Being interdisciplinary, Stanley Fish once opined, is so very hard to do. In the instant case we might inquire whether the architectonics of literary study (genres and modes, authors and movements) or of legal study (branches of law, landmark statutes and precedents, law-society interactions) should govern a handbook of law and literature. Of course, neither structure will do, and the result is omission of important legal and literary material. Should the period's great jurists get their due? This handbook has two chapters on John Selden—good. But it has no chapter taking a comprehensive view of the career of Sir Edward Coke or Sir Matthew Hale. And the period's legally trained writers? Sir John Davies gets a chapter—fair enough. But John Donne, the most important poet to pass through the Inns of Court, receives very scant notice in these many pages, and Edmund Waller, admitted to Lincoln's Inn in 1622, receives no mention at all. Courts having enormous social significance—Chancery, the Court of Wards and Liveries, the ecclesiastical courts—are not treated in a focused, detailed way. There is no attention to international contexts between Henry V, the subject of two illumining chapters, and Dryden's Indian Emperor (1665), even though the intervening years see several writers, major and minor, active in diplomacy: John Barclay, Sir Richard Fanshawe, John Milton, and Andrew Marvell.

So much for omissions. A handbook is not an encyclopedia, and this one claims from the start, in the words of Lorna Hutson's introduction, a “non-compendiousness” exploring “the vague conjunction of two very different disciplines” (1)—the introduction as a whole provides a concise, helpful overview of scholarship on law and literature, recent and less so, including studies of rhetoric and law. The essays included tend to be of a very high caliber, providing exemplary background and, in several cases, moving between law and literature with finesse. Temporally the center of gravity falls in the late Elizabethan moment, noted by several contributors to be a high-water mark of legal activity and of Inns of Court culture. Perhaps the most significant contribution of the handbook as a whole is its fresh and complex image of the Inns. Here we find literary activity to be an expression of hierarchy, separating cultural consumers from producers—the latter being, as James McBain puts it, “a cultural elite within their institutions, almost always the products of previous education” (82). This insight McBain attaches to a reading of The Misfortunes of Arthur (188). It also resembles Jessica Winston's argument in her excellent chapter on Sir John Davies's Epigrammes (ca. 1592–95), in which, she argues, Davies is eager to cast himself as a gentleman lawyer rather than the kind of “mercenary drudge,” in the words of Marlowe's Faustus, increasingly satirized in the 1590s. Paul Raffield places Gorboduc in the context of “the Elizabethan monarchical republic” and the “institutional landscape of the legal community of the Inns of Court” (164), each Inn a “microcosmic republic” producing able counselors (166). Critiquing Raffield's earlier work, Martin Butler wonders if the Inns and their entertainments can be said to have a coherent ideological program, and one directed against Whitehall, pointing especially to Sir Francis Bacon's activity in promoting entertainments emphasizing “a two-way relationship between law and prerogative” (191).

Deserving special notice is the chapter by Christopher Brooks, owing to his standing as a legal historian and to the fact that he passed away before seeing this essay to publication—the chapter reconciles two sets of lecture notes. Brooks charts a trajectory from a late Elizabethan “cultural bloom” in the law—pointing to Love's Labour's Lost, where Boyet asks for a kiss by requesting grant of pasture—to a decline in legal culture, both in terms of amount of litigation and activity at the Inns in the 1690s and early eighteenth century. This is correlated to the strength of pro-Parliament sentiment, with a strong legal profession favoring strong parliaments, and also to a culture of disregard for law taking root in the Civil War years and continuing into the Restoration.

Also deserving special notice are those chapters drawing attention to radical culture applying critical pressure on legal authority. If the late sixteenth century was the apex of lawyerly culture, the 1640s and 1650s were the zenith of constitutional imagination. Paul D. Halliday shows how a language of birthright, with biblical provenance in the story of Jacob and Esau, became, via the unlikely midwifery of Sir Edward Coke, a significant legal resource for Levellers advocating such reforms as jury trial and the right to counsel. In his chapter on the Levellers, Nigel Smith shows how John Lilburne cast himself as reforming the common-law tradition from within, in his legalistic defenses of the rights of the “free-born Englishman.” And in this approach he was not alone: fellow Levellers John Wildman and Maximilian Petty also urged the rights of “free-born Englishmen” in urging various legal reforms in The Case of the Armie Truly Stated, and Gerrard Winstanley's Diggers show a level of legal engagement, rather than simple rejection of authority, not always appreciated. More skeptical of the assumptions of the “free-born Englishman,” Mary Nyquist explores the many dynamics of the term slave: its class implications; its legal status both domestically and in the war-slavery doctrine of the jus gentium; and, of course, its racial charge. With Spenser's Faerie Queene and a broad range of Shakespeare plays in view, The Tempest stands out in furnishing via Prospero's references to Ariel and Caliban a usage of “‘slave’ … designating formal enslavement” (635).

Nyquist's is the only chapter in the collection devoting attention to race. Only two chapters, those of Carolyn Sale and Frances E. Dolan, focus on gender. In a collection comprised of thirty-eight chapters, this certainly does not feel adequate. In this instantiation at least the sub-subdiscipline of early modern law and literature looks discomfitingly conservative. The contributions to this collection are consistently outstanding, but all this excellent work certainly leaves much room for excellent work to be performed.