He has held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship on rhetorical performance and as a National Teaching Fellow and national "Law Teacher of the Year" (2009) for many years delivered rhetoric workshops for the Royal Shakespeare Company. His books include Shakespeare's Acts of Will, Dress, Law, and Naked Truth, Trusts and Equity, The Making Sense of Politics, Media, and Law, and Equity Stirring.
Watt applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Shakespeare and the Law, and reported the following:
Page 99, which appears in a chapter on Shakespeare’s props, contends that “To appreciate the performance of legal and governmental power through stage props requires us to appreciate material performances in their wider social and religious contexts”. Two examples are given of props that performed the Elizabethan passage from Roman Catholicism to the Protestant idea of the priesthood of all people. The first is a wooden altar that was moved towards the congregants during the church service. The second is a provision in the burial ritual that empowered attendants to throw dust upon the coffin where this had previously been the exclusive function of the priest. Page 99 then considers the crown as an exemplary instance of a legal and governmental prop in Shakespeare’s history plays, quoting the Duke of Gloucester (the future Richard III) where he says ‘[h]ow sweet a thing it is to wear a crown, / Within whose circuit is Elysium / And all that poets feign of bliss and joy’ (3H6 1.2.29-31). That word “feign” has connotations of dishonesty but here, as elsewhere in Shakespeare, it also refers to the poet’s art of using rhetorical “figures”. This brings us to the key argument of page 99 and of the chapter on props, which is that Shakespeare’s stage props perform rhetorically. The Crown, for example, performs as synecdoche, which is a figure through which a part represents a larger whole. An endless circle of incorruptible gold, the physical crown expresses exquisitely the deathless sequence of regal authority wherein queens and kings die but the monarch never does. It is a small hand prop, but it signifies a large idea.Learn more about Gary Watt and his work, and read more about Shakespeare and the Law at the Oxford University Press website.
The question is whether page 99, as a small part of my book, performs synecdochally as an effective representation of the whole. I think it performs quite well in that regard, since the larger argument of the book is that rhetorical performance is the key connection between Shakespeare and the law. Page 99 considers only one Shakespearean prop – the crown – but this invites us to consider other legally significant props (sword, book, seal etc) discussed in the same chapter. Alongside the chapter on props, we will naturally go on to consider the chapters on Shakespeare’s legal “stages” (his historical and physical place), his “roles” (his lawyers and other legal personalities), his “script” (the binding magic of his legal language), and the judgment of his “playgoers”.
--Marshal Zeringue
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