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A ‘Right to Passions’? Compassion’s Sexed Asymmetry and a Minor Comedy of Errors

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What error drives our eyes and ears amiss?

The Comedy of Errors 2.2.184

Abstract

This paper reflects on the experience of presenting a limit test case based on passion/provocation cases against a proposed ‘right to passions’ suggested by proponents of a sentimental jurisprudence. The limit case, presented at the 2010 CLC held in Utrecht, invited the audience to reflect on the human (read: male) right to a provocation defence, a right enshrined in the criminal law as a concession to ‘human frailty’ in ‘crimes of passion’ for centuries.

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Notes

  1. I have discussed the seemingly intractable problems attending attempts to reform the law of provocation elsewhere (see, for example, Howe 2002, 2004, 2008a).

  2. Of course, criminal courts also struggle to see her act as an eminently rational one of self-defence.

  3. See Wiegman’s (2006) ruminations on the failure of the ‘originating intentions’ of a paper written for a conference on heteronormativity.

  4. As I argued in Howe (2000).

  5. See Howe (2010) for an account of previous attempts to do so.

  6. If you look hard you can even spot the occasional feminist contribution on ‘law’s (masculine) violence’, albeit with its masculinity modestly bracketed away (Hunter 2006).

  7. According to Dabhoiwala, eighteenth-century commentators were well aware of a sexual double standard that ensured that the passions were unevenly, indeed unjustly distributed between men and women, and between different social classes. As Bishop Burnet put it, ‘men have a property in their Wives and Daughters, so that to defile the one, or corrupt the other, is an injust (sic) and injurious thing’ (cited in Dabhoiwala 2010, p. 152).

  8. [2000] 4 All ER 289. See for example Macklem and Gardiner (2001) and Heaton (2001).

  9. AG for Jersey v Holley [2005] 2 AC 580 at 588 and 598.

  10. Lord Morley (1666) 6 St Tr 770 at 780.

  11. R v Duffy [1949] 1 All ER 932.

  12. Ibid at 933. See Edwards (2009) for a more detailed examination of Duffy.

  13. R v Mawgridge (1707) Kel J 119 at 137.

  14. See for example Law Commission (2004, 2006). The exclusion of sexual infidelity as a trigger for loss of self control in the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 should not worry defence lawyers unduly. The taunting script—she said this, she said that—will still be available.

  15. [1946] AC 588 at 597-8.

  16. Examples of some of the more egregious cases are Attorney General’s Reference No 742002 EWCA Crim 2982 and R v Rowland [2003] EWCA Crim 3636.

  17. I thank Kerri Woods, teaching fellow in political philosophy, University of York, for permission to quote her comment.

  18. Other notable commentators on serious and subversive themes in The Comedy include Patricia Parker (1996, pp. 56–82) and Clare Asquith (2005, pp. 55–61).

  19. Heinze (2009 p. 256) argues that the blindness of patriarchal males, their inability to ‘see what is right before their eyes, inducing them to lay their “errors” at the feet of their subordinates, recurs in Shakespeare’. See also Parker’s (1996, p 77; her emphasis) close reading of the disjunction of discourses within the play that obfuscates the meaning of repeated biblical references, in particular the ‘familiar hierarchical assimilation of master to Master, spouse to Spouse, a structure on which not only Elizabethan homiletics but modern critical ones depend’.

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Acknowledgments

Research for this paper was completed during my visiting professorial fellowship at Queen Mary Law School, University of London. I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the inspirational work of Eric Heinze, professor of law at Queen Mary. Thanks Eric for your wonderful Law and Shakespeare lectures, your boundless enthusiasm for Shakespearean-inflected critical law scholarship and finally, for so generously sharing your wealth of knowledge in the field. Thanks also to the reviewers for their comments.

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  1. School of Law, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS, UK

    Adrian Howe

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Howe, A. A ‘Right to Passions’? Compassion’s Sexed Asymmetry and a Minor Comedy of Errors . Law Critique 23, 83–102 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-012-9098-5

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