ABSTRACT
This chapter describes William Shakespeare's The Tempest and Cymbeline for insights into legal hybridity first emerging in early modernity, as European colonialism is newly under way. It reviews a progression from classical humanist, to postcolonial, and then to hybridity readings of late Shakespearean political drama. The chapter revisits from a hybridity standpoint, a Shakespearean challenge to the myth of savagery as lawlessness, used to justify European conquests of non-European lands. It explains the well-known theories of colonialism as symbolised through sexual conquest, again contrasting the hybridity perspective, and examines broader themes of mutual cultural exchange. Although schools of legal realism have long construed law within informal as well as formal norms and processes, legal hybridity depicts that 'real' as multicultural. The chapter also argues that Cymbeline's shift to a hybridity model represents broader historical challenges to pre-existing political and legal assumptions.
