Abstract
Richard III is the only Shakespearean character to invoke Saint Paul (and the villainous king does so five times). The anomaly has been noted as a side topic but this essay shows that Shakespeare's rendering of Pauline subjectivity informs the play as a whole. This understanding of Richard has only become visible in our own Pauline moment. As Gil Anidjar puts it, current critical thought is in a “moment of the renewed reception of Paul”, albeit an “insufficiently acknowledged” moment. Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Slavoj Žižek have all recently addressed the relationship between Paul's paradoxically active (through love) submission to God's Grace and our current problematics of subjectivity without necessarily insinuating a specific Christian belief. Badiou's work, in particular, allows us to see anew or, perhaps, for the first time, the paradoxical “charisma” of this notorious sovereign.
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