MOCK SOVEREIGNTY: THEATRICALITY AND POWER IN SHAKESPEARE'S HISTORY PLAYS (RENAISSANCE, DRAMA)

Throughout the Renaissance, sovereign power was conceived in terms of a contradiction. The most ample of persons, the sovereign was also seen as an irreducibly theatrical figure whose presence was most manifest in the effigy which marked his grave. This thesis explores the paradoxical relationship between theatricality and power in the Renaissance by drawing together two seemingly antithetical figures from Shakespeare's histories: Richard II, a king who attempts to play the spectator to his own undoing, and Henry V, whose illimitable, and inscrutable, presence comes to merge with the theatrical spectacle itself. The profound complicity between these two contrary figures reveals the unmasterable nature of a power which can neither be affirmed nor denied except in self-mockery.;By showing that sovereign power originates in transgression, Hobbes's traitor suggests the radical ambiguity of Richard's desires to play the traitor to himself. In those scenes where he pompously forswears all pomp, Richard demonstrates anew the riddle of a power which is affirmed insofar as it denies itself and which originates in mockery. Rather than being merely a pendant to the earlier play, Henry V aims to master the potent division and self-contradiction at the heart of sovereignty through a formal structure and a political conquest which would let king and play compass the breach that defines them both. Yet for the king, and for the audience, the very attempt to comprehend the contradiction of an originally divided and theatrical power renews its elusive force.;Shakespeare's understanding of the theatricality of kingship is reflected in the work of political philosophers as varied as Edward Forsett and Thomas Hobbes. Both theorists conceived the regal presence in terms of a reflexive and divided spectacle which served to implicate the subject in those terrifying effects he seeks to objectify and master. For Hobbes, this subjecting bind crystallizes in the person of the traitor, a figure who cannot defy the king's fatal will because he authors all the sovereign does. Not simply a legal contingency, the traitor's plight marks the problematic "origin" of a power which is conjured by the subject's very wish to resist it.