Shakespeare's Acts of Will

Gary Watt is Professor of Law at the University of Warwick, UK. One of the founding editors of the journal Law and Humanities, he is a National Teaching Fellow and regularly delivers workshops on rhetoric for the Royal Shakespeare Company. In addition to texts on the law of trusts, he has written monographs on law and literature, law and dress, and has co-edited the collection Shakespeare and the Law.

• Acknowledgements1. ‘Performance is a kind of will or testament’2. Handling Tradition: Testament as Trade in Richard II and King John3. Worlds of Will in As You Like It and The Merchant of Venice4. ‘Shall I descend?’: Rhetorical Stasis and Moving Will in Julius Caesar5. ‘His will is not his own’: Hamlet Downcast and the Problem of Performance6. Dust to Dust and Sealing Wax: The Materials of Testamentary PerformanceNotesIndex

Through a strong analysis of six plays—Richard II, King John, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet—Watt extends the definition of legal terms (“will,” “testament,” “executor,” “probate,” “witness”) to highlight the rhetorical and performative crossover between law and theater, or the ways in which words “express” and “move” will … Watt, a professor of law at the University of Warwick, presents a careful and caring study of will in Shakespeare’s plays. Watt’s thorough rendering of rhetoric and performance is provocative and fully worth study.