Concepts and Representations of Sovereignty on the English Renaissance Emblematic Stage

Abstract

One of the most complex cultural representational systems of the early modern period was the English Renaissance stage. It not only reflected on the world picture, the politics, and ethics of the age, but also fused representational traditions, such as allegorism, emblematism, and naturalism, in a unique multimedial way. Recent scholarship has increasingly focussed on the mediality and representational logic of this theatrical practice, including research in emblem studies, theatricality, the politics of images, the carnivalesque, etc. In my paper I am going to touch upon the theories of rulership (the king’s two bodies, the medieval patriarchal view, Machiavelli’s Realpolitik); the emblematic representations of power in the early modern period; and representations of power in bonam partem and in malam partem in some plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. A particularly interesting case study is Shakespeare’s Henry V and its two famous filmic recycling by Laurence Olivier (1944) and Kenneth Branagh (1989). In conclusion I demonstrate the hermeneutical intricacies in this reception history.