WHEN Oscar Pistorius was convicted of murder
last month, the presiding judge described the case as a “human tragedy of
Shakespearean proportions”. The Paralympic athlete’s fall from grace had
followed a narrative arc that made this comparison appropriate: overcoming
severe disability to reach “Olympian heights”, falling in love with a beautiful
model, and, in a coincidence that wouldn’t be out of place in one of the bard’s
plays, taking her life on Valentine’s Day. Mr Pistorius’s tragic flaw was an
excessive paranoia regarding intruders, which manifested itself in an
enthusiasm for guns. His downfall will be complete when he is sentenced in
April.
Mr Pistorius’s case is, indeed, peculiarly
Shakespearean. But Justice Eric Leach, who delivered the judgement, is but one
of a vast horde who have turned to the playwright in times of legal need. In
2012, Britain’s High Court evoked “King Lear” in a trial regarding a “menacing”
joke on Twitter—they eventually overturned a conviction on the grounds that
social-media users “are free to speak not what they ought to say, but what they
feel”.
A choice snippet of “Hamlet” ("a little patch of ground that hath
no profit in it but the name") was recited in a 2008 boundary dispute; a
different chunk was used in a French court when discussing criminal liability
(“I here proclaim was madness.”). “Henry VIII” (though wrongly attributed at
the time as “Henry IV”) was called forth by Senator Sam Ervin Jr during the
Watergate hearings.
The condemnation of Dzokhar Tsarnaev, one of the
orchestrators of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, was sealed with lines from
“Julius Caesar”: “the evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft
interred with their bones.” These examples illuminate and beautify, and make
court proceedings user-friendly. (Sometimes it is mere ponderous showing-off:
in 1978, Judge Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice felt the need for a footnote explaining
that his use of the phrase “a very positive reply” was lifted from act two,
scene two, line 43 of “Romeo and Juliet”.)
Lawyers’ love of Shakespeare is appropriate
given that more of his lines are devoted to discussing law than any other
profession. (Some think his knowledge of the law was so detailed that the
“real” Shakespeare must have been a lawyer.) A study by Scott Dodson and Ami
Dodson published last year set out to discover “the most literary [Supreme
Court] justice” of those currently sitting, and which authors were regularly
turned to for quotable wisdom. The “most prolific citer and the widest read”
was found to be Antonin Scalia, and—no surprise—William Shakespeare topped the
list of the oft-quoted, along with Lewis Carroll. Both Shakespeare and Carroll
accrued sixteen references from five justices. Other popular authors among the
bench were George Orwell, Charles Dickens, Aldous Huxley and Aesop. (No female writer made the top ten.)
The words of Shakespeare are likely to
reverberate around courtrooms for decades to come as many
universities—particularly in America and Britain—have incorporated him into
their law curriculum. Harvard Law School offers a seminar which focuses
entirely on “justice and morality in the plays of Shakespeare”. King’s College
London’s “Shakespeare and the Law” module is co-taught by the Literature and
Law faculties, and explores “the role of the law in mediating the place of the
individual within society”.
There are sensible reasons behind this; the
University of Southampton, in line with recent studies, states (not
implausibly) that it offers the opportunity to study law through a literary
prism of Shakespeare, Dickens, Kafka and others in order to “help law students
to become more ethically astute practitioners”. A study by David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano argues that reading literary fiction makes
people show empathy, challenge preconceptions, and be more flexible in their
decision-making—all of which are, presumably, desirable in practitioners of the
law. A literary sensibility enables lawyers to present clear, structured
opinions and briefs.
But what is it about the work of Shakespeare, in
particular, that lends itself to legal quotation and reflection? After all, as
Robert Peterson pointed out in “The Bard and the Bench”, all 37 of
Shakespeare’s plays—including the lesser-known “The Two Noble Kinsmen” and
“Timon of Athens”—have been quoted by American courts, in over 800 judicial
opinions. One answer lies in Shakespeare’s status as an embodiment of high
culture; citing him seeks to invest the judgement with credibility and invoke a
sense of history. Mr Peterson notes that this can “[drive] decisions in
substantive ways”, pushing courts towards familiar outcomes.
Another option is
Shakespeare’s universality — everyone has either read, or claims to have read, plays
like “Hamlet”. His works have become a shared global parlance; the term
“Shakespearean tragedy” evokes a rise-and-fall narrative even if the listener
is not intimate with the works themselves. The horrifying details of Mr
Pistorius’s actions on that night, contextualised in a familiar Shakespearean
frame, helps members of the court, and the public, to make sense of the
unnecessary bloodshed. Either way, 400 years after the
playwright’s death, Ben Jonson’s assessment is as true as ever: Shakespeare's plays
and wisdom are “not of an age, but for all time”.
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