Bradin Cormack's A Power to Do Justice is a fine and formidable book that makes an important cross-disciplinary intervention into early modern literary studies and English legal history. Sweeping broadly across the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Cormack builds his argument around the labile concept of jurisdiction, which in his account is both the delimitation of a given juridical power and the process whereby law comes to possess a fixed but eminently contestable form. Jurisdiction, the assertion of a territory within which a legal actor possesses the “power to do justice,” is a Janus-faced action; it is the “fundamental juridical dynamic by which the distribution of a given authority both stabilizes and makes contestable that authority's norms” (5). The concept of jurisdiction, in Cormack's view, offers an especially valuable pathway toward an understanding of the fluid and complex relationship between law and expressive culture in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Cormack proposes a nuanced isomorphism of these two often opposed modes of expression: “jurisdiction and literature both … open the culture in which they function onto more complex orders than those through which they seem to do their work” (12). But the bond between jurisdiction and literary culture is not one of mere analogy or occult resemblance; Cormack proposes that his book will “show how deeply engaged early modern literature was with the technical production of the legal order, and to define the ways in which jurisdictional topics provoked a metacritical perspective on the management of legal meaning and literary meaning both” (12). At the heart of that shared metacritical perspective are shared fantasies of sovereignty, recognitions of the fragile, contingent quality of law or legal norms, and often begrudging acknowledgments of the necessity of equitable accommodation.

By way of illustrating these braided destinies of legal and literary meaning, Cormack offers six detailed and erudite chapters devoted to the work of key thinkers from John Skelton, Sir John Fortescue, and Thomas More to Edmund Spenser, Sir John Davies, William Shakespeare, and Sir Edward Coke. The analytical method of these chapters is symptomatic of a core aim of the book; Cormack is less interested in offering up comprehensive readings of exemplary literary works than he is in describing a horizontal plane of legal, literary, and political reasoning from which he can adduce emblematic flash points of jurisdictional action. In concrete terms, literary texts have pride of place here, but only just. Cormack's commanding and nuanced treatments of the often technical legal history of the period are usually integrated with elegance into his treatment of a representative literary text. Long chapters on Skelton and More manage this balancing act with particular grace; an offbeat text like Skelton's play Magnyfycence here comes alive to offer a poetics of bureaucratic culture, while Cormack gives us an original and entirely compelling view of More's public theory of equity. In the book's account of Spenser and of Shakespeare's history plays, however, the gravity of the legal material crowds out Cormack's often narrow readings of key episodes. The same cannot be said, however, for the book's outstanding and highly original chapter on Cymbeline and Pericles, two of Shakespeare's most challenging late romances. Here Cormack supplies a striking vision of these two plays as Shakespeare's meditations on the spatial and temporal metaphysics of jurisdiction in a historical moment when new theories of maritime trade, imperium, and especially political belonging emerge to meet the needs of an expanding state. As in the age's related common law jurisprudence, these plays confront the limits of sovereign power and the essential instability of the rule of law, even as they model a normative method of accommodation and exchange. The book concludes with a fine chapter on the cowritten 1624 play A Cure for a Cuckold, which, in Cormack's persuasive account, is a comic set piece of jurisdictional frisson.

Cormack has persuasively announced jurisdiction as an important conceptual category for early modern studies. His insights might have been fruitfully extended deeper into cultural history and historical sociology, and some attention, however brief, to the lived experience of jurisdictional accommodation outside the courts and off the page would have given the argument additional purchase. Indeed, the book reproduces one of its key observations, namely, that the law-literature nexus was and is a technical conversation between professional stakeholders. This is not necessarily a critique; the fact that there is more work to be done in bringing forward the visible cultural effects of jurisdiction is a testimony of the richness of Cormack's whole line of inquiry. A Power to Do Justice is a very good book, but it is, at times, a difficult read. Cormack's prose can be uncompromising and his historically rigorous and philosophically nuanced argument may ask a lot of nonspecialist readers. But despite an occasionally high entry cost, Cormack's study repays the effort at every turn; his insights are striking, and his patient exposition is thorough and persuasive. This is an impressive and illuminating book, generative of exciting new questions; it deserves a wide audience.