Copious Sovereignty in the Henry IV Plays

This chapter demonstrates Shakespeare’s extensive use of the rhetorical figure of copia in the two Henry IV plays. Although copia, as the basis for written and verbal expression, is the archetypal figure of Renaissance eloquence, Shakespeare’s writing often pushes its use towards the outer limits, risking a dissipation, rather consolidation of meaning. In these two plays, the generative capacities of copia take a dark turn, linking images of diseased and damaged bodies to a centrifugal movement away from centres of sovereign power. This chapter argues that the dilatory nature of these two plays – in their language and in their proliferation of diseased body parts, as well as in their plot – underscores a representation of sovereignty that sees it as de-centred and dysfunctional.

Introduction: The Baroque Body Parts of Henry VI Part Two

The introduction sets up the starting premise of book: that, in the history plays, metaphors involving bodies and body parts always complicate, rather than simplify, any understanding of sovereign power. Founded on recent research into the authorship and revisions of the Henry VI plays, this chapter reveals Shakespeare’s particular contribution to the emerging genre of the history play as one of proliferating complexity. Work on the politics of the baroque in Benjamin and Foucault is used to frame an understanding of the off-kilter figuration employed in the dialogue of these plays. Key examples are taken from the Henry VI part two, where Shakespeare’s contributions to the lengthier Folio text consist almost entirely of the addition of long metaphorical speeches that contest the crown, and characters’ proximity to sovereign power.

‘My kingdom for a horse’: Bestial Sovereignty in Richard III

This chapter offers a conclusion to the book, through a movement away from the human body into the ways that animal bodies are also recruited for Shakespeare’s metaphorics of sovereignty. More than any other of Shakespeare’s history plays, Richard III is dominated by animal imagery. One way to understand this is as a form of moral commentary on the “bestial” state that England has been dragged into by the civil war and, particularly, by the evils of that war as concentrated in Richard himself, a concentration particularly in the image of his body as deformed. However, the slipperiness of metaphor does not allow for the stabilization of sovereignty in any one body, including the stability imagined in the metaphysical conceit of the “kings two bodies”. In this chapter, I offer a final countermand to Kantorowicz’s reading of Richard II wherein Richard’s abdication offers up the Christ-like sacrifice of the king as a concentrated image of divine sovereignty. In place of this, I read Richard III backwards from the moment of Richard’s own brief “abdication” at the end of the play: his willingness to exchange his kingdom for a horse, albeit in the face of death. Whilst not ascribing any revolutionary intent to the character of Richard, this moment affords an alternate insight into the translatable locations of sovereignty. Re-read through its figurations, sovereignty is conceived of as never inalienable; it is, rather, always dependent on the bodies of others including, here, the bodies of animals.

Necks, Throats and Windpipes in Henry V: Sovereignty Translated

Henry V features a lot of throats, necks and – in French – “gorges”. It is also a play interested in the relationship between sovereign power and capital punishment. These vulnerable body parts are frequently placed within violent acts of translation and exchange: throats cut, strangled and transformed. French gorges are put in the place of English throats as Nym and Pistol trade threats back in England; Pistol offers to refrain from “couper la gorge” if he is given English “brave crowns” in return; the “col” of a French princess is translated into an English “nick”; and Bardolph’s “vital thread” is “cut / With edge of penny cord” in return for stealing “a pax of little worth”. It is in, and through, the “throat” that Henry V represents and interrogates the transactions that pertain to the mechanics of sovereignty.

Prosthetic Hands in King John

The word “hand” occurs more times in King John than in any other Shakespeare play. This is no accident. This play imagines sovereign agency through forms of prosthesis, and figures sovereignty through synecdoche: parts standing in for wholes. The word “hand” comes to the fore at moments in the play where the transactional nature of sovereign power is being accentuated: in John’s uncomfortable second coronation and, most concentratedly, in the peculiar circumstances of Prince Arthur’s death, a death that is willed by many but enacted by none. In the disputes between King John and Hubert over their relative responsibility, the word “hand” becomes a focus for a drawn-out meditation on the extent to which sovereign power is alienable or always located in the person of the King himself.

Richard II as Robinson Crusoe: Sovereignty and the Impossibility of Solitude

Through a close reading of two key moments of Richard II – the king’s return from Ireland and his later imprisonment and murder – this chapter demonstrates that, whilst the play develops an emotional investment in the trope of the lonely, isolated sovereign, sovereignty itself is imagined differently. Sovereignty is never contained within the lonely figure of a solitary man’s body but rather made manifest through an engagement with the world and, particularly, the organic with the machine, the “natural” with the “artificial”. This is a reading which is opposed to the dominant influence of Kantorowicz’s account of Richard II in The King’s Two Bodies, and that engages with Derrida’s consideration of Robinson Crusoe’s lonely sovereignty in the second volume of his The Beast and the Sovereign lectures.