Jessica Winston’s fine book, Lawyers at Play, explicitly takes its cue from Richard Helgerson’s The Forms of Nationhood (1992), in which Helgerson argues that writing across a range of discursive fields and disciplines in the late sixteenth century represents a “concerted generational project” (1); anxious and uncertain poets lived in a “tension between their literary undertaking and the claims of the state” (Helgerson, 2). Founding her book on the parallel claim that “literary history consists of generational waves of writers,” Winston develops a dense, persuasive argument focused specifically on early Elizabethan (1558–81) writing by students at the Inns of Court. By concentrating on this narrow slice of time, she contributes significantly to our deeper understanding not only of who individual men were as students of early modern law, but also of how they authored early Elizabethan England’s nascent magisterial culture. As she identifies a connection between writing, personal development, and institutional transformation, Winston finds that “literary production at the Inns intensifies in response to important periods of legal-professional change. Literature helped members to navigate their own changing status and that of their institutions at times when the size and role of the profession were in transition” (9).

The opening chapter on the “intellectual topography” of the Inns introduces one of the recurring claims: that “the corporate (here meaning communal) character helped to foster and homogenize the diverse attitudes, ideals, and outlooks of ‘Innsmen’” (23–24). An anonymous ditty from the time could satirize differences among the Inns: “Inner for the rich, / Middle for the poor, Lincoln’s for the gentlemen, / And Gray’s Inn for the whore” (25). But in general the production and translation of literatures at the Inns inculcated a sense of shared identity among a legal population who slowly developed a very specific view of the monarchy and the commonwealth. Mediated through lyric poetry (chapter 3), translation (chapter 4), polemical tracts (chapter 5), and drama (chapters 6, 7, and 8), potential conflicts between classes or religious views or moral stances were shaped into a common idea of a legal and political community. (Among the verbal levelers: it was the practice at the Inns to give everyone in-house the name of “gentleman,” no matter his status in society at large [34].) Innsmen wrote with a consciousness of their own literary territory (42) and developed a perception of themselves as legislative leaders of the commonwealth (61). In various ways and in such diverse literatures as Senecan tragedy, The Mirror for Magistrates, and Gorboduc, they wrote themselves into Elizabethan governance by positioning themselves as the ideal caretakers of a magisterial nation. Advancing the professionalization of law, they also advanced the political and social significance of literature.

Winston’s book makes a strong case for the importance of literature in the professionalizing of the Inns during the mid-sixteenth century (1558–81) and for its role in shaping an emerging position for magistrates in the later Elizabethan reign. Among the intellectual pleasures of this book, chapter 4 is particularly striking. Arguing that “translations are a genre in their own right, regardless of the rhetorical structure of any individual work—prose, poetry, polemical, or pastoral” (100), Winston threads her way through multiple translations of Cicero, others designed for the (“unlatinate”) common reader, and still others that shape early seventeenth-century views of the monarchy. Far from being mere repetitions of original texts or sources of limited, specific political and philosophical views, translations (which are always adaptations) become foundational texts for imagining and circulating perceptions of the lawyer as a learned legislator.

This is a knowledgable literary history that contributes substantially to our understanding of early Elizabethan literary life at the Inns of Court. (Two appendixes chart “Literary Men of the Inns of Court, 1558–72” and “First Editions of Classical Translations, 1558–81.”) Early modern scholars in general, and students of law and literature in particular, will want to read Winston’s study of how the wide range of early Elizabethan literatures that were produced at the Inns of Court fostered personal connections, political expression, and the very shape of the subsequent Elizabethan government.