Treason by Words: Literature, Law, and Rebellion in Shakespeare's England - Hardcover

"Rebecca Lemon's Treason by Words is a ground-breaking book. It shows early modern English theater as the site of passionate political argument when absolutist kings, princes, and generals confront constraints imposed by constitutional and natural law." -- Constance Jordan, Claremont Graduate University "A paradox is central to Rebecca Lemon's original, incisive, and theoretically astute book: although there was endless chatter about treason in early modern England, no successful act of treason, at least in the technically appropriate sense of king-killing, actually took place during the Tudor and Jacobean periods. Treason may have been discussed, planned, prosecuted, and punished, but it was never perpetrated. It was, in a sense that would become central for writers of the period, a matter more of words than actions. In some of the book's most exciting sections, Lemon shows the dangerous legal and political consequences of treason's drift from action to language. This created a very difficult position for Shakespeare, Donne, and Jonson. As Lemon concludes, their efforts to navigate a landscape increasingly dominated by accusations of treason by one party and of tyranny by another mark a crucial stage in the development of the modern notion of conscience." -- John Watkins, University of Minnesota, author of Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England "Lemon points out that the arguments in favor of Richard II's deposition that Hayward puts into the mouth of the Archbishop of Canterbury echo the arguments for Elizabeth's deposition. Lemon indicates how the controversy surrounding Haywards's subsequent prosecution produced competing definitions of treason and sovereignty. Lemon's book provides valuable New Historical leverage on how early modern English writers dealt with the problem of treason and tyranny, a problem becoming familiar again." * Renaissance Quarterly * "It may be that, as the republican theorists of Ancient Rome and Early Modern England understood, tyranny does not consist in an overly rigid enforcement of the law, but on the replacement of the objective laws of logic by arbitrary laws such as those of the marketplace, individual whim, or mere fiction. When this happens, rhetoric becomes a legal matter, certain kinds of statement become criminal, and the notion of 'treason by words' gains new currency. Treason by Words examines the consequences of such a development. Its analysis is incisive and its warnings timely." * Times Literary Supplement *

Under the Tudor monarchy, English law expanded to include the category of "treason by words." Rebecca Lemon investigates this remarkable phrase both as a legal charge and as a cultural event. English citizens, she shows, expressed competing notions of treason in opposition to the growing absolutism of the monarchy. Lemon explores the complex participation of texts by John Donne, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare in the legal and political controversies marking the Earl of Essex's 1601 rebellion and the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. Lemon suggests that the articulation of diverse ideas about treason within literary and polemical texts produced increasingly fractured conceptions of the crime of treason itself. Further, literary texts, in representing issues familiar from political polemic, helped to foster more free, less ideologically rigid, responses to the crisis of treason. As a result, such works of imagination bolstered an emerging discourse on subjects' rights. Treason by Words offers an original theory of the role of dissent and rebellion during a period of burgeoning sovereign power.