“The devil’s law case” by John Webster: legal fraudulence or new professionalism?

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21119/anamps.42.345-356

Keywords:

John Webster, law and literature, lawyers, justice, property.

Abstract

The world that is depicted in The Devil’s Law Case by John Webster is a typical mercantile world, based on all kinds of contracts:  transfers of money, shipping profits, class interaction between merchants and aristocracy through marriage contracts. In this world the figure of the lawyer is central, for he guarantees the validity of the contracts as he participates in this rapid exchanging of various sorts of property. Webster portrays a tortuous world picture centred on legal figures and legal problems. On one hand we have several lawyers representing different hues of justice, or injustice; on the other hand, we see the importance of property and how to deal with it, hence the importance of wills.

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Author Biography

Daniela Carpi, University of Verona

full professor of English Literature at the Department of Foreign Literatures and Languages, University of Verona. She has founded and presides the Associazione Italiana di Diritto e Letteratura AIDEL (http://www.AIDEL.it). She is in the editorial board of the journals Symbolism: a Journal of Critical Aesthetics (New York), Anglistik (University of Heidelberg), Cardozo Law Bulletin (University of Trento), La torre di Babele (University of Parma), Law and Humanities (University of Warwick), Cosmo, Comparative Studies in Modernism (University of Turin). She co-founded and is the managing editor of the journal Pólemos, Law Literature and Culture published by DeGruyter, Berlin.

References

GREENBLATT, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: from More to Shakespeare. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005 [1980].

RADIN, Margaret Jane. Reinterpreting Property. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993.

TUCKER, E. F. J. Intruder into Eden, Representation of the Common Lawyer in English Literature 1350-1750. Columbia (South Carolina): Camden House, 1984.

WARD, Ian. Shakespeare and the Legal Imagination, London; Edinburgh: Butterworths, 1999.

WEBSTER, John. The Devil’s Law Case. London; Tonbridge: E. Benn, 1975. (Edited by Elizabeth Brennan).

WHIGHAM, Frank. Seizures of the Will in Early Modern English Drama. Cambridge: University Press, 1996.

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Published

2018-12-30

How to Cite

CARPI, Daniela. “The devil’s law case” by John Webster: legal fraudulence or new professionalism?. ANAMORPHOSIS - International Journal of Law and Literature, Porto Alegre, v. 4, n. 2, p. 345–356, 2018. DOI: 10.21119/anamps.42.345-356. Disponível em: https://periodicos.rdl.org.br/anamps/article/view/519. Acesso em: 26 oct. 2026.

Issue

Vol. 4 No. 2 (2018): julho-dezembro

Section

Articles

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