The Introduction begins by outlining the generative tension of the early modern public sphere: debate and defamation, free speech and false news, went hand in hand. Libels were often vicious and violent. Yet they were also essential to England’s emerging media ecosystem. Drawing from public sphere theory, the first main section conceptualizes the viral circulation of libels across speech, manuscript, print, and performance; and it makes the case that theater – urban and provincial, amateur and professional alike – was central to their multimedia careers. The next section follows the intertwined semantic, cultural, and legal histories of libel from the 1550s to the early 1600s. In the process, it identifies a clear and enduring paradigm of libel: as anonymous, extralegal accusation. The third section returns to theater history, tracing the same logic to the core of efforts to regulate the stage. After surveying the relevant scholarship on dramatic censorship, it pins the theater’s proximity to libeling on the vexed question of audience interpretation. The Introduction finally locates the late Elizabethan scenes of libel in the context of the anxious years of the long 1590s (1588–1603).

George Garnett explores the roles of time and history in English Common Law, and how they gave the Common Law its political salience. He begins by picking apart F.W. Maitland’s celebrated contrast between the ‘logic of evidence’, deemed to be characteristic of historical understanding, and the ‘logic of authority’, deemed to be characteristic of legal understanding. Celebrated as this statement has been, Garnett contends that the almost – but crucially not quite – antithetical relationship has never been properly understood, and that it rests in part on Maitland’s misunderstanding of how legal development and continuity worked in the period before judicial precedent became central, in the late sixteenth century. The chapter is therefore concerned both with Maitland and with the peculiar problems encountered in tracing legal development and continuity in a system which was primarily customary rather than statutory. By extension, Garnett considers the implications for explaining the use of English legal history in political thinking, particularly in the seventeenth century. Emphasis is laid on Maitland’s distaste for Sir Edward Coke, then as now, the most influential Common Law jurist.

This final chapter examines the early Stuart period in the years leading to the Civil War. This ending point, though necessarily arbitrary, has been chosen because of the entwinement between centralised royal power and the origins of the common law described in previous chapters means that it can be said that the common law had reached a level of maturity when it was able to survive for an extended period of time without a monarch. The Civil War further provides an appropriate conclusion to our survey given that it was the culmination of the conflicts between the king and his advisers, which date back centuries to Magna Carta and beyond. The chapter explores this final time period by exploring the work, behaviour and legacy of Sir Edward Coke, who has been likened to the Shakespeare of the law, and who is often seen as the bridge between the medieval and the modern laws.

The jurisprudential tradition that created the original methods that were in effect at the time of the Constitution provides the foundation for an interpretive approach for applying the Constitution’s fixed text to changing circumstances. Across the centuries, even commentators with strong preferences for following the lawmaker’s original meaning have recognized that there are legitimate times for judges to adapt an old law to fit new circumstances. In light of that history, this chapter describes a principled approach to adapting laws to changing circumstances that has its foundation in Edward Coke and William Blackstone, and was developed over the centuries in the UK courts.