While Love's Labour's Lost has a quasi-judicial sub-structure and may have been written with an Inn of Court audience in mind, it has never ranked as a ‘legal’ play in the same sense as The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure. The latter have always attracted attention from lawyers themselves for their primary concentration on legal issues, which are immediately seen to be crucial to their respective plots. My concentration here does not lie in the niceties of sixteenth-century contract or marriage laws, but in the overaching conflict between Natural Law and positive law. This framework was seen to be important to Love's Labour's Lost, as Natural Law's innate impulses comically overrule the letter of laws which are made by men, and, as we shall see, it informs the tragic world of King Lear. Indeed, the overall direction of my argument leads to the conclusion that this is par excellence the Shakespearian theme when he bases a drama on the contemplation of issues of justice.

The Merchant of Venice

It has become a commonplace, at least amongst legal historians who write on Shakespeare, that the central trial scene in The Merchant of Venice, despite its Mediterranean setting, dramatises and turns upon the distinctive differences between English common law and equity. Up to a point I agree with this, but only in so far as equity was England's court of Natural Law, and not a specific jurisdiction.