From common law to natural law: English expansionism and the early modern romance

My dissertation argues that the early modern genre of romance played a significant role in the discursive formation of legal imperialism. While many English subjects held tenaciously to the tradition of common law---a legal system grounded in immemorial English custom---as a way of distinguishing England from its Catholic aggressors, such legal claims put the English at a distinct disadvantage in foreign contexts where England itself was the aggressor. How could English writers insist on the implementation of English common law in Ireland when the common law was, according to Edmund Spenser, uniquely suited to "the kingdom for which it was devised"? As I show, prominent early modern writers of romance, such as Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and Lady Mary Wroth, employed narrative and poetic strategies in order to resolve this difficulty. These writers posited Catholic natural-law and civil-law traditions as alternatives to native legal discourse, thereby laying an ethical basis for English conquest. In The Arcadia, Sidney overcomes his misgivings about the Spanish source of recent Catholic natural-law doctrine and uses natural-law foundations in order to offer an alternative to the violent form of conquest which Spain had pursued. In Book Six of The Faerie Queene, Spenser explores a possible foreign policy in Ireland based on a compromise between the competing legal discourses of natural law and common law, a compromise which Spenser was unable to accomplish in his prose tract on Ireland. Finally, Shakespeare's Cymbeline and Wroth's Urania suggest that natural law and common law were separately necessary to British imperialism. In contrast to Spenser's attempt to resolve the conflict between these two legal discourses, Shakespeare and Wroth present the British sovereign as responsible for imposing natural law on other nations while at the same time justifying Britain's own retention of native legal traditions. In each of these literary texts, then, I explore how early modern writers employed romance conventions in order to negotiate a coherent legal rationale for English expansion.