Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of maps
- Acknowledgements
- Glossary
- A note on the text
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Of rings, and things, and fine array’: marriage law, evidence and uncertainty
- 2 ‘Unmanly indignities’: adultery, evidence and judgement in Heywood's A Woman Killed With Kindness
- 3 Evidence and representation on ‘the theatre of God's judgements’: A Warning for Fair Women
- 4 ‘Painted devils’: image-making and evidence in The White Devil
- 5 Locations of law: spaces, people, play
- 6 ‘When women go to Law, the Devil is full of Business’: women, law and dramatic realism
- Epilogue: The Hydra head, the labyrinth and the waxen nose: discursive metaphors for law
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - ‘When women go to Law, the Devil is full of Business’: women, law and dramatic realism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of maps
- Acknowledgements
- Glossary
- A note on the text
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Of rings, and things, and fine array’: marriage law, evidence and uncertainty
- 2 ‘Unmanly indignities’: adultery, evidence and judgement in Heywood's A Woman Killed With Kindness
- 3 Evidence and representation on ‘the theatre of God's judgements’: A Warning for Fair Women
- 4 ‘Painted devils’: image-making and evidence in The White Devil
- 5 Locations of law: spaces, people, play
- 6 ‘When women go to Law, the Devil is full of Business’: women, law and dramatic realism
- Epilogue: The Hydra head, the labyrinth and the waxen nose: discursive metaphors for law
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
As its alternative title suggests, Webster's The Devil's Law Case or When Women go to Law, the Devil is full of Business is a play about women initiating as well as disrupting court procedures. When Vittoria Corombona, the brilliant, adulterous protagonist of Webster's better-known play, outperforms her accusers during her trial in the papal court, judge Monticelso remonstrates, ‘she scandals our proceedings’. The sense of ‘scandal’ attaching to women litigants – or simply women appearing in court – in much of early modern drama may appear to be a fictional stereotype. Women in plays often bring dubious suits, get up to strange tricks that throw legal procedure into chaos, and engage in shady sexual dealings. Is this purely a literary phenomenon? Women, after all, are generally thought to have had minimal legal agency and visibility in the period. A second set of associations further reinforces the sense of their ‘unrealistic’ representation in these contexts – that of an obscuring mystery which often conflates tricksiness with ritual.
This chapter shows how the two associative strands are linked in such dramatic treatments, and attempts to explain the particular brand of fictionality this combination produces. In exaggerating the hybrid nature of theatrical courtrooms, female litigant characters bring issues of representation into focus. But addressing the fictive representation of women at court within early modern plays can tell us a great deal not only about the drama's distinctive vision of law but also about women's actual legal experience.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama , pp. 206 - 232Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006