It is hoped that our studies will be seen to have brought sharply into focus both well-known and formerly unexplored aspects of Shakespeare's theatre, texts, and themes. If we have achieved this, to our minds that alone will recommend our method of considering Shakespeare's legal and historical contexts.

We approach legal history as a part of cultural and social history, while at the same time recognising that early modern English law had its own particular disciplinary norms. Legal reasoning and procedure was not (and is not) identical to storytelling. Indeed, we believe, the operations of neither law nor storytelling can be seen as isomorphic with the unfoldings of ‘ordinary’ (whatever that is) life. Yet, neither fiction (no matter how esoteric its genre), nor law (no matter how abstruse its ratio), is ever altogether divorced from the social structures extant and the common lives lived at the time of its creation.

Thus, in particular, we view the laws and legal institutions of Shakespeare's age as both sources and consequences of the social, political, and intellectual dynamic of early modern England. This is in contrast to academic approaches that make trans-historical jurisprudential issues their main focus, or other technical historical approaches that make legal change alone their primary concern independently of the wider life of past times.

For such reasons we support a view that study of the relics of legal history may offer a holistic impression of the past.