The Liberal Trial Play: Notes toward the Formation of a Genre

According to this logic, the play itself might be regarded as performing a kind of advocacy.In The Life of Galileo, while successive versions of the play shift the emphasis from a concern with the individual's rights to his responsibilities,12 this does nothing whatever to diminish the play's conspicuous concern with "the great man" himself13 and the trials of his conscience.14 The plays under examination here differ markedly in the treatment of the individual from their classical counterparts, whose heroes, in spite of wearing "individualised mask[s] set[ting] them apart from the anonymous group of the chorus," were not, thereby, endowed with the properties of the modern "psychological subject" as we understand them.15 By presenting human beings as "committed to [their] actions," Jean-Pierre Vernant explains, "tragedy bears witness to the progress made in the psychological elaboration of the agent... [and yet] it is also evidence of the extent to which, for the Greeks, this category is still limited, indecisive, and vaguely defined.According to Farmer's analysis of the modern trial-in his terminology, the "reconstructive trial"-a variety of nineteenth-century procedural innovations led to increases in the volume of witness testimony and forensic evidence presented, in the detail with which crimes were reconstructed, and crucially, in the scrutiny to which the character and motives of the accused were subject.23 Though Farmer is careful here, as elsewhere, to resist the idea that that these developments reflected an entirely "new liberal political sensibility-a respect for the individual subject," his argument leaves little doubt that the reconstructive trial's evolution has led "to a new fascination with character" and "a new focus on the state of mind of the accused.[...]when Roper accompanies Alice and Margaret to visit More in prison, horrified by the sight of the rack, he begs his father-in-law to "Swear to the Act!