him the new Duke of Lancaster. But whereas the most straightforward way of conceptualizing this change in legal identity is as a form of accumulation—the acquisition of more land, more titles, more goods—Bullingbrook presents it as a transfer, a slippage from one self into another, with a new name, a new title, and a new, exile-free past. For Bullingbrook, in other words, property law curates a mobile and amorphous version of selfhood, one capable of reconfiguring itself through time and in response to circumstance. Though his justification for returning to England is certainly based on legal technicalities, it is also rooted in more general metaphysical ideas about selfhood as it inheres in property—metaphysical ideas which he sees those legal technicalities expressing.

What are we to make of the many moments like this in Shakespeare’s work when matters of law—property, obligation, crime, judgment— underwrite ideas about the nature of the self? What do we learn about Shakespeare’s thinking on selfhood if we consider the topic from a legal perspective? And how, finally, might this line of inquiry help us reimagine what law offered Shakespeare as an imaginative resource? This book, the first sustained study of the relationship between law and selfhood in Shakespeare’s work, sets out to answer these questions. My central claim is that Shakespeare’s career-long interest in law also needs to be understood as an ongoing meditation on what it means to be a person— individually and collectively, intellectually and physically, and in relation to the world of things. More specifically, my argument is that law provided Shakespeare with a conceptual language for describing selfhood in distributed terms, as a product of interpersonal exchange or as a gathering of various material forces. Scenes that display these qualities I refer to collectively as Shakespeare’s “legal ecologies,” representational environments in which selfhood is both linked to and shaped by other human and nonhuman agents in a juridical setting. Shakespeare’s legal ecologies are important for two reasons. First, they mark a departure from the bounded and inward-looking selfhood of Augustinian and Cartesian thought and from the individualist political and ethical trajectories of those traditions. Viewed together, these scenes of distributed legal subjectivity show us Shakespeare’s distinctly communitarian vision of personal and political experience, the way he regarded living, thinking, and acting in the world as materially and socially embedded practices. Second, these scenes demonstrate how Shakespeare leveraged his knowledge of law for intellectual and speculative ends that were not specifically legal; the way, that is, Shakespeare thought with or through law as opposed to simply thinking about it. What this book offers, then, is a new theory of Shakespeare’s imaginative relationship to law and an original account of law’s role in the philosophical and ethical work of his plays and sonnets.

A project like this has both historical and theoretical investments. Since Shakespeare’s thinking about law is necessarily conditioned by the culture in which he lived and the time at which he wrote, readings of his plays and sonnets are frequently rooted in primary historical documents such as sixteenth- and seventeenth-century law books, legal reports, treatises, and assize-court records. However, if grounding Shakespeare’s engagement with law in a specific past is important for this study, so too is showing how his writing opens the historical particulars of legal experience out onto larger, universal questions about being, agency, and the relationship between body and mind. Toward this end, Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies also treats the plays and sonnets as part of a genealogy of thought that extends beyond the early modern period to include modern thinkers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Gilles Deleuze. Though they write in different forms and for different ends than Shakespeare, these philosophers nevertheless share with him an interest in thinking about selfhood from the outside rather than the inside, as something premised on collectivity, otherness, and the external life of the senses. By attending to both the early modern sources and the modern destinations of Shakespeare’s legal imagination, this book is able to tell a new story about Shakespeare’s unique place in the history of selfhood.

The following introduction focuses on three things. First, it describes the kind of legal knowledge that was available to Shakespeare in his own time and the distinctive ways in which that knowledge was put to work in his writing and dramaturgy. This discussion leads, in the second section,

Introduction í to a consideration of selfhood in which I more rigorously define and theorize the notion of legal ecologies, taking special care to situate the concept in relation to other models of selfhood available in Shakespeare’s time and our own. I conclude by turning to the particular ideas and legal scenes addressed in each chapter, overviewing the various arguments—about property, hospitality, criminality, and judgment—that weave themselves through the book.

Thinking with Law

As I mentioned above, Shakespeare thought with law. This sounds like a simple enough assertion, but it also raises some questions. Perhaps most importantly: what is the difference between thinking with law and thinking about law? Let me start with the latter. Thinking about law means engaging imaginatively with legal institutions, figures, and language, and even a cursory look at Shakespeare’s works shows that he did a lot of this. One thinks immediately of Shylock’s famous trial scene in The Merchant of Venice or the cruel magistrate, Angelo, of Measure for Measure. The Comedy of Errors opens with Egeon being condemned by the law of Ephesus while A Midsummer Nights Dream opens with Hermia being condemned by the law of Athens. Complicated legal questions about inheritance and property underpin the plots of Richard II, 1 Henry VI, and Henry V, while plays like Othello and Hamlet display a preoccupation with evidence and testimony. Shakespeare thought a great deal about law, and with good reason. Theaters drew a sizeable portion of their audiences, and even some of their playwrights, from the Inns of Court, the institution that trained young men for careers in law.? John Marston, for example, was a member of the Middle Temple in the 1590s, as was John Webster. John Ford was admitted in 1602. Ben Jonson did not attend the Inns himself, but he was close friends with prominent jurists such as John Seldon, with whom he corresponded about transvestism on the stage, and John Hoskyns, who was also a respected poet and wit. Not surprisingly, then, the plays themselves are teeming with legal terms, legal instruments, legal references, and characters drawn from the legal profession. The Index of Characters in Early Modern Drama lists 65 lawyers, 13 attorneys and pettifoggers, and 120 judges and justices, not to mention an array of clerks, bailiffs, constables, scriveners, solicitors, and other minor legal officials.?

However, it wasn’t just the people in the theaters that made law such a touchstone in Shakespeare’s drama. It was also the world around the theaters. In a recently coedited volume, Bradin Cormack, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Richard Strier point out that “the law is everywhere in Shakespeare’s plays because, most simply, it was everywhere in his culture.” This is no exaggeration. Courts, each with their own jurisdiction, abounded in early modern London: there were the common law courts of King’s Bench, Common Pleas, and the Exchequer; the equity court of Chancery; the Court of Requests; the Admiralty Court; Star Chamber; the Lord Mayer’s Court at Guildhall; and a variety of smaller guild courts.° Actual litigation increased drastically as well in the period. Between 1490 and 1640, cases in later stages in the Court of King’s Bench and the Court of Common Pleas, the most important common law courts, rose from about 2,100 to almost 29,000.° Another source estimates that by the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign a total English population of about four million was involved in about one million legal actions per year.’

There are some specific reasons for this massive upsurge in legal activity. One is that by the sixteenth century, law offered a rare means for young men to ascend the social ladder, with the result that there were simply more people seeking legal careers. William Prest writes, “by the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign the law had virtually replaced the church as the career open to talents, the ladder on which young men could climb to power and riches.”® It’s partly for this reason that legal activity was sometimes ridiculed as self-interested and roguish on the stage. In King Lear, Kent includes “action-taking” (prone to litigation) alongside “base,” “proud,” “shallow,” “lily-liver’d,” and “filthy” in his profuse condemnation of Oswald (2.2.15-24).

Another reason for the expansion of legal culture is the rise of print. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, print made the actual disciplinary and practical knowledge of law available to a much broader section of the population than it ever had been before. The history of printed legal texts in England begins in 1481 with the publication of Thomas de Littleton’s Tenures, a book that catalogs and describes the intricacies of English land law. However, it is in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that printed, widely disseminated legal texts really begin to proliferate. Esteemed thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscript treatises on common law were printed for the first time in the sixteenth century: Britton in 1530; Glanvill’s Tractatus de legibus et consuetudinibus regni Angliae in 1554; and Bracton’s De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae in 1569. The sixteenth century also saw the appearance of printed yearbooks, texts that gave basic overviews of trials, including the complainants’ names, the legal questions at issue, and the judgment delivered. Starting in 1553, the printer Richard Tottel produced over 200 editions of yearbooks, including various reprints and compilations. The yearbooks were eventually overtaken by “reports,” which were initially based on the notes of students at the Inns of Court and later produced by well-established jurists like William Bendlowes, William Dalison, Richard Harper, James Dyer, Edmund Plowden, and Edward Coke.’ More than anyone else, Plowden, with his monumental Commentaries (1571), is associated with the formative age of law reporting and with a new, more scholarly tendency to summarize all sides of a judicial argument.'° Yearbooks, reports, and venerable treatises became the core of the standard legal reference library, and in printed form they were available to nonprofessional readers, as well. In addition to this material, there was an increasingly vast and diverse array of legal literature rolling off the presses. This ranged from learned treatises and commentaries on common law, such as Coke’s four foundational Institutes (1628, 1642, 1644, 1644), to handbooks and abridgments intended for both professional and nonprofessional audiences. Included in this latter group are texts such as A New Boke of Presidentes in Maner of a Register (1543), which attempts to explain “for every man” “all maner of evydence and instrumentes of Practyse” and The Attourney’s Academy (1630), which similarly bills itself as “intended for the publike benefit.”'!

Legal and cultural history helps us establish why, and to some extent what, Shakespeare thought about law. But its explanatory power is limited when it comes to addressing how Shakespeare used legal subject matter to explore ideas about selfhood that are not themselves specifically legal. In these cases, law is a tool or a map, a way to accomplish an intellectual labor, get to an imaginative destination, or give form to a concept. Consider as an example Macbeth’s famous dagger soliloquy, which I discuss in detail in chapter 3. “Is this a dagger which I see before me?” (2.1.33), Macbeth asks, grasping at the air. He reflects on the evidence and makes some speculations; eventually, he walks off stage to kill the sleeping King. There’s an immediate legal context for this scene—the crime of treason— and a rich historical archive that can help us connect it to the legal culture of Shakespeare’s time. We might begin, for example, by noting that the basic definition of treason in the sixteenth century—“when a man doth compasse or imagine the death of our lord the king”—privileges the mental conception of regicide over its material instantiation.” The dagger scene, by staging the dynamics of thought, knowledge, and will that precede the criminal act, is rooted in this historically specific understanding of treason as well as the various legal debates and revisions it gave rise to over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most would agree, though, that it’s not really the historical particulars of law that give the dagger scene its imaginative and speculative charge. These aspects of Macbeth’s soliloquy derive from the way it mobilizes fundamental questions about the nature of the relationship between body and mind and doing and thinking—questions that are at the conceptual heart of early modern treason but whose philosophical implications extend beyond any historically fixed aspect of law. While Macbeth’s speech is occasioned by the event of legal transgression, it ultimately explores something different: the process through which thought and action develop out of sensory experience.

The dagger scene is an example of Shakespeare thinking with law because it takes the theoretical issues surrounding a particular kind of crime and uses them as shorthand for a larger set of questions about agency and intention. The scene presents a specifically theatrical version of something we would now call phenomenology. As this example should illustrate, law is of interest to me primarily for what it affords Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets conceptually. Tracing this relationship requires an understanding of the historical particulars of early modern legal culture, but it also means that historical contextualization is not an end in itself. By contrast, much of the legally oriented scholarship in early modern literary studies has tended to deal with law in its concrete textual and institutional forms with the goal of connecting early modern plays and poems to some aspect of material, political, or legal culture. Influential scholarship in this vein includes work by Frances Dolan, Rebecca Lemon, and Subha Mukherji." These studies cast new light on the textual and theatrical genres through which legal ideas circulated, the various ways in which early modern men and women experienced law at both the institutional and discursive levels, and the cultural ligatures that existed between the theater and the courtroom. For each of these scholars, “law” is something understood in the particular. It’s approached largely at the local level of its various historical, political, and institutional instantiations—as specific laws, specific crimes, and specific procedures that are refracted through or encoded in the drama and literature. This way of thinking about law—let’s call it law-in-the-particular—is rooted in the critical aspirations that helped give rise to the field of literature and law in the 1970s. During this formative period of the discipline, law was seen as crystallizing various aspects of the political real; it encoded authority, normative behavior, and various forms of inequality. In this way, law seemed to offer literary criticism a way to be topical, socially engaged, and finally to achieve the political urgency and immediacy that many literary scholars were seeking.'* Literature, for its part, had the potential to humanize law, to awaken empathy and facilitate a kind of moral insight and disciplinary self-critique typically absent from legal records and the formal procedures of the courtroom.’ Scholars like Dolan, Lemon, and Mukherji do not necessarily share the programmatic commitments of first-wave legal-humanists, but a general link between law and the political real persists in their work, as it does in the work of many other early modernists. !°

When it comes to addressing the relationship between law and selfhood, though, law-in-the-particular provides limited resources. As I have indicated, a study like this one requires engagement with both the cultural particulars of legal experience in Shakespeare’s time and the way these particulars—institutional, textual, and experiential—iterate larger philosophical ideas that cannot necessarily be reduced to a specific time and place in history. Accordingly, while my investigations of law and selfhood in Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets are frequently grounded in the archive, they are also responsive to the conceptual dimension of law—the ideas, assumptions, values, and habits of thought that underpin specific legal rules and practices and which intersect with primary questions about selfhood, such as: What are the sources of agency? What counts as a person? For whom am I responsible, and how far does that responsibility extend? What is truly mine? These are questions that are as fundamental to law as they are to metaphysics, ethics, and political theory, and Shakespeare remains creatively and intellectually committed to them throughout his career.

Some studies of early modern literature and law have been attentive to these kinds of questions. In this group, I would include the work of scholars such as Lorna Hutson, Luke Wilson, and Katharine Eisaman Maus, all of whom have shaped my own thinking on Shakespeare. Our projects differ, however, in some crucial respects. Hutson’s The Invention of Suspicion, for example, addresses selfhood at a number of points, but because Hutson’s concern is with the way forensic rhetoric endowed characters on stage with a sense of interiority, the book’s main insights about law and selfhood have to do with the means by which legal ideas and language contribute to the formation of discrete, rational, and volitional subjects.!’ My project, by contrast, is to explore how law enabled Shakespeare to model communal, collaborative, and distributed forms of selfhood, and therefore places his legal imagination in a different philosophical tradition. Wilson’s Theaters of Intention deals with one specific component of selfhood: the representation of agency on stage and in the courtroom.'® I engage with agency, too, at various points, and as my notes indicate, I have learned a great deal from Wilson. But selfhood cannot be reduced to a discussion of agency. Thinking about selfhood also involves attending to matters of embodiment, cognition, and social responsibility, all of which are issues I examine in this book. Finally, Maus has explored how law contributes to the articulation of interiority in early modern drama, and more recently she has analyzed how Shakespeare distinguishes between human subjects and material artifacts when he writes about property.'” One of the things I hope this book calls attention to, though, is the fact that law provided Shakespeare with more than one language of selfhood. If ideas about interiority and singularity have legal coordinates in Shakespeare’s work, so too do ideas about physical substance and sociality.

My aim in pointing out these differences is not to try to prove any of these scholars wrong. The kind of legal rhetoric that Hutson and Maus focus on, for example, really does contribute to a heightened sense of inwardness. But there are also elements of law premised on more communal, collaborative, and distributed forms of selfhood. Land law, for instance, curates complex relationships among people, animals, and objects and treats the human self as an assemblage of these various artifacts. This is something I explore in chapter 1. Or consider judgment, the topic of chapter 4, which was in Shakespeare’s time a largely participatory practice relying on the collaboration of multiple parties, including jury members, justices of the peace, and various legal and bureaucratic officials. In modern philosophy, especially the work of Immanuel Kant and Hannah Arendt, judging entails stepping into a relational and inherently social mode of being. Even a concept like criminality, which is certainly understood in reference to discrete deviants, nevertheless requires a larger social and material environment to become phenomenologically intelligible, a topic I take up in chapter 3. There are also legal concepts that issue from outside the strictly juridical realm. The idea of hospitality, in its religious, philosophical, and social formations, is a good example of this. As I discuss in chapter 2, the laws of hospitality are premised on a radical ethics of otherness and the version of justice they posit is correspondingly resistant to self-sameness and individuality.

It’s not correct to say that Shakespeare wasn’t interested in what we understand as individuality, nor would it be accurate to claim that his engagement with law does not have something to tell us about that interest. But this book shows that law also offers a perspective from which we can redescribe Shakespeare’s vision of selfhood in communal, embedded, and intersubjective terms, and make of him something more than “an author for a liberal individualistic culture,” as Peter Holbrook has labeled him.” While it’s true that Romantic individualists like Johann Gottfried Herder were fanatical Shakespeareans, it does not follow that they were balanced and careful readers. They did not, at any rate, attend closely to the relationship between law and selfhood in his work, a relationship PI begin to describe in more detail in the next section.

Legal Ecologies

Law afforded Shakespeare a conceptual language through which the self could be portrayed as part of a vital and interdependent world of things. Accordingly, in the plays and sonnets I examine, selfhood is not a fixed and bounded entity, but instead something better characterized as a dynamic process involving an assortment of human and nonhuman agents in environments of exchange.*! In the twentieth century, the philosopher A. N. Whitehead used the term “actual entity” to describe something similar, the way seemingly discrete people and things are in fact in states of constant interaction and change. He explains, “An actual entity is a process, and is not describable in terms of the morphology of a stuff.”?? This idea of dynamic process—of a gathering of different, relationally evolving agents—is important because whether it takes the form of social (humanhuman) or material (human-environment) relationality, it entails a way of thinking about nonindividual selfhood that is distinct from the more rigidly object-oriented materialism that emerged in early modern studies in the 1990s. Work by scholars like Patricia Fumerton, Margreta De Grazia, Ann Rosalind Jones, and Peter Stallybrass, as well as slightly later studies by Natasha Korda and Julian Yates, critiqued the Burckhardtian commitment to interiority and emergent individualism that characterized the field. Instead, they argued that selfhood inheres entirely in things, “in bric-a-brac worlds of decorations, gifts, foodstuffs, small entertainments, and other particles of cultural wealth and show,” to borrow Fumerton’s words.” For these object-oriented materialists, selfhood is, contra Whitehead, precisely “describable in terms of the morphology of a stuff.” I think Shakespeare’s use of law shows us a different way out of individualism, one that includes objects but which ultimately embraces a much broader and more eclectic world of relational life. The term I use to indicate this distributed and dynamic version of selfhood is “ecology.”

Earlier, I defined Shakespeare’s legal ecologies as representational environments in which selfhood is both linked to and shaped by other human and nonhuman agents in a juridical setting. As this definition suggests, my use of the word “ecology” aims at a more robust way of thinking about relationality than allowed by the term’s narrowly biological or environmental meanings.” In this I follow the lead of a number of modern and contemporary thinkers, including some prominent ecocritics.

Timothy Morton, for example, uses the term to evoke a general sense of interconnection: “The ecological thought,” he writes, “is the thinking of interconnectedness . . . It’s a practice and a process of becoming fully aware of how human beings are connected with other beings—animal, vegetable, or mineral.”*> The political theorist Jane Bennett has argued that acknowledging this “interconnectedness” is necessary if we want to change public policy on issues like the environment, farming, and stemcell research. The goal, according to her, is to recognize “a political ecology of things” existing on a horizontal, rather than a vertical and hierarchical, plane.” Bennett’s project, as she points out, draws on an established philosophical history of vibrant matter that includes the writings of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, Bergson, Whitehead, and Deleuze. However, in thinking about the way vibrant matter forms an ecology of association and exchange, she is responding even more specifically to John Dewey, who was interested in the “dependence of the self for wholeness upon its surrounding,” and Bruno Latour, who pushed Dewey’s ideas in a more assuredly materialist direction.” Bennett’s notion of “political ecologies” might even be seen as a synthesis of Dewey’s idea of “conjoint action”—the distributive, cooperative agency necessary to generate a public sphere—and Latour’s rejection of the exclusive categories of “nature” and “culture” in favor of the “collective.” As Latour explains in Pandora’s Hope, “Humans, for millions of years, have extended their social relations to other actants with which, with whom, they have swapped many properties, and with which, with whom, they form collectives.”?* These collectives, or ecologies, are not simply the contexts in which a person exists. They need to be understood as a model for existence as such. “Who can say,” asks Henri Bergson in Creative Evolution, another important contribution to this strand of thought, where individuality begins and ends, whether the living being is one or many, whether it is the cells which associate themselves into the organism or the organism which disassociates itself into cells? In vain we force the living into this or that one of our molds. All the molds crack. They are too narrow, above all too rigid, for what we try to put into them.”

Where does individuality begin and where does it end? Is the living being one or many? These are questions that Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets pose too, though they do so through the formal language of theater and poetry and under the thematic auspices of law. When I use the term “legal ecology” to describe these moments in Shakespeare’s work, I intentionally make a connection between the playwright’s legal imagination and a materialist strain of thought that assumes process rather than substance or form to be the fundamental structure of the world.