Event Description
Come hear Professor Gary Watt talk about the performative power of legal vernacular in Shakespeare’s plays As You Like It, The Winter’s Tale, and Hamlet. The talk will be followed by a conversation with the audience and conveners of the Canadian Network of Law & Humanities (CNLH). The event will take place in room 111 on Monday, March 24 from 12:30-1:50pm with light lunch. If you would like to attend over Zoom, please email Professor Julen Etxabe at etxabe@allard.ubc.ca
This presentation argues that legal vernacular appealed to Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights not only because it spoke to playgoers’ quotidian and professional experiences of law, but also because legal speech is inherently resonant with performative power. With examples from plays including As You Like It, The Winter’s Tale, and Hamlet, this presentation will show that the poetic power of legal speech extends beyond the evocative incantation of law’s set phrases (eg; “to have and to hold”, “be it known unto all men by these presents”) into sound effects secreted within individual legal words.
Bio: Gary Watt is a Professor in the School of Law, the University of Warwick. He was a founding co-editor of the journal Law and Humanities and is the General Editor of Bloomsbury’s A Cultural History of Law. As a National Teaching Fellow and national ‘Law Teacher of the Year’ (2009), he for many years delivered rhetoric workshops for the Royal Shakespeare Company. His writing on Shakespeare includes Shakespeare’s Acts of Will (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016) and Shakespeare and the Law (Oxford Shakespeare Topics, OUP, October 2024). His book The Making Sense of Politics, Media, and Law: Rhetorical Performance as Invention, Creation, Production (Cambridge, 2023) arose out of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship.
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