Books in the Rethinking the Early Modern series

Offers the first sustained examination of the relationship between law and selfhood in Shakespeare's work. Taking five plays and the sonnets as case studies, Kevin Curran argues that law provided Shakespeare with the conceptual resources to imagine selfhood in social and distributed terms, as a product of interpersonal exchange or as a gathering of various material forces.

Argues that Shakespeare's plays present ""secularization"" not only as a historical narrative of progress but also as a hermeneutic process that unleashes complex and often problematic transactions between sacred and secular. These transactions shape ideas about everything from pastoral government to wonder and the spatial imagination.