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Setting
Act 4, Scene 2
Explanation and Analysis—Satire of Lawyers:
In Act 4, Scene 2, Lussurioso orders the death of “Piato” who is in fact Vindice in disguise. In a turn of both dramatic and situational irony, he decides to find a new “panderer” and asks Hippolito about Vindice, who then assumes a new disguise as a lawyer. In their “first” meeting, Vindice offers a harsh satire of lawyers, a conventional target for satirical works in the early modern period:
Lussurioso. What, three and twenty years in law?
Vindice. I have known those that have been five and fifty, and all about pullin and pigs.
Lussurioso. May it be possible such men should breathe,
To vex the terms so much?Vindice. ’Tis food to some, my lord. There are old men at the present, that are so poisoned with the affectation of law-words – have had many suits canvassed – that their common talk is nothing but Barbary latin. They cannot so much as pray, but in law, that their sins may be removed, with a writ of error; and their souls fetched up on heaven with a sasarara.
Vindice claims that he has spent 23 years studying law, a comic exaggeration of the lengthy education and training of lawyers. Upping the ante of this satirical exaggeration, he also claims to know other lawyers who have spent 55 years studying the arcane laws that regulate animal husbandry (“pullin,” or poultry, and “pigs.”) Lussurioso responds with shock, asking if it could really be possible that men “vex” or litigate such minor concerns so extensively as to require such an arcane and complex legal code. Further developing his satire of the legal profession, Vindice adds that many elderly lawyers are "so poisoned with the affectation" of legal language through their extensive experience handling “suits” that they can only speak in a corrupt form of Latin, the language used in legal courts throughout Europe at the time. Further, they speak to God as if at trial, offering a “writ of error” to expiate their sins, and they are summoned to heaven by a “sasarara,” or a legal summons. The play's satire of lawyers suggest that they reduce spiritual mysteries to mere legal procedure.
