Shakespeare’s Tragic Art By Rhodri Lewis, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024. 381 pp.

Abstract This short note is not a book review but a set of reflections intended to indicate the potential benefits to jurists of an encounter with Professor Rhodri Lewis’s book Shakespeare’s Tragic Art . Shakespeare’s genius, as Lewis finds it performed in the tragedies, is that he does not try to make sense of life but dramatises our common struggle to make sense of life. These reflections will hopefully demonstrate that legal trials perform in a comparable way – not trying to cure that which is past remedy but giving the parties a forum in which to perform life’s agonies in agonistic mode.