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Lawyers at Play examines why literary communities developed around the Inns of Court in the 1560s and how these communities helped to shape the development of key genres in English Renaissance literature.
List of contents
- Introduction: Lawyers at Play
- Part I: Society at the Early Modern Inns of Court
- 1: An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court
- 2: 'Minerva's Men': The Inns of Court in the 1560s
- Part II: The Translation of Learning
- 3: Lyric Poetry: Forming a Professional Community
- 4: Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England
- Part III: Literary-Political Precedents
- 5: A Mirror for Magistrates: Political Discourse and the Legal Magistracy
- 6: Senecan Tragedy in Early Elizabethan England
- Part IV:To Fashion an Institution
- 7: Gorboduc in the Political Nation
- 8: Marriage Plays at the Inns: Negotiating Professional Jurisdiction
- Conclusion: Lawyers at Play Redux
- Appendices
- Chapter app. 1 Literary Men of the Inns of Court, 1558-1572
- Chapter app. 2 First Editions of Classical Translations, 1558-1581
- Chapter app. 3 Description of Gorboduc at the Inner Temple
About the author
Jessica Winston is Professor of English at Idaho State University, where she specializes in sixteenth-century literature and Shakespeare. She is the author numerous articles are the early modern Inns of Court and, with James Ker, she is co-editor of Elizabethan Seneca: Three Tragedies (Modern Humanities Research Association, 2012).
Summary
Lawyers at Play examines why literary communities developed around the Inns of Court in the 1560s and how these communities helped to shape the development of key genres in English Renaissance literature.
Additional text
Winston's analyses are ... patient, careful and illuminating, such that this book offers more than a few valuable correctives to commonplace notions of the Inns and verdicts on the literature produced there. It encourages one to look forward to future studies, whether by Winston or by those whom this book will inspire, on the clusters of early modern Inns writers that came subsequently: in the 1590s; in the 1610s; in the 1630s-40s.
