ABSTRACT
In late Tudor and early Jacobean England, the juridical and administrative practices and procedures relating to wards and guardians were controlled by the Court of Wards and Liveries, an institution feared for its extraordinary power and hated for its overt corruption. The first formal public grievances about the Court of Wards and Liveries occurred in Parliament in 1604, a date which lies within the time frame critics have proposed regarding authorship of All’s Well, one of the two Shakespearean plays (the other is Cymbeline) in which relationships between wards and their guardians figure prominently. Such synchronicity should not be dismissed as mere coincidence, and in this essay, I will call attention to some remarkable parallels between representations of issues concerning wardship in All’s Well and the debate about abolishing the Court of Wards and Liveries that occurred in Parliament from 23 March to 20 June 1604. Using the, by now old, New Historicist saw, one of my aims is to demonstrate ways that All’s Well is produced by and reproduces some of the language and issues that occur in the 1604 debate about wardships. Another is to illuminate ways by which All’s Well transforms contemporary legal issues and discourse into dramatic actions and language. On one level, dating All’s Well roughly coeval with the 1604 debate in Parliament suggests that Shakespeare may have incorporated within the play a critique of the issues concerning wardships shortly after the debate. On another level, the play may represent Shakespeare’s participation in the debate while it was ongoing. If the latter is true, then topical references to the law are dialogic rather than merely referential, and, given the close relationship between the
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locates the play during James’s reign and thus within the purview of Jacobean rather than Elizabethan cultural poetics.1 Thus, while it would be absurd to say that the 1604 debate concerning the Court of Wards and Liveries was the context within which Shakespeare wrote All’s Well, there are obvious and undeniable parallels between the date of the controversy and the proposed dates for authorship of the play, as well as numerous similarities between the grievances presented in Parliament and the issues concerning wardship represented in the play. An understanding of this controversy therefore not only illuminates much of the language concerning wards and guardians in the text, but it also suggests a composition date after March 1604.
