At first sight, it may seem odd for this Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Language to include a chapter on Shakespeare’s language and translation. After all, a translation renders a text into another language; inasmuch as a translation of Shakespeare is a real translation, it will no longer be in Shakespeare’s language.

At the heart of Shakespearean drama is the dialogic encounter. Whether as arresting as the clash of irreconcilable opponents or as seemingly mundane as the everyday conversation of acquaintances, the performed encounters of plays deploy language in a special manner that differs from discursive writing or narration.

Everyone knows that Shakespeare wrote iambic pentameter. This fact is familiar even to those who know little else about Shakespeare and nothing else about prosody.

There has never been a more exciting time to be working on Shakespeare’s language. If you have an internet connection, fire it up.

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, does it. Likewise, Peter Quince, carpenter of Athens. They write for actors. And writing for actors, they tell us something about how the playwright who’s written them writes for actors.

Rhetoric aimed to teach pupils how to argue persuasively and how to analyse other people’s speeches and writing in order to understand what they were saying, to reply to them effectively, and, at times, to learn from their use of language.

What is more Shakespearean, in the popular imagination, than creativity with words? Shakespeare’s mythic gift for lexical invention underlies his enduring reputation as godfather of English literature and language, a writer whose work has apparently given us ‘roughly one-tenth of all the most quotable utterances written or spoken in English since its inception’.

It is the purpose of this chapter to examine and analyse the juridical notion of custom in relation to the institutional foundations of common law. I concentrate primarily on juristic ideas of custom attendant on the theories espoused by Fortescue in De laudibus (written c. 1470) and developed in the first half of the sixteenth century, notably by the barrister and jurist Christopher St German, author of Dialogus de fundamentis legum Anglie et de conscientia, more commonly known as Doctor and Student, published in English in 1530. In passing, I consider the gradual change in juridical meaning of consuetudo, from that intended by Chief Justiciar of England Ranulf de Glanvill and cleric, justice and jurist Henry de Bracton, to its meaning as recorded in the decisions of judges, handed down in the courts of common law. The judiciary adopted for themselves a didactic and rabbinical role, in accordance with the description of them by Fortescue as sacerdotes (priests): ‘For a priest is by etymology said to be one who gives or teaches holy things.’ Like Fortescue, they were trained in the arcane practices of the English legal system at the Inns of Court and practised their calling as serjeants-at-law in the law courts at Westminster prior to their elevation to the ranks of the judiciary.

Attempts to define treason often imply a debate about the very nature and limits of the law, and about the legal authority of governments. Medieval literature reflects such tensions, but also seems to invest imaginatively in the concept of treason to an extent that the history of law alone cannot explain. In this chapter it is argued that treason took on a new shape during the period from the 1260s to the 1340s, and that this was to have a lasting effect on its representation, not just in English law, but also in English culture more generally. This evolution was significantly conditioned by the political turmoils of the period, including the Second Barons’ War of 1264–7, Edward I’s campaigns in Wales and Scotland, Edward II’s conflict with Thomas of Lancaster, and Edward II’s eventual deposition in 1327. Literary texts testify to the legal paradigm-shifts provoked by these events, and to the differences of political principle that underlay them; but they themselves seem to have played a part in the very processes that led to the creation of these new paradigms. What we see in several late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century texts is something of the cultural and political ferment in which new attitudes to treason were formed.

This chapter argues for the idea of collective rights with which a people endow themselves in the face of political crises, as opposed to the more popular concept of human rights which is to be given by (often hostile) states to individuals, at the urging of international organizations. Citing examples such as those of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico and the people of Palestine, the author sheds light on the political rewards in the translation of the rights of the individual to collective rights. The latter kind has the advantage of having evolved from cultural specificities, as opposed to the more conventional idea of transcendent human rights. They are more in tune with material realities as well as unobligated to universal standards and forms.

This chapter gives an overview of the current debates regarding the way human rights has been defined and historicized. It argues that understanding these debates is crucial for an understanding of the ways in which human lights matter to literary study. Referencing the works of Johannes Morsink, Paul Gordon Lauren, Lynn Hunt, and Samuel Moyn, the author moves the through the varied points of origin and genealogies of human rights as we understand them today. The chapter shows that this present concept is by no means unambiguous, and argues that literature and its analysis provides us with one of the best ways to investigate the historical and political tensions that exist at its very foundations.

Most legal and juridical proceedings depend upon fixed positions with regards to human rights claims, especially where violations of rights are concerned, those of victims, perpetrators, witnesses, and sometimes, although to a lesser extent, beneficiaries. However, the social and political realities in which rights are embedded usually prove much murkier. For example, those who carry out atrocities one minute, might find themselves the object of state violence the next; witnesses who receive reparations or are able to sell their stories might seem like less innocent beneficiaries of the events of which they’ve given accounts, and a much broader notion of culpability calls into question the function or efficaciousness of identifying individual perpetrators. This chapter argues that literature is especially well-suited for evincing and elaborating such ambiguities and contradictions that inhere in the history and politics of human rights.

Traditional investigative journalism maintains a commitment to neutral objectivity, but the genre of creative nonfiction, in which writers are deeply immersed in complex and rapidly shifting social and political conditions, has proven to be one of the most durable genres of human rights literature. On the one hand, reportage often enjoys the documentary authority of the first person observer. However, the intensely personal relationship of the writer to his or her subject also entails vexed questions of how they represent the experiences of human rights subjects (whether victims or survivors), the usually uneven structural relations of power between the writer and subject, and the ethical good or harms enacted by the representations themselves. This chapter turns to reportage and other first-person documentary prose, including Human Rights Watch press releases, Addario’s The Forever War, and Angelina Jolie’s Notes from my Travels to examine both the appeals and difficulties the genre poses for representing human rights victims and struggles.

This chapter provides a survey of poetic reactions to human rights violations in the contemporary world. Theodor Adorno declared in 1949, “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz,” a sentiment symptomatic of the shock that made literature seem inadequate in dealing with the scale of human injustice revealed by the Holocaust. However, the human capacity for wrongdoing remains endemic to our times. Wherever human rights violations have proved irresistible, poets have sought redress through the symbolic action of poetry, giving proof of how we might invert the sentiments of Walter Benjamin’s claim that “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” In the teeth of modern barbarism, as this chapter aims to demonstrate, poetry continues to remind humanity of what will keep us humane and human.

The practical inefficacy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was largely due to the development of the Cold War following its adoption in 1948. The author in this chapter studies the generative environment of the UDHR, with the particular geopolitical and cultural dissonances of the post world war world, and follows through to its immediate aftermath. It especially looks at the literary advocacy of human rights that had come up in this period, where the right to write without persecution began to stand for a larger body of diverse rights. Traversing a wide range of literary engagement with human rights in the Global South and North – in testimonio, autobiography, political fiction, radical drama, community theater, war poetry, magical realism, and diasporic literature – the author shows how Cold War literature documents both the ideals and the failures of human rights as thought and action.

This chapter looks at the proliferation and pluralization of the subject of human rights, in terms of identity and difference, in the twentieth century, with its inclusion of previously elided constituencies – women, LGBTQ individuals, persons with disabilities, migrants, and so on. The authors test the limits of this plurality by studying its imbrication with heteronormative notions of reproductive futurism, transnormativity, ableism, and neoliberal agency. The texts in consideration are three documentary films – Growing up Coy, Born in the Wrong Body: My Transgender Kidand Kids on the Edge: the Gender Clinic. This chapter seeks to understand the potentialities and limitations of transformative identity-based legal categories, and the children whose personal lives are derecognized within the systems of these categories, and also to ‘queer’ or ‘crip’ established human rights discourses which have their roots in heterosexist notions of ownership of one's body.