In the acknowledgements section of Shakespeare’s Theater of Judgment Kevin Curran writes that when he began the work, he thought he was embarking on a project of historical and intellectual recovery, but he eventually realised that the task was more consequential than this. It was about not just Shakespeare’s time but our own. Indeed, he says, thinking about judgmentFootnote ¹ entails considering the terms on which public life operates, the complex ethical relationships between freedom and responsibility and, above all, the special place of theatre in cultivating moral intelligence and a shared sense of justice. Curran’s belated discovery of the true import of his own work strikes a chord with me not only because somewhat retrospective clear-sightedness tends to be a feature of every academic project undertaken in earnest but because it captures what I think is at stake in judgment, too. Just as one must be willing to follow a research project wherever it leads, to fully engage in judgment one must similarly be open to venturing into both unexpected and previously unknown places. Such a view contrasts with the common perception that judgment is rendered in ready-made soundbites and all-or-nothing pronouncements. Lost from sight are the real quandaries, the meandering paths and all the nuances and complications of judgment. Here is where the study of it must begin too, for judgment in Shakespeare is ‘always a question, a problem, a matter for exploration; never a straightforward answer or solution’ (p. 4).

Curran’s is a concise but rewarding book on how to reconceptualise judgment, redressing impoverished versions of it with the help of Shakespearean theatre. Avoiding the sting of elitism, Curran’s Shakespeare is the opposite of the lonely genius. Curran identifies in Shakespeare’s theatre a form of collective intelligence – revealed not by anything that Shakespeare explicitly stated, the opinions he may have espoused or even what we commonly refer to as the moral of the plays. The undeniable intelligence in Shakespeare’s plays is found instead in the specific mode of theatre, which turns out to be, like judgment itself, embodied, affective, communal and creative.

Curran wears his scholarship and erudition lightly in this sophisticated yet engaging book. As the series editor of the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy, Curran extends his philosophical considerations to include not just foundational questions of metaphysics, politics and aesthetics but also the theoretical work carried out by performance and poetry itself. In this sense, Shakespeare is philosophical because his work creates new possibilities of knowledge and ethical encounter. Through their scenarios and imagery, the plays engage the qualities of consciousness and human action, the phenomenology of motive and attention, the conditions of personhood and the relationships between reality and experience (p. xii). This is what makes Shakespeare’s art timely and relevant for legal scholarship, too.

While Curran situates the plays in the cultural milieu of the early modern period and discusses the common law theories of Edward Coke (1552–1634), Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and others, he is interested less in the sociohistorical context of Shakespeare’s theatre than in its current meaning. This correction is necessary, he believes, because far more energy has been invested in exploring what Shakespeare once meant than in thinking rigorously about what Shakespeare continues to make possible. Curran pushes back against the academic trappings of historicism whereby an author is put into a box and reduced to an era. He therefore offers some new interpretations of Shakespeare, but they are meant to be only small windows into the scenes of judgment that Shakespeare himself left open. I leave it to others more versed in Shakespeare to assess their pertinence, but Curran’s fresh readings do not appear contrived or deliberately controversial to me. If there is departure from canonical and well-established understandings, this appears motivated by a desire to show that there is much in Shakespeare that merits renewed attention once we begin to ask different questions.

The book is structured around six keywords that together provide a ‘lexicon of judgment’, as assembled from Shakespeare’s writing and dramaturgy: (1) feeling, (2) objects, (3) vision, (4) making, (5) facing and (6) community. The first chapter, ‘Feeling’, reflects the fact that we judge with our bodies phenomenologically, not just intellectually with our rational minds. Interestingly, to bring judgment back from the realm of reason cordoned off from passion (Locke), Curran enlists the help of Hamlet as a man of feeling – not, as he is usually understood, as a thinking subject. ‘To judge feelingly,’ writes Curran, ‘requires a sensory encounter with the material world and a willingness to trust the body as a source of knowledge’ (p. 43). In saying so, Curran is siding with a body of scholarship that has rehabilitated the role of emotions in law (e.g. Nussbaum, Reference Nussbaum2001; Abrams and Keren, Reference Abrams and Keren2010; Amaya and Del Mar, Reference Amaya and Del Mar2020). Yet the goal is not to pin down exactly how particular emotions – say, empathy, fear or disgust – either contribute to or hinder judgment. Rather, Curran is primarily interested in locating the physiological basis of judgment in the body, even though judgment does eventually ‘exceed the individual body’ (p. 42). By feeling, Curran does not mean solipsistic or atomistic sensation but a more ‘collective participation in the world-out-there’ (p. 42).Footnote ² For instance, Shakespeare’s Hamlet provides a series of scenes that foreground the sociality of thinking and the intersubjective ground of moral agency – most famously, the ‘Mousetrap’ episode in which an acting troupe stages a murder almost identical to the one that Hamlet believes Claudius to have committed (p. 39). This play-within-a-play unequivocally demonstrates the conditions that judgment and theatre share: a common sensory environment where people hear, see, feel and think together (p. 34). Acknowledging the importance of such sensorial dynamics can arguably enrich our understanding of legal judgment, too.

Chapter 2 turns its attention to objects, not so much in the vein of recent trends of ‘new materialism’ and ‘vibrant matter’ (Bennett, Reference Bennett2010) but rather in connection to an earlier and somewhat occluded rhetorical tradition of Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian and Horace whereby objects function as ‘vectors of interpretation, material anchors for hermeneutic events’ (p. 42). As an example of the ability of objects to focalise attention Curran gives us Caesar’s mantle in Mark Antony’s speech in Julius Caesar, specifically the visible holes that lead to the conviction that treason has been committed. Curran connects the turn to such objects with a new form of ‘evidentiary thinking’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as to the virtue of prudence, or phronesis – a type of practical knowledge different from the abstract knowledge of sophia. The Aristotelian virtue of phronesis, chief among the cardinal virtues in later Stoic and Christian philosophies such as Thomas Aquinas’s, is a form of contextual ‘know-how’ that presupposes fallibility and the need for persuasion. Curran rightly points out that phronesis is viewed best not as a personality trait or individual moral attribute but as a community-orientated set of practices grounded in the capacity of humans to think, feel and discern together (p. 45). The development of such a virtue of prudence was important not just in the early modern period; as the Dutch judge and law and humanities scholar Jeanne Gaakeer has argued, it is relevant for contemporary judges, too (Reference Gaakeer2019).Footnote ³ Against such a backdrop, objects can function as the ‘prudential linkage’ (p. 49) between the particulars of a given situation and the generality of the norm. Here, Curran notes the affinity with the term ‘artefacts’ employed by Maksymilian Del Mar (Reference Del Mar2020), understood as devices of language encountered in juridical contexts that call upon us to participate and to judge imaginatively (p. 57).

The next chapter, ‘Vision’, deals with the fact that objects can, on the other hand, deceive and create optical illusions (as in the handkerchief used by Iago to manipulate Othello about Desdemona’s unfaithfulness). Vision, though immediate, is not wholly reliable, and things are not always as they appear. Curran explores theatre’s unique status as a space for visual judgment (p. 72), for theatron means literally a place for viewing (pp. 76–77). ‘Theat[r]e … is a collaborative knowledge making practice grounded in visual judgment’ (p. 77), writes Curran, but unlike other sciences of the eye (e.g. astronomy, geography, radiology, bacteriology), it is also ‘make-believe’. As a result, theatre asks us to see not just with the eyes of interpretation but with the eyes of wonder (p. 78). While some recent approaches to law and theatre emphasise the theatrical (Leiboff, Reference Leiboff2020), the performative (Stone Peters, Reference Stone Peters2022) and the spectacular (Ertür, Reference Ertür2022), Curran explores how theatre and ordinary life are grounded in common (albeit playful) experience. At the same time, we might wonder about the privileging of vision over the rest of the senses. Considering the unreliability of vision, what is the role that the rest of sensory experience can play in improving or enriching judgment? For instance, can hearing help the audience – in contrast to Othello – to perform ‘sound judgment’ (Watt Reference Watt2024, p. 137ff.)?

In the chapter on ‘Making’, Curran asks: ‘Is judgment an ending or a beginning? Does it finish something or create something new?’ While judgment is often understood to align with the former, Curran explores judgment as a new beginning – as creative invention. He focuses on epilogues, particularly the one in The Tempest, where the audience is invited to imagine a future for Prospero. He explains that such epilogues were typically read rather than memorised and thus bear a striking resemblance to the procedures of law courts. The chapter then tackles the political and ethical value of theatre, which he explores with the help of Hannah Arendt’s reflections in Eichmann in Jerusalem (Reference Arendt2006 [1963]) – and to a lesser extent Jacques Rancière’s (Reference Rancière2011) ‘sensory fabric of “being together”’ (p. 99). In some of the most compelling pages of the book, Curran recalls how Arendt expected German citizens living under the Third Reich to be capable of telling right from wrong, even when all the rules that existed before had been abandoned and their judgment was at odds with the seemingly unanimous opinions all around them. This hits the nail of judgment on the head, given that not even when the community’s moral compass seems to have gone awry are you absolved from the need to judge – in fact, you may have all the more reason to judge. As Curran explains in Arendtian terms, judging against the community’s ‘common sense’ is not an individual act of heroism but arguably the articulation of responsibility, which in turn is a condition of being a free agent capable of moral decision.Footnote ⁴ Accordingly, ‘[t]o judge is to participate, with all the potential risks and rewards that attend participation’ (p. 97). By contrast, the refusal to judge denotes an ‘unwillingness to be accountable for the world we all must share’ (p. 97).

Curran then shifts from what judgment is to how it works, in ‘Facing’. Chapter 5 chooses Measure for Measure, which may be surprising, given that the ending is known for arbitrariness and authoritarianism, leaving some readers ethically and intellectually unsatisfied. One possible way to neutralise this impression is to say that things were different in Shakespeare’s time, but Curran is not satisfied with such historicist absolution. For him, theatre is not antiquarianism but a living art that must necessarily inhabit, physically and ethically, the present of its performance (p. 105). Therefore, rather than being bound by the constraints of the Duke’s decision, Curran focuses on Mariana’s face instead, analysing her act of unveiling (act 5, scene 1) and how her face can index a judgment-event in space and time.Footnote ⁵ Focusing on the ‘physical and ethical choreography of mutual recognition’,Footnote ⁶ Mariana’s face establishes a new truth about the relations among the characters and the conditions for fundamental change in the social fabric of Shakespeare’s Vienna (p. 110). While the analysis may not save the finale, it shifts attention from the bald content of judgments to the ways that judgment unfolds sequentially through space and time (p. 109). Understood as ‘a participatory practice that forms communities by translating common sensory experience (seeing, showing, looking, hearing) into common axes of value (a shared sense of right and wrong, good or bad)’ (p. 118), Curran concludes – perhaps in the most philosophical statement of the book – that ‘judgment is theatrical because it is constituted by the same raw materials as theatre: time, space, and action’ (p. 117). The understanding of judgment as gaining density, or ‘thickening’, through space and time is something I have written too in my reading of Sophocles’ Antigone (Etxabe, Reference Etxabe2013). With this perspective, we can see that judgment does not occur in an instant, like switching on a light at the moment of decision; rather, judgment has both texture and duration, which can indeed be participatory and collectively engaged. Nevertheless, given the conflictual nature of normative dilemmas, as well as the fact that in theatre, no less than in law, we contend with ‘competing intelligences’ (Yachnin and Manderson, Reference Yachnin and Manderson2010, p. 199), a shared sense of right or wrong, of good or bad, may be too high a bar. How can theatrical judgment account for and respond to normative disagreement about events and conflicts in both theatre and law?

The last chapter, ‘Community’, explores the politics of atonement for crimes too great to punish, where the aim for adjudication is to rebuild the community rather than to punish specific persons. The Winter’s Tale offers a negative example of judgment in Leontes, who believes himself in singular possession of the truth; instead, Curran valorises the more participatory form of judgment employed by Paulina, which is consistent in spirit with early-modern courtroom practices. And by the end of the play, an alternative form of judgment emerges that embraces forgiveness and responsibility. Curran rescues Emmanuel Levinas’s radical ethics based on an encounter with an absolute other and his notion of infinite justice, which is difficult to institutionalise but may represent what Desmond Manderson (Reference Manderson2006) has called ‘the soul of law’. The chapter addresses law’s moral capacities and the notion of restorative justice in the context of historical examples such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. These reflections are highly relevant for the land from where I speak, where indigenous peoples have been decimated by colonialism, and reconciliation is both noble aspiration and live policy. But the latter prompts me to ask further important questions, even if the answers remain out of reach. What narratives of reconciliation might be suitable for the task? What might such judgment entail, and how can it be performed? What does forgiveness mean in this context?

In the final coda of Shakespeare’s Theater of Judgment, the political stakes of reimagining judgment as collaborative, embodied and creative are fully revealed. On the one hand, this view of judgment stands apart from a liberal tradition that reveres reason, the individual mind and the autonomous self. Yet it also stands in opposition to another strand of (neo)liberalism, where value is determined exclusively according to market logic. In contrast to both, Curran vindicates an ethos of open-mindedness, tolerance, sympathy, community and plurality, as drawn from Shakespearean theatre. Such positive revalorisation rescues judgment also from critical projects that view it either solely in terms of condemnation, punishment and negative normalisation (Foucault) or as the maintenance of cultural prestige and privilege (Bourdieu).

For Curran, it is necessary to recover a positive and world-making form of judgment, which he associates with the practice-orientated rhetorical tradition and the collective embodied judgment of Shakespeare’s theatre. Stated in such programmatic terms, I fully agree that a revitalisation of judgment is worth our efforts. It is, moreover, a project eminently suited to humanistically orientated legal scholarship – a big tent that includes law and literature, law and rhetoric, law and emotion, law and performance, cultural legal studies and more. These days, hegemonic forms of judgment are too commonly driven by knee-jerk reactions, likes and dislikes in social media and the number of someone’s ‘followers’. We are increasingly used to seeing harsh and disproportionate judgments for small acts of transgression and the cancelling of entire life histories with the lift of a little finger. Similarly, there are widespread forms of ideological critique whereby the task seems to be to draw lines between friends and enemies, real or imaginary. Lacking from these types of judgment are careful and thoughtful engagement and, fundamentally, the affective registers of repair, generosity, tact and proportion. In this vein, the democratic ethos of openness and plurality – which are harder to practice than to preach – can work as a powerful countermeasure against authoritarianism and its very different ethos.

This is what legal scholarship may learn from Shakespeare’s Theater of Judgment – but also could contribute to it. There are many references to classical common law in the book, to its communal aspect, to its claim of being legitimised not by reason or logic but by history and usage (p. 36),Footnote ⁷ to the fact that common law adjudication is a product of collective experience, not individual thought (p. 37)Footnote ⁸ and to the generative role of precedent in its conceptual landscape.Footnote ⁹ Curran effectively draws attention to the significant overlap between the culture of the theatre and the culture of the law in Shakespeare’s time, yet less historicist, more contemporary and innovative accounts of law are apposite too for the project of revitalising judgment (e.g. Davies Reference Davies2017). This is where Curran can forge a powerful alliance with law and humanities and cultural legal studies in order to make sense of not just law’s self-image in the past but its encounters in the contemporary world.