Book dossier

The invention of suspicion

by Lorna Hutson

"The Invention of Suspicion argues that the English justice system underwent changes in the sixteenth-century which, because of the system's participatory nature, had a widespread effect and a decisive impact on the development of English Renaissance drama. The book offers an overarching account of epistemological change since the Reformation: even elements of Renaissance drama which can seem to be 'remnants of the sacred' may be seen to be, crucially, evidential. The book also offers an entirely new account of the importance of experiments in probabilistic drama in the political circumstances of the 1560s and 70s. It argues that these resulted in a sub-genre of 'civic detective plots' which may be seen to underlie Shakespeare's early experiments in revenge tragedy, history play, and romance comedy, in Titus Andronicus, Henry VI, and The Comedy of Errors, as well as Jonson's Every Man in his Humour. The book ranges from mid-fifteenth-century drama, through sixteenth-century interludes to the drama of the 1590s. It draws on a wide range of legal-historical sources in print and manuscript."--Jacket.