The Appeal: Gender and Prosecution in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and the Common Law

Penelope Geng is an assistant professor of English at Macalester College. She works at the intersection of literature, law, and religion. Her articles have explored the crisis of legal administration in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2 (“On Judges and the Art of Judicature,” Studies in Philology, 2017), the rhetorical tactics of female heresy defendants (“Before the Right to Remain Silent,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 2012), and the staging and type-setting of parrhesia in Jonson’s Sejanus (“‘He Only Talks,’” Ben Jonson Journal, 2011). She has presented conference papers at the meetings of the Renaissance Society of America, Shakespeare Association of America, the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities, and the North American Conference on British Studies. She received her PhD in English from the University of Southern California, MA in the Humanities from the University of Chicago, and BA in English from the University of Toronto. She is completing her first book “Communal Justice in Shakespeare’s England,” which examines popular representations of communal justice and lay magistracy in Reformation and post-Reformation England.

Co-sponsored with the Society for the Study of Women in the Renaissance (SSWR) and the CUNY Academy for Humanities and Sciences.