Sonnet 30 and the Language of Debt

Shakespeare and the Law

In this course, Dr Andrew Zurcher (University of Cambridge) looks at Shakespeare through the lens of early modern law, with a particular focus on the tension between legal (i.e. public, political, performative) personhood and natural (i.e. private, authentic) personhood. In the first lecture, we look at Shakespeare’s use of the language of debt in Sonnet 30. In the second lecture, we think Richard II through the concept of the king’s two bodies, before turning in the third lecture to explore statements of intent (and failures to fulfil that intent) in Hamlet. In the fourth lecture, we look at King Lear in the context of the laws surrounding inheritance and gift-giving, before turning in the fifth lecture to the tension between one’s legal (i.e. public, political, performative) person and natural (i.e. private, authentic) person, and the extent this tension is negotiated in Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies.

Sonnet 30 and the Language of Debt

In this lecture we think about Shakespeare’s use of legal language in Sonnet 30, particularly the language of debt, focusing in particular on: (i) the logical structure of the poem; (ii) the sheer number of legal terms used in the poem, e.g. sessions, summon, remembrance, etc.; (iii) the early modern meanings of the words ‘sessions’ and ‘remembrancer’; and (iv) the way that debt worked in early modern England, especially the interdependence of all the debts one held, i.e. you couldn’t default on one debt without impacting all the others.