Dennis Kezar is associate professor of English at Vanderbilt University.
“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
Ask a Question About this Product More... |