This book investigates rhetorical and representational practices that were used to monitor English law at the turn of the seventeenth century. While the majority of Law and Literature studies characterise the law as a force of coercion and subjugation, this book instead treats in greater depth the law's own vulnerability, both to corruption and to correction. Numerous writings from across early modern English culture represent disorder as the product not of ‘an ungovernable people’, but of the legal system itself and its magistrates. The broad participatory structure of the justice system helped produce a population that was especially sensitive to the contribution of legal language, institutions, practices, and officers to the regulation of the commonwealth. The dominance of the law in everyday life made its failings and improvements of widespread concern: it was a regular and popular focus of criticism. I argue that the terms and techniques of legal reform provided modes of analysis through which legal authorities and literary writers alike evaluated form and character. Legal reform, together with the conflicts and anxieties that inspired and sprang from it, were represented by courtly, coterie, and professional writers. Close readings in subsequent chapters reveal that Spenser's Faerie Queene, the Gray's Inn Christmas revels of 1594–5, Donne's ‘Satyre V’, and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and The Winter's Tale all examine the potential, as well as the ethical and practical limitations, of legal reform's contribution to local and national governance. The selection of literary texts is drawn from a variety of major writers who established individualistic styles and contributions, but who were all drawn to legal reform as a subject and as a method of analysing contemporary thought and experience. The selection of texts is also heavily weighted on the side of satire and comedy, capacious genres that are simultaneously critical and conservative, just like the principles and practices of legal reform that I discuss below.

These literary texts place us in a compact era, stretching only from the 1590s to the 1600s, that has nevertheless attracted extensive scrutiny from every kind of historian. The period was beleaguered by crises on all fronts – social, economic, religious, political, local, national and international.