Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction -- Theatre, Theatrocracy, and the Politics of Pathos in the Athenian Lawcourt -- The Roman Advocate as Actor : Actio, Pronuntiatio, Prosopopoeia, and Persuasive Empathy in Cicero and Quintilian -- Courtroom Oratory, Forensic Delivery, and the Wayward Body in Medieval Rhetorical Theory -- Irreverent Performances, Heterodox Subjects, and the Unscripted Crowd from the Medieval Courtroom to the Stocks and Scaffold -- Performing Law in the Age of Theatre (c. 1500-1650) -- Legal Performance Education in Early Modern England -- Epilogue.

Explores the history of legal theatricality from antiquity to the eighteenth-century. It recovers a long tradition of jurisprudential thought about law as a form of theatre, a tradition that ancient, medieval, early modern, and later theorists transmitted across centuries, continually elaborating and reworking it to suit changing conditions.