Shakespeare and Social Crime: Legality and the People’s Justice

Abstract

The idea of “social crime” was first developed by Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who defined as “social” those crimes which “have a distinct element of protest in them”, and are therefore supported by the community’s consensus as crimes of necessity. Though potentially fertile, however, the notion of “social crime” was quenched by the partial disagreement of another Marxist historian, E. P. Thompson, who objected that such definition would imply a distinction between “good” and “bad” criminals, overlooking the fact that all criminals occupied the same disadvantaged social group. The present article examines three Shakespearean texts where the idea of social crime is differently represented: Coriolanus, the Hand D pages of Sir Thomas More and The Merry Wives of Windsor. The citizens’ revolt in the first scene of Coriolanus is probably the most relevant theatrical representation of a social crime in Shakespeare’s plays. Not only are the Roman Citizens represented in it as performing a conscious action of protest dictated by need; but, as has been noted, the play has an apparent topical feature, for it was written a year after the Midlands Rising (1607), a protest against enclosures which Shakespeare re-reads, in Coriolanus, as a food riot. The “Ill May day scenes” in Sir Thomas More, instead, are presented as the instance of an irrational protest against foreign labourers which, being dictated by mere xenophobia, cannot be justified as “social” crime. Even less can the “disparagement” Falstaff performs in Merry Wives by poaching in the lands of JP Shallow. Falstaff and his gang of friends are indeed “bad” criminals who profit from their vicinity to the nouveaux riches to perform an offense that should have been prosecuted at the highest degree, that of the Star Chamber, but is instead celebrated with a venison dinner.