It was once hard for literary critics to argue for the political engagement of English Renaissance literature. When David Norbrook declared in 1984 that Philip Sidney's imagined Arcadia was not a “timeless idyll” but a “state with a complex economic and social structure,” his observation seemed radically new. Since then, of course, there have been the New Historicists—for whom literature was complicit with state power—and the Cambridge School, advocating granular attention to the languages of political thought. In the meantime, social and legal historians, such as the late Christopher Brooks, have argued that early modern English political thought is impossible to understand without a grasp of ordinary people's uses of common law institutions. Stephanie Elsky's Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature is an elegant and ambitious literary version of Brooks's proposition. Elsky argues that the English common law's declared belief in its own constitutive political power is the enabling condition of early modern literature's radical social imagining.

One of the most impressive qualities of Elsky's book is its sustained control of the framing of this argument, because the generative power of its analogies relies on holding in play equally vital distinctions and discriminations. Janelle Greenberg's account of the political radicalism of the common-law myth of immemorial origin is crucial to Elsky's meditation on how English literature imagines the possibility of change, whether political or poetic. In arguing that English poets thought of the literary past as immemorial popular custom, for example, Elsky has to contend with the widely held literary-historical consensus that sees the Renaissance as the birth of modern historical consciousness. Similarly, in response to Alan Cromartie's account of a growing tendency to identify lex terrae not with the monarch but with the customs of the people, Elsky proposes a literary analogy with the humanist vision of literature as composed out of “commonplaces”: sayings that belong to all the people. If common law is created out of collective custom, she proposes, literature relies on the apt “invention” (in a poetic sense) of the commonplace. But this analogy, in turn, requires further discrimination and distinction: the doctrine of “law as popular custom” coexists, in what Elsky calls a “paradox” (9), with the role of law as the regulator of private ownership, whereas proverbs, although authored by noone, can be more or less wittily deployed, depending on individual art and skill.

Elsky's series of literary case studies ingeniously deploys these analogies and distinctions, turning up some thought-provoking new interpretations. Her analogy between the literary commonplace and legal common custom, for example, might lead us to imagine that the citizens of Thomas More's Utopia would utter nothing but collective wisdom, nothing but proverbs. Yet, as she shows, all the flash and wit of a “volley of commonplaces” (59) occurs in Utopia's first book, the so-called “dialogue of counsel” between More and Hythloday. Utopia itself, she puns, is “no place for commonplaces” (73). Perhaps proverbs and commonplaces are collective only in the collecting; in composition, their apt and skilful application distinguishes the individual authorial voice.

From utopian imagining, Elsky turns to literary nationalism and colonial politics. She reads Edmund Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland in the context of a debate over the use of native as opposed to classical metres in English poetry. Whether in matters of prosody or Irish land law, Spenser, she shows, distrusts the power of “custom” alone, favoring an injection of coercive conquest. English accents must be made to fit classical meters, as the Irish people must be brutally coerced into seeing the fitness of English inheritance practices. Poetic meter and the political uses of custom are just as insightfully, if more optimistically, juxtaposed in Elsky's chapter on Sidney's Arcadia. Sidney's characteristic insistence on hermeneutic contingency is itself, Elsky compellingly argues, beautifully expressive of his commitment to a politics of participation in the shepherd's eclogues.

Elsky's final two chapters on Isabella Whitney's “Sweet Nosgay” and Shakespeare's Hamlet argue that political and literary revolutions are made possible by customary forms. Laertes’ offstage rebellion in Hamlet is the “customary” prerequisite for the evanescent conceptual revolution of Hamlet's ending (188). Whitney's spirited poetic miscellany (which ends with a joke about the author's not having credit enough to be imprisoned for debt) apparently turns both learning and London into commons, or collectively owned spaces. If the last is true, however, I find that it loses the witty point that links Whitney's mock will and testament to the credit-feigning “familiar epistles” that open her text. This minor reservation of mine, however, hardly detracts from Elsky's impressive achievement. Her book offers a new, compelling and optimistic framework for reading English literature's conceptual debt to law in the early modern period, as well as for thinking about its legacy for our own times.