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This book explores literary culture in England between 1630 and 1700, focusing on connections between material, epistemic, and political conditions of literary writing and reading. In a number of case studies and close readings, it presents the seventeenth century as a period of change that saw a fundamental shift towards a new cultural configuration: neoclassicism. This shift affected a wide array of social practices and institutions, from poetry to politics and from epistemology to civility.

The analysis of law in Shakespearean texts has recently seen a renewed interest. In the negotiations between theatre and society the law comes to the forefront not as a static but a mutable code that reflects the new needs of the age. The novelty of