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Critical interest in the legal and economic issues imbedded in The Devil Is An Ass, first staged in 1616, has been directed to the topicality of Jonson’s satire: contemporary irritation about monopolies; polemics about the fen-draining projects; King James’ edicts on the problems caused by his subjects’ movement from the country to the city; his 1616 Star Chamber speech on the jurisdictional disputes between the common law courts and the Chancellor’s Court of Equity (a conflict that resulted in the removal of Edward Coke from his position as Chief Justice of the King’s Bench); and, in particular, several scandalous trials between 1613–16 involving accusations of witchcraft (the series of Overbury trials over which Chief Justice Coke presided, as well as a trial in Leicester in 1616 in which the judges were fooled by the false “possession” staged by a hysterical boy).1 My own essay emphasizes the law’s importance to the play, but rather than focusing on topical issues, it is spurred by the various plots that depend on contract and property, as well as the law’s role in suggesting the play’s linguistic economy: and by this I mean not only the social values symbolically exchanged in language, but the comic exchange of language itself (i.e., puns and equivocations) operating in the play. The importance of contract in The Devil Is An Ass has not gone unnoticed, but it has not been recognized as a recurring structural feature in the play’s different plots, and it has been treated from a strictly literary, rather than a legal, perspective. The pact involving Satan and Pug with affairs on earth reminds many critics of the very different terms of Doctor Faustus’ contract with the devil, which appears with a comic twist in The Devil Is An Ass because of the little devil Pug’s consistent inability to compete with human vice as he draws ever nearer to the conclusion of his temporal contract with Satan. Fitzdottrell’s agreement to give Wittipol fifteen minutes of conversational access to his wife, in exchange for a valuable cloak, has likewise been considered from a literary viewpoint that emphasizes what that contract shows about characters and values. On the other hand, the legal status of the notarized instrument of enfeoffment which Fitzdottrell signs in act 4 has received surprisingly little scrutiny, and this has led to contradictory beliefs about how the play is perceived to end. Most critics take it for granted that if the ending is something short of “happily ever after,” there has nonetheless been an economic resolution which guarantees Fitzdottrell’s wife Frances a certain amount of security by putting control of her husband’s estate into Manly’s abler hands. Paul Clarkson and Clyde Warren (who were lawyers) and Anne Barton (who is not) appear to be the only critics to date who have noticed that Manly complicates the understanding of property rights in the final moments of the play, when he asserts that Fitzdottrell has not lost his estate; and as Barton observes, if the property “remains his [Fitzdottrell’s]…. It is a heavily qualified happy ending” that does not in fact guarantee the resolution of Frances’ problems.2 I shall therefore be arguing two related points in this essay: 1) that the practical situations (as well as the ethical and epistemological problems) found in the law of contract and property suggested conditions which Jonson used in plotting The Devil Is An Ass, and 2) that the language the law operated in defining and dealing with questions of contract and property suggested a vocabulary which Jonson refracted throughout the comedy in non-legal contexts. By collapsing the meaning of key words, Jonson in fact comically unites a number of figures whose activities are apparently disparate, and one of my purposes here is to show how Jonson uses the terms of contract and property law as a dramatic nexus in the very different worlds he shackles together in The Devil Is An Ass.
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