An Interdisciplinary research seminar

Professor Gary Watt, School of Law, University of Warwick.

Shakespeare’s Testamentary Performance in As You Like It

Professor Gary Watt, the first ever speaker in the interdisciplinary series “Sidelights on Shakespeare”, returns to share some thoughts from his upcoming book Shakespeare’s Acts of Will: Law, Testament and Properties of Performance which will be published in 2016 on the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s will.

Since ancient times legal ceremonies of testamentary transfer have been performed before the witnessing public by actors using props and following the set text of a script. John Austin considered words of bequest to be exemplary of “speech act”. The distinctive performative power of testamentary utterance is attributable in part to the fact that “the tongues of dying men / Enforce attention like deep harmony” (RII, 2.1.5-6), and in part to the transcendental, even magical, attempt to speak across the threshold of death itself and to bind the properties of future worlds with present words. Theatrical performance, like legal performance, is “testamentary” in the way it engages actors to execute the dramatist’s will and playgoers to witness and approve it. The performance is not complete without the complicity of executors and the approbation of a community of witnesses. As You Like It, which in terms of theme and “source” texts can claim to be Shakespeare’s most testamentary play, is also exemplary of the ritual and communal testamentary power that connects legal to theatrical performance.

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