The politics of desire: William Shakespeare's 'history' and the question of subjectivity in 'Richard III', 'Richard II', 'Henry IV I', and 'Henry IV II'

William Shakespeare's Richard III portrays, through Richard's peculiar psychic constitution, a unique fictive analogue of Renaissance subjectivity, a subjectivity both constituted by and transgressive of a feudal ideology centered on the king's Divine Right. Taking Richard III as a point of departure, this dissertation explores how Shakespeare's thinking about the imitation and defiance of the feudal concept of authority develops in Richard II, Henry IV I, and Henry IV II.;Chapter One discusses theoretical incoherences in recent poststructuralist discourses on Shakespeare's history plays. This chapter also elaborates a notion of subjectivity based on Jacques Lacan's discourse and on other central poststructuralist thinkers' interpretations of Lacan's discourse. Chapter Two, on Richard III, argues that Richard both imitates and defies the feudal concept of authority and that this double relationship is a fictive analogue of Renaissance subjectivity. Chapter Three, on Richard II, contrasts Richard II's orthodox feudal monarchism with Bolingbroke's self-differentiation from and contradictory desiring of an orthodox idea of monarchical authority. Chapter Four, on Henry IV I, focuses on Prince Hal's multilayered discourse on the idea of authority, with particular regard to his intersubjective relationship to the marginal voices of commoners; Henry IV's discourse on the feudal kingship is significant only as a backdrop for the formation of Hal's idea of authority. Chapter Five, on Henry IV II, discusses Hal's further self-differentiation from Henry's idea of feudal authority and argues that Hal desires to transform Henry's paradigm of feudal authority to an idea of authority based on the voice of commoners. The Conclusion briefly discusses Henry V in order to suggest how Shakespeare both aesthetically closes the narrative cycle of his history plays and opens up this aesthetic closure by alluding to an actual historical situation.;In Richard II, Henry IV I, and Henry IV II Shakespeare's kings (unlike Richard III, whose relationship to the feudal concept of authority is ambiguous) function as central authorities in the feudal ideological system of signs, whose unity Shakespeare's kings desire to maintain. This dissertation attempts to reveal gaps and contradictions in this system of signs. Our analysis of Shakespeare's language situates such poststructuralist ideas of language as differance in a larger socio-political context which is reflected in Shakespeare's history plays.