Body Politics and the Non-Sovereign Exception in Titus Andronicus and the Winter’s Tale

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas P. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Physical Condition ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Body Politics ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Two Bodies ◽  
Performing Objects

This chapter looks at The Winter’s Tale and Titus Andronicus to show how Shakespeare’s aesthetics integrates performing objects and performing bodies in its depiction of powerful women. In staging the process of survival for Lavinia and Hermione, Shakespeare travesties the concept of the king’s two bodies central to early modern sovereignty, redistributing agency between subjects to objects. Central to the argument about the female body in these two plays is Elizabeth Grosz’s concept of corporeal femininity, which emphasizes the tactility of the performing body, its agitating power that poses problems for the way these plays and their critics attempt to make sense of the women’s physical condition as an embodiment of fractured or incomplete subjectivity. Julie Taymor’s film Titus (2000), with its cinematic expression of the power of the prosthetic, becomes a touchstone for a reading of the play’s exploration of the politics of vibrant matter. Both Lavinia and Hermione offer a form of corporeal feminism, exemplified in Taymor’s film. In their parody of sovereignty’s charismatic survival beyond death, these two plays to different degrees transform political theology into a feminist politics in which performing objects—Lavinia’s body and Hermione’s statue—evoke the phenomenon of non-sovereign agency that limits sovereign absolutism and enables fugitive politics in Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s Pharmacy

2018 ◽  
pp. 101-151
Author(s):  
Eric Langley
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Pharmaceutical Medicine ◽  
King Lear ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Titus Andronicus

Part II of my study introduces sympathy’s attendant oppositional force, antipathy, and consequently Chapters 3 and 4 are both informed by early-modern scientific conceptions of pharmaceutical medicine, wherein the same bittersweet drug can have both medicinal and poisonous (or sympathetic and antipathetic) capacity; this pharmaceutical metaphor is shown to widely inform Shakespeare’s drama, both at the level of genre, plot, and character, and, more significantly for my study, at the level of word, where language itself is repeatedly described as operating with the force of the Platonic pharmakon. Communication is shown to have the capacity both to cure and to kill, leaving the Shakespearean subject caught up among indeterminable influences, beset by malign attendants, infectious carriers, sickly sympathizers, and ill communicators. Chapter 3 explores a number of plays—including The Winter’s Tale, Titus Andronicus, Coriolanus, King Lear, and All’s Well That Ends Well.

Shakespeare's Fugitive Politics

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas P. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Julius Caesar ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Henry V ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Political Events

Shakespeare’s Fugitive Politics makes the case that Shakespeare’s plays reveal there is always something more terrifying to the king than rebellion. The book seeks to move beyond the presumption that political evolution leads ineluctably away from autocracy and aristocracy toward republicanism and popular sovereignty. Instead, it argues for affirmative politics in Shakespeare—the process of transforming scenes of negative affect into political resistance. Shakespeare’s Fugitive Politics makes the case that Shakespeare’s affirmative politics appears not in his dialectical opposition to sovereignty, absolutism, or tyranny; nor is his affirmative politics an inchoate form of republicanism on its way to becoming politically viable. Instead, this study claims that it is in the place of dissensus that the expression of the eventful condition of affirmative politics takes place – a fugitive expression that the sovereign order always wishes to shut down. Exploring a concept of fugitive politics in Coriolanus, King John, Henry V, Titus Andronicus, The Winter’s Tale and Julius Caesar, the study contends that this investment in political theory during a time of crisis helps to explain Shakespeare’s enduring relevance to theo-political events beyond the early modern stage.

Philomela’s Marks

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Wells
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Female Body ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Poetic Representation ◽  
Rape Of Lucrece

This essay explores the significance of the mutual imbrication of ekphrasis and sexual violence in Shakespeare’s poetry. Beginning with a discussion of Philomela’s substitution of a woven picture (the teasingly opaque ‘purpureas notas’) for an oral account of violence in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, I analyse Shakespeare’s revision of this foundational story in Titus Andronicus. Arguing that in Shakespeare’s work ekphrasis functions as a gendered site of contestation between image and word in which the feminine image is organized and contained by the masculine ‘noting’ of an artist figure, I consider how Shakespeare’s other extensive use of the Philomela story in Cymbeline clarifies this pattern. My final texts, The Rape of Lucrece and The Winter’s Tale, allow me to unpack more fully the function of ekphasis in drawing attention to the predication of poetic representation on the abjection of the female body.

scholarly journals The Dramaturgy of Female Gender  in Early Modern English Theatre:  An Investigation of the Theatrical Expression of Gender in Selected Jacobean Plays, Their Restoration/Early Eighteenth-Century Adaptations, and Their Original and Contemporary Staging

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lori Beth Leigh
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Female Gender ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Female Roles ◽  
Gender Boundaries

<p>The adaptations of Shakespeare‘s plays that were written and staged during the English Restoration and eighteenth century form an important part of the performance history of Shakespeare; yet they have never been employed in research on the female characters in the original plays. This thesis analyzes four late Shakespeare plays and their adaptations: The Two Noble Kinsmen (with Fletcher) and Davenant's The Rivals; The Tempest and Davenant and Dryden's The Enchanted Island; The Winter's Tale and Garrick's Florizel and Perdita; and the lost Cardenio (also with Fletcher) and Theobald's Double Falsehood. Investigating the dramaturgy of the female characters from a theatrical point-of-view that includes both a close-reading and imagining of the text with a "directorial eye" and practical staging work, this study examines not only language but the construction and representation of character through emotional and physical states of being, gestures and movement, sound (music and the sound of speech), props, costumes, spectacle, stage directions, use of space and architecture, and the audience. The adaptations have been used as a lens to encounter afresh the female characters in the original plays. Through this approach, I have discovered evidence to challenge some traditional interpretations of Shakespeare's female characters and have also offered new readings of the characters. In addition, I have demonstrated the danger of accepting the widely held critical view that the introduction of actresses on the Restoration stage prompted adaptors to sexualize the female roles in a demeaning, trivial, and meretricious manner. In fact, female roles in the Restoration had some power to subvert gender boundaries just as they did in the Renaissance when played by boy actors. This work explores the treatment of themes and motifs that recur around the staging of women in the early modern period such as madness, cross-gender disguise and cross-gender casting, rape and sexual violence, and the use of silence by female characters. Each chapter draws individual conclusions about the female characters in the plays, often drawing parallels between two central women in particular play. Overall, the thesis demonstrates the complexity and multiplicity of the ways the women in Shakespeare's plays express their agency and desire.</p>

Ernst Kantorowicz, Shakespeare, and the Humanities’ Two Bodies

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-23
Author(s):  
Stephanie Elsky
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Literal Meaning ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Ideology Critique ◽  
Human Community ◽  
New Vision ◽  
Two Bodies

This commentary reflects on two very different revivals of Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology in the field of early modern studies, the first during the heyday of New Historicism and the second in the current post-New Historicist moment that is still defining itself. The first revival focused on the literal meaning of king’s two bodies, the second on its figurative and fictional nature. The first trained its lens on the doctrine’s absolutist potential, the second on its constitutionalist strain. To account for these political and literary shifts I turn to a larger trend in literary and humanistic studies, the desire to move away from ideology critique and to reframe the humanities in terms of its capacity to articulate “a new vision for human community,” to borrow Victoria Kahn’s phrase. I argue that the peculiarly ironic status of the king’s two bodies offers a way to intervene in this debate, which I term “the humanities’ two bodies.” The commentary concludes by offering Laertes’ popular rebellion in Hamlet as a brief test case of the limits and promise of this most recent turn in the career of Kantorowicz’s protean text.

scholarly journals “Nature’s Bastards”: Grafted Generation in Early Modern England

2015 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-148
Author(s):  
Claire Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Scientific Texts ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Reproduction Humaine

This paper examines the shared rhetoric between human and horticultural generation in early modern England, particularly focusing on grafting. Early modern English gardening manuals imagine grafting as a method of controlling generation in the natural world, and early modern English obstetrical treatises imagine the female generative body in horticultural language. Alongside these scientific texts, this article uses Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale as a literary case study of grafting rhetoric. Ultimately, while grafting treatises imagine man’s power over generation in the natural world and obstetrical treatises imagine controlling human generation using horticultural metaphor, The Winter’s Tale complicates this fantasy by depicting Leontes’s efforts at genealogical control as unnecessary and fruitless: not only do Perdita and Hermione survive and flourish after his attempts to kill them, but Perdita is the legitimate and non-grafted offspring of Hermione and Leontes. Cet article examine la rhétorique que partagent la reproduction humaine et l’horticulture en Angleterre au début de l’époque moderne. Les ouvrages portant sur les jardins, à l’époque, représentent la greffe comme une méthode pour contrôler la reproduction dans le monde naturel, tandis que les ouvrages d’obstétrique de la même époque représentent la capacité reproductrice du corps féminin en termes d’horticulture. A côté de ces textes scientifiques, on se sert dans cet article de la pièce de Shakespeare The Winter’s Tale comme exemple de la rhétorique de la greffe. En dernière analyse, tandis que les ouvrages décrivant la greffe représentent la puissance humaine sur la reproduction dans le monde naturel et que les ouvrages d’obstétrique représentent la reproduction humaine avec des métaphores tirées de l’horticulture, The Winter’s Tale vient compliquer cet imaginaire en présentant comme futiles les tentatives de contrôle généalogique de Leontes : non seulement Perdita et Hermione survivent et fleurissent après les tentatives de meurtre, mais encore Perdita est le fruit légitime non-greffé des amours d’Hermione et Leontes.

scholarly journals The Matter of Early Modern Female Melancholy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Emma Rayner
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Intellectual Activity ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Early Modern Women ◽  
Artistic Representations ◽  
Robert Burton ◽  
Lucy Hutchinson ◽  
History Of ◽  
Medical Treatises

<p>The Renaissance is often touted as the age of melancholy. For fictional personages like Hamlet as well as for writers like Robert Burton, melancholy served both as a burden and a blessing, facilitating intellectual activity at the expense of psychological and bodily comfort. Precisely because of its Aristotelean associations with brilliance, melancholy was off-limits to early modern women, who were afforded a pathology different not merely in degree but in kind to that of the male melancholic. Female melancholy was understood as an entirely corporeal illness, lacking any semblance of the creative or intellectual fecundity which its male sufferers enjoyed.  Literary critics and cultural historians have long taken the authors of early modern medical treatises at their word, and because of this, the extant scholarship on melancholy projects an overwhelmingly masculinist history of the emotion. Those scholars who have addressed the subterraneous literature of women’s emotion in the Renaissance, moreover, have commonly understood female-voiced articulations of negative affect through the lens of “grief” or “sorrow”. A poetics of female melancholy in the English Renaissance is thus still awaiting formulation, and it is this critical absence that I move to redress.  Putting male-authored, canonical works of literature in dialogue with the poetry of three seventeenth-century women writers, this thesis pursues the topic of a literary melancholy that is specifically female, or female-voiced. Chapter One explores the shape of female melancholic discourse in two Shakespearean texts – Hamlet and The Two Noble Kinsmen – and in the poetry of devotional poet An Collins. Chapter Two considers the telos of self-marmorisation (the female melancholic’s turn to stone) first in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and Milton’s Comus, and then in the verse of Hester Pulter. Finally, Chapter Three discusses the presence of postlapsarian melancholy in the elegies of Lucy Hutchinson. All three chapters argue for the significance, the matter, of artistic representations of women’s affect in a period which has traditionally seen male expressions of melancholy raised above female expressions of the same.</p>

Time, Equity, and the Artifice of English Law: Reflections on The King’s Two Bodies

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Raffield
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Legal Institution ◽  
Persuasive Power ◽  
Magnum Opus ◽  
English Law ◽  
Two Bodies

The aim of this article is to analyze the contribution of the early modern English legal institution to the formulation of the theory of the king’s two bodies. I explore three principal themes in the course of this article, all of which relate directly to central tenets of the thesis proposed by Kantorowicz in The King’s Two Bodies. First, is the centrality of time and continuity to theories of kingship and to the ideology of common law. Secondly, I consider the importance of equity to the formulation of decision-making in English law, and in pursuit of this end, the manipulation by the judiciary of political theology concerning the king’s two bodies. Lastly, I analyze the persuasive power of the trope, and especially the capacity of metaphor and metonym to embody such invisible and intangible juristic concepts as justice, equity, and law itself. Whilst recognizing the magisterial quality of Kantorowicz’s magnum opus, I take issue with some of the more extravagant of the author’s claims for the pervasive power of mystical kingship and its influence over English jurists and the English legal profession.

Political Theology and the Metamorphoses of The King’s Two BodiesThe King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, by Ernst H. Kantorowicz

2020 ◽  
Vol 125 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-145
Author(s):  
Brett Edward Whalen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Medieval Studies ◽  
Dual Nature ◽  
The Public ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Two Bodies

Abstract As is well known, Ernst H. Kantorowicz’s groundbreaking 1957 study The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology explored the “dual nature” of the king’s body in medieval and early modern religious and political thought, tracing the evolution of an idea that would ultimately underwrite the “myth of the State,” namely, that the king possessed a mortal, transitory body, but also a supranatural one that never died. Readers greeted The King’s Two Bodies as an exceptional contribution to medieval studies immediately upon its publication. As Whalen relates, however, a growing awareness of where the book fits into the trajectory of Kantorowicz’s life and early career in 1920s and 1930s Germany has reshaped scholarly analyses of his famous work. Increasing numbers of scholars now interpret Kantorowicz’s study of medieval political theology as a response and oblique challenge to contemporary theories about the theological origins of modern sovereignty, including the work of Carl Schmitt. As Whalen also suggests, in recent years, the so-called return of religion to the public sphere and ongoing debates about the validity of the “secularization” narrative, positing the transference of religious concepts to secular politics in the modern age, has inspired further rounds of critical interest in The King’s Two Bodies. Now over sixty years old, Kantorowicz’s book seems as important and vital as ever, experiencing transformations in its reception that few could have imagined when it first appeared in print.

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