False Trials in Shakespeare, Massinger, and Ford

Abstract

SCENES OF TRIAL abound in Renaissance drama, and they have almost received the critical attention they deserve. Not so the curious phenomenon of the ‘false trial’. Dramatic plots presented as trials often call into question the ostensible certainty of the knowledge arrived at through legal means. In Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, Helena uses producible tokens such as rings to prove that her marriage to Bertram has been made indissoluble by the fact that although he thought he was sleeping with Diana he was in fact tricked into bed with her. The play shares with many others an insight into the fragile relation between truths of intention and demonstrable proofs which in legal contexts often take the form of Aristotle's inartificial signs rather than the artificial or inherently probable proofs that he thought were superior.1 But this perspective coexists with an understanding of probability not as a failure of certainty but as a pragmatic, contingent alternative; a necessarily provisional but hopeful step towards knowledge, and a ground for trust. Amidst the precarious provisionalities that haunt the end of All's Well, we are reminded of the king's tentative acceptance of Helena's improbable promise of medical cure: More could I question thee, and more I must, Though more to know could not be more to trust: From whence thou cam'st, how tended on – but rest Unquestioned welcome, and undoubted blessed.(II. i. 205-9)2

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.