This book investigates the origins, impact, and outcome of the
Elizabethan obsession with fraudulent conveyancing, the part of
debtor-creditor law that determines when a court can void a
transfer of assets. Focusing on the years between the passage of a
key statute in 1571 and the court case that clarified the statute
in 1601, Charles Ross convincingly argues that what might seem a
minor matter in the law was in fact part of a wide-spread cultural
practice. The legal and literary responses to fraudulent
conveyancing expose ethical, practical, and jurisprudential
contradictions in sixteenth-century English, as well as modern,
society. At least in English Common Law, debt was more pervasive
than sex. Ross brings to this discussion a dazzling knowledge of
early modern legal practice that takes the conversation out of the
universities and Inns of Court and brings it into the early modern
courtroom, the site where it had most relevance to Renaissance
poets and playwrights. Ross here examines how during the thirty
years in which the law developed, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare
wrote works that reflect the moral ambiguity of fraudulent
conveyancing, which was practiced by unscrupulous debtors but also
by those unfairly oppressed by power. The book starts by showing
that the language and plot of Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor
continually refers to this cultural practice that English society
came to grips with during the period 1571-1601. The second chapter
looks at the social, political, and economic climate in which
Parliament in 1571 passed 13 Eliz. 5, and argues that the law,
which may have been used to oppress Catholics, was probably passed
to promote business. The Sidney chapter shows that Henry Sidney, as
governor of Ireland (a site of religious oppression), and his son
Philip were, surprisingly, on the side of the fraudulent conveyors,
both in practice and imaginatively (Sidney's Arcadia is the first
of several works to associate fraudulent conveyancing with the
abduction of women). The fourth chapter shows that Edmund Spenser,
who as an official in Ireland rails against fraudulent conveyors,
nonetheless includes a balanced assessment of several forms of the
practice in The Faerie Queene. Chapter five shows how Sir Edward
Coke's use of narrative in Twyne's Case (1601) helped settle the
issue of intentionality left open by the parliamentary statute. The
final chapter reveals how the penalty clause of the Elizabethan law
accounts for the punishment Portia imposes on Shylock at the end of
The Merchant of Venice. The real strength of the book lies in
Ross's provocative readings of individual cases, which will be of
great use to literary critics wrestling with the applications of
legal theory to the interpretation of individual texts. This study
connects a major development in the law to the literature of the
period, one that makes a contribution not only to the law but also
to literary studies and political and social history.
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