| Considering verbal, visual, and musical representations of the royal and other bodies from Shakespeare to Swift, this study charts shifts in representations of the body politic during crises in which the monarch's body played a prominent role: the Union Crisis, the Personal Rule of Charles I, the Regicide, the various crises of the mid-1660s, the Exclusion Crisis, and the succession crisis after the Glorious Revolution. Chapter 1 situates the body politics of Shakespeare's Coriolanus within the contexts of James I's Union plan and the politics of access to patronage through the Grooms of the royal Bedchamber---at the center of both of which lay the king's body natural. Chapter 2 argues that Caroline portraiture, masques, and prints granted new prominence to the monarch's physical body, and that the unprecedentedly wide circulation of these images contributed to the rise of the body natural as a focal point of political discourse. With the help of mourning and fetish theory, Chapter 3 demonstrates that the Regicide elegies drew obsessive attention to the royal corpse, prompting a shift in political discourse toward the corporeal, the scatological, even the pornographic. Genres such as the elegy became more interested in the rotting corpse, and pastoral elegy virtually disappeared for the next thirty years. Chapter 4 reads Cavendish's Blazing-World and Dryden's heroic drama as responses to anxieties about the effect of Charles II's and his mistresses' debauched bodies on the body politic. Chapter 5 considers John Blow's opera Venus and Adonis as a document of the continuing centrality of Charles II's body after its failure to produce a legitimate Protestant heir led to the Exclusion Crisis. Glancing at Pope's Rape of the Lock and Swift's Gulliver's Travels, the Conclusion registers ambivalence over the diminished sacrality of the royal body in the early eighteenth century. |
