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Many early modern poets and playwrights were also members of the legal societies the Inns of Court, and these authors shaped the development of key genres of the English Renaissance, especially lyric poetry, dramatic tragedy, satire, and masque. But how did the Inns come to be literary centres in the first place, and why were they especially vibrant at particular times? Early modernists have long understood that urban setting and institutional environment were central to this phenomenon: in early modern London, educated men with time on their hands turned to literary pastimes for something to do. Lawyers at Play proposes an additional, more essential dynamic: the literary culture of the Inns intensified in decades of profound transformation in the legal profession. Focusing on the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the period when a large literary network first developed around the societies, the book demonstrates that the literary surge at this time grew out of and responded to a period of rapid expansion in the legal profession and in the career prospects of members. Lawyers at Play maps the literary terrain of a formative but understudied period in the English Renaissance, but it also provides the foundation for an argument that goes beyond the 1560s to provide a framework for understanding the connections between the literary and legal cultures of the Inns over the entire early modern period.

This book explores both the value and the potential pitfalls of reading the literature and drama of the period from the 1380s to the Reformation ‘historically’, that is, in dialogue with historical events and the political cultures of the communities which produced and received it. It examines a wide range of dramatic and literary texts, some of which, like Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or Sir David Lyndsay’s monumental drama, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis are relatively well known. Others, like the early Tudor Interlude of Godly Queen Hester, are perhaps less so. What drives the book is a belief that studying the literature of a period provides a far richer experience of its culture and politics than consideration of ‘historical’ documents alone. To read literature historically allows us to see how contemporary men and women deployed the ideas, concepts and symbols that mattered to them and how they represented their own relationships to such ideas and symbols. It allows us to hear them discussing questions of morality, identity, belief, private and public probity and responsibility openly and at length, and suggests how those men and women might respond, emotionally and aesthetically (as well as intellectually or pragmatically) to moral, social, and political issues. To read literature historically is, then, to attend to history imaginatively and aesthetically, with a fuller regard to the concerns, at once both intimately personal and broadly cultural, that underpinned political action, and the beliefs that gave meaning to individual behaviour.