Lawyers at Play

For scholars of the early modern period, it is a basic truism that writers with connections to the Inns of Court contributed significantly to the era’s flourishing literary culture. It is also increasingly appreciated that the marked growth of the legal profession in Elizabeth’s reign, paralleled by the rise in importance of legal men in the government alongside, and above, the nobility and clergy, is reflected—sometimes critiqued or satirised, other times lauded and promoted—in the popular literature of the time. Nevertheless, as Jessica Winston contends in this important book, the body of literature produced at the Inns by its members has been under-studied, and our understanding of the role the Inns played in nurturing literary composition has tended to rest on overly general conceptions of their ‘culture’ or ‘social world’. Certainly, Winston grants, through the decades there was much continuity in the culture of the Inns of Court, rooted in their time-honoured institutional rituals and their members’ ‘sense of a corporate identity’. But equally the early modern period was a time of transitions, new challenges and new opportunities, within the legal profession itself and with respect to the status of the law and lawyers within society. The character of that ‘corporate identity’ transformed over time, Winston points out; correspondingly, in historically contingent ways, literature was at certain times taken up as a fit vehicle for members of the Inns to negotiate professional, legal and political changes that looked to affect their immediate and future prospects. Thus, the Inns did not produce literature steadily throughout the era, or literature of one particular sort to match a uniform institutional character. There were, instead, ‘networks of writers clustering in particular periods’: a first, in the late 1550s and early 1560s; a second in the 1590s; a third in the 1610s; another in the 1630s–40s

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