Sovereignty’s Scribbled form in King John

This chapter explores a concept of the nation-state defined in terms of leagues, friendships, and amity between England and France in King John. The play consistently describes the evolving relationship between nations in terms of friendship and hospitality. Constance’s desperate question, ‘France friend with England! What becomes of me?’ (2.2.35) after the rival nations become momentary allies, captures the challenge that national sovereignty poses to a subject’s liberty. In its depiction of this geo-political friendship, King John interrogates the powerful claims of an emerging bureaucratic network of authority exemplified by the Bastard’s relationship with what the play calls ‘borrowed majesty’ (1.1.4) and ‘perjured kings’ (3.1.33). In arguing that King John makes explicit the political condition of friendship in depicting rival nation-states, the chapter makes the case that the Bastard’s new sovereign relationship radically redefines a political subject as a bawd or broker in a bureaucratic network with radical, albeit unrealized, political potential. The Bastard—a bureaucrat with royal blood—is well aware that his fugitive survival and political efficacy are contingent on how he responds to the unintended contours of the sovereign decision, to its collateral effects that exceed ordered and absolute power, in other words, to that which allows him to act legitimately, with bureaucratic sovereignty, both inside and outside of the law.

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

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.

Touching Sovereignty in Henry V

This chapter takes seriously the Chorus’ avuncular description of Henry’s presence in the camp at Agincourt as ‘a little touch of Harry in the night’ (4.0. Chorus. 47). It draws on early modern and modern understandings of the royal touch to make the case that tactility in the play becomes the vehicle for reconfiguring sovereignty, exposing its fractured condition as well as efforts to reconstitute its integrity. For Henry, to touch is to redeem sovereign authority. His contemplation of the ritual effect of the royal touch to cure his own diseased condition, however, demonstrates the impossibility of sovereign redemption through touch. To the multitude in the play, however—Falstaff, Williams, Bates, even Katherine—tactility is an expression of individual sovereignty that agitates institutional power through body politics. In Henry’s quest for union between England and France, redemption and union are conjured, like magic, through his tactile encounter with Katherine. This magic does not serve a new politics of consensus; instead, it disavows what Henry knows too well—that his royal touch is powerless to make sensible the fugitive condition of a dissensual politics immanent at the core of his divided condition.

The Embodied Will in Julius Caesar: An Introduction to Shakespeare’s Fugitive Politics

The unpredictable promise of Shakespeare’s fugitive politics is perhaps best illustrated in the ritual events surrounding Caesar’s funeral depicted in Julius Caesar. The play serves as a touchstone, establishing and amplifying dimensions of the political at stake throughout Shakespeare’s plays. Julius Caesar is a play that has at its center a flash mob occupying the marketplace and rendering a form of wild justice on Cinna—the poet who unfortunately bears the same name as one of Caesar’s conspirators. Roman plebeians randomly come across the poet on his way to Caesar’s funeral and promise to ‘[t]ear him to pieces’ (34) and to ‘[p]luck but his name out of his heart’ (32-3). The contingency of the event of Cinna’s murder and its fleeting, yet absolutely essential political nature are the culmination of events in the play informed by early modern concerns about sacred sovereignty, friendship, and body politics that are the themes of Shakespeare’s Fugitive Politics.

Epilogue: Turning Away

This chapter reasserts the book’s central premise that fugitive politics emerges within sovereign power, not necessarily ancillary or as a reaction to it. An exploration of Shakespeare’s political philosophy suggests the sovereign exception that arbitrates survival in early modern drama about absolute power also paradoxically menaces sovereignty’s own claims to absolutism, allowing for a politics of discord to supplement resistant political expressions. Paulina’s wager in The Winter’s Tale—a wager that so menaces Leontes’ sovereign desire—illustrates both a form of resistance and redirection, a confrontation with and a turn away fromm power that seeks to define the political in Shakespeare.

Friendship, Sovereignty and Political Discord in Coriolanus

This chapter re-orients the way that early modern political sovereignty is understood by arguing that the relationship between Coriolanus and Aufidius is a friendship predicated on agonism and discord. The chapter’s close examination of their alliance and eventual betrayal establishes the counter-politics of friendship that organizes political relationships explored throughout the book. A fragile warrior-friendship links the two men in shared estrangement. In claiming that the two rivals embody a singular type of friendship with resonant political implications, the chapter revises early modern theories of friendship from Erasmus, Bacon, and Montaigne, as well as friendship theory from their classical predecessors Cicero and Aristotle. Shakespeare’s depiction of amicitia perfecta offers a critical point of intervention in contemporary accounts by Foucault and Derrida of the political potential inherent in a friendship characterized by dissensus, not amity. Coriolanus stages the possibility of radicalizing the citizen/state binary, glimpsing the fragile grounds of a potentially new communal politics embodied in a fragile warrior friendship.