Solon and Thespis

The recent 'law and literature' movement has produced several intriguing studies of the relation between these discourses and Solon and Thespis . . . [is an] exciting addition to that corpus. It suggests that fiction and the law are mutually determining. The essays collected in Solon and Thespis focus on the complicated relation of the law and the theatre in Early Modern England . . . . [The] analyses are incisive and warnings timely. -Times Literary Supplement . . . the introduction admirably outlines the field within which the essays examine the negotiations between law and theatre; it also pre-empts worries about randomness by foregrounding its conscious decision to represent the variety of critical negotiations addressing and extending the diversity of the interrelation. -The Review of English Studies Dennis Kezar's superb collection of essays Solon and Thespis: Law and Theater in the English Renaissance also interrogates the extent to which theater's 'professional deceit' can do any more than debase 'privileged truth.' Taken as a whole, this volume is the place to send both undergraduates and graduates who want to get up to speed on this fascinating field of early modern studies. -Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 Kezar offers nine essays, plus an introduction and epilogue, which investigate connections and interactions between English law and the theater in the 16th and 17th centuries. As one might expect, half the essays deal with plays by Shakespeare and Jonson, with contributions on lesser writers such as Chapman and Sackville rounding out the collection. The essays avoid the standard legal concerns of the Renaissance theater and instead investigate more subtle connections. -Choice The collection explores the relation between law and drama in the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, Marston, and others. The title of the collection comes from a meeting between Solon, an Athenian lawmaker, and Thespis, a Greek poet and actor, over whether lies in a play lead to falsehood in society. Role-playing and the relation between art and life are central in this debate. -The Renaissance Quarterly The diversity of topics explored in this excellent collection makes it a valuable addition to the burgeoning field of early modern law, theater, and literature studies. The essays included here touch on a wide range of material-from Dekker to Shakespeare to Chapman and Bacon; and in doing so, they explore the tensions between Solon and Thespis in such a way as to make the work of analyzing the relationship between literature and the law seem not only fruitful, but in fact essential to a deeper understanding of both. -Jeremy Lopez, University of Toronto In this attractively titled collection of essays on law and theater in the English Renaissance, Dennis Kezar has assembled an impressive array of talent to focus on the productive and yet vexed relationship of theater and the state. Plays 'tell lies' to their audiences: so argued Solon in his riposte to Thespis, to be followed in due course by Plato's attack on poetry in the Republic and all that Jonas Barish has studied under the rubric of The Antitheatrical Prejudice. This battleground here affords a rich opportunity for an exploration of 'an institutional antagonism over the tenuous distinction between theater's inconsequential fiction and the real world's socially consequential fact.' This volume is a truly valuable contribution to the growing interest in law and literature, here brought to bear on the great drama of Shakespeare, Jonson, Dekker, Marston, Chapman, and their contemporaries. -David Bevington, Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities, University of Chicago