Rebecca Lemon's Treason by Words is a ground-breaking book. It shows early modern English theater as the site of passionate political argument when absolutist kings, princes, and generals confront constraints imposed by constitutional and natural law.

A paradox is central to Rebecca Lemon's original, incisive, and theoretically astute book: although there was endless chatter about treason in early modern England, no successful act of treason, at least in the technically appropriate sense of king-killing, actually took place during the Tudor and Jacobean periods. Treason may have been discussed, planned, prosecuted, and punished, but it was never perpetrated. It was, in a sense that would become central for writers of the period, a matter more of words than actions. In some of the book's most exciting sections, Lemon shows the dangerous legal and political consequences of treason's drift from action to language. This created a very difficult position for Shakespeare, Donne, and Jonson. As Lemon concludes, their efforts to navigate a landscape increasingly dominated by accusations of treason by one party and of tyranny by another mark a crucial stage in the development of the modern notion of conscience.