(Source: Cornell University Press)
Cornell University Press has published a new
book on “theatres of pardoning”.
ABOUT THE BOOK
From Gerald Ford's preemptive pardon of Richard
Nixon and Donald Trump's claims that as president he could pardon himself to
the posthumous royal pardon of Alan Turing, the power of the pardon has a
powerful hold on the political and cultural imagination. In Theaters of
Pardoning, Bernadette Meyler traces the roots of contemporary
understandings of pardoning to tragicomic "theaters of pardoning" in
the drama and politics of seventeenth-century England. Shifts in how pardoning
was represented on the stage and discussed in political tracts and in
Parliament reflected the transition from a more monarchical and
judgment-focused form of the concept to an increasingly parliamentary and
legislative vision of sovereignty.
Meyler shows that on the English stage,
individual pardons of revenge subtly transformed into more sweeping pardons of
revolution, from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, where a series of final
pardons interrupts what might otherwise have been a cycle of revenge, to later
works like John Ford's The Laws of Candy and Philip
Massinger's The Bondman, in which the exercise of mercy prevents
the overturn of the state itself. In the political arena, the pardon as a right
of kingship evolved into a legal concept, culminating in the idea of a general
amnesty, the "Act of Oblivion," for actions taken during the English
Civil War. Reconceiving pardoning as law-giving effectively displaced
sovereignty from king to legislature, a shift that continues to attract
suspicion about the exercise of pardoning. Only by breaking the connection
between pardoning and sovereignty that was cemented in seventeenth-century
England, Meyler concludes, can we reinvigorate the pardon as a democratic
practice.
