Abstract
Shakespeare’s plays are situated upon the threshold of two worlds: a declining traditional order torn apart by political rivalry and ascendant early-modern capitalism. The history plays dramatize infighting among warring factions of privileged aristocrats as well as revolutionary forces propelled by the rising commons and the politics of commodity. Legitimate authority is rarely secure among the kings perched upon Shakespearean thrones. In Shakespeare’s Henriad and King John , crowns are contested from the moment they are placed upon royal heads, inspiring Kantorwicz’s political theology: the corporeal body of short-lived kings is distinct from the sovereign’s sublime body that reigns without cease. “The King is dead, long live the King!” A re-reading of Shakespeare’s plays of deranged authority reveals, as Lacan would predict, that his kings possess three bodies: corpo-“real,” imaginary, and symbolic. When fractured and animated by different characters, the king’s three bodies map onto Weber’s three modes of legitimate domination. In King John , the “imaginary” body of the king – the character most capable of acting with noble warrior honor expected of Kings – is the charismatic “Bastard” who can never ascend to symbolic legitimacy. The article ends with an analysis of the three bodies of sovereignty in the contemporary moment of deranged authority: Trumpism.
Highlights
Shakespeare played a pivotal role in the formation of German post-idealist philosophy, including movements of thought that culminated in critical social theory (Paulin 2003)
Shakespeare identified the central structures of both fading feudalism and rising capitalism, mapping the relationship between universal values, individual lives, and the mediating structures of social particularity
Shakespeare’s plays were performed but were published and read as literature. His audiences and readers were exposed to synthetic images that captured and preserved the feudal order as it disappeared and was canceled into emergent modern capitalism
Summary
William Shakespeare wrote potent literary productions that reflected declining feudalism and emerging capitalism with uncanny veracity. Shakespeare’s plays were written during a period of enormous religious tension and revolution, when the rising commons and a new politics of commodity were openly challenging the privilege and unchecked prerogatives of the aristocracy Most of his sovereigns supplement traditional power with legal and/or charismatic authority. Divided and animated by different characters, the king’s three bodies map onto and combine in complex forms with Weber’s three modes of legitimate domination: corpo-real bodies and their irrational rules of succession are bound with traditional authority, imaginary bodies of reigning and warfare correspond with charismatic authority, and the symbolic bodies of ruling, judging, and lawgiving relate to legal authority. Shakespeare’s fracking of authority animated by three distinct characters -- the corpo-real King John-Prince Arthur dyad, the imaginary charismatic Bastard, and the symbolic-legal Cardinal Pandolf -- sheds light upon early modern sovereignty but upon contemporary derangements of authority
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