Doublings: Comedy, Office, Law

Doublings: Comedy, Office, Law

Description

The weightier the profession the greater the need for levity. Lawyers, whose practice engages constantly with trauma, conflict, and death have a finely established and generously expansive tradition of rem levem, stemming back to the Roman games and the officium ludicræ that administered the forum. The early modern reception of the classical tradition witnessed lawyers devising mock trials that mocked, revels that revealed, jocastic customs and saturnalian practices that challenged the agelastic and melancholic quotidian rituals of the juridical. The comedic indeed grows in stature and scope during the period and allows for the argument that the exegete’s quadripartite conception of the levels of the text in fact masks a fifth tier of meaning, the humorous doubling, the satirical punning, and the sensus ridiculus that the enigmatist Antonio de Nebrija notes in the introduction to his Aenigmata iuris.

ISBN

978-3-031-74093-0

Book Title

Literature and the Legal Imaginary: Knowing Justice

Editor(s)

Subha Mukherji, Dunstan Roberts

Start Page

165

Publication Date

1-7-2025

Publisher

Palgrave Macmillan Cham

Keywords

Literature and Law, Anglophone literature, Poetics, Renaissance England, Law and drama, Legal knowledge

Disciplines

Film and Media Studies | Law

Doublings: Comedy, Office, Law

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