Overview

What is the relation between who a person is, and what he or she has? A number of Shakespeare's plays engage with this question, elaborating a 'poetics of property' centering on questions of authority and entitlement, of inheritance and prodigality, and of the different opportunities afforded by access to land and to chattel property. Being and Having in Shakespeare considers these presentations of ownership and authority. Richard II and the Henry IV plays construe sovereignty as a form of property right, largely construing imperium, or the authority over persons in a polity, as a form of dominium, the authority of the propertyholder. Nonetheless, what property means changes considerably from Richard's reign to Henry's, as the imagined world of the plays is reconfigured to include an urban economy of chattel consumables. The Merchant of Venice, written between Richard II and Henry IV, part 1, reimagines, in comic terms, some of the same issues broached in the history plays. It focuses in particular on the problem of the daughter's inheritance and on the different property obligations among kin, friends, business associates, and spouses. In the figure of the 'vagabond king', theoretically entitled but actually dispossessed, Henry VI, part 2 and King Lear both coordinate problems of entitlement with conundrums about distributive justice, raising fundamental questions about property relations and social organization.

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9780199698004

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Recommended. --Choice

admirable [and] innovative ... Maus is never reductive. Her grasp of the legal intricacies is complete. This is a book that knows the difference between dominium and seisin, between escheat and forfeiture ... groundbreaking. John Kerrigan, London Review of Books Maus's taut, original readings of the plays certainly belie Parvini's claim that historicism is boring. Julia Reinhard Lupton, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 This remarkable book, based on her Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures, is a splendid adjunct to Maus's classic Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance. James P. Bednarz, Little Reviews a Recommended. P. Kujoory, CHOICE

Maus's taut, original readings of the plays certainly belie Parvini's claim that historicism is boring. Julia Reinhard Lupton, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

Maus's taut, original readings of the plays certainly belie Parvini's claim that historicism is boring. Julia Reinhard Lupton, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 Recommended. P. Kujoory, CHOICE

Recommended. * P. Kujoory, CHOICE * This remarkable book, based on her Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures, is a splendid adjunct to Maus's classic Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance. * James P. Bednarz, Little Reviews a * Maus's taut, original readings of the plays certainly belie Parvini's claim that historicism is boring. * Julia Reinhard Lupton, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 * admirable [and] innovative ... Maus is never reductive. Her grasp of the legal intricacies is complete. This is a book that knows the difference between dominium and seisin, between escheat and forfeiture ... groundbreaking. * John Kerrigan, London Review of Books *

Author Information

Katharine Eisaman Maus is James Cabell Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She has published widely on English Renaissance literature, especially drama. Maus has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, and Leverhulme Foundation. One of her previous monographs, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance, won the Roland Bainton Prize from the Sixteenth Century Association.

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