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Shakespeare's Once and Future Child: Speculations on Sovereignty

Online ISBN:
9780226832555
Print ISBN:
9780226832531
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Book

Shakespeare's Once and Future Child: Speculations on Sovereignty

Joseph Campana
Joseph Campana

William Shakespeare Professor of English

Rice University
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Published online:
19 September 2024
Published in print:
6 May 2024
Online ISBN:
9780226832555
Print ISBN:
9780226832531
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract

Shakespeare’s Once and Future Child considers a particular development in the history of sovereignty by which the figure of the child comes to replace the figure of the monarch as the vulnerable mechanism meant to both guarantee and, in so doing, define, the political future even as other claimants to the throne of sovereignty, such as “the people,” are waiting in the wings. As Shakespeare’s works show, transfers of sovereignty involving the sovereign, “the people,” and other forms of governance, were already imagined through vulnerable child figures whose genealogical promise was coextensive with a threat to perpetuity that required complex management regimes. These works first consider that the child, rather than the monarch, might offer a more capacious figure for and means of speculating on political futures. The first section finds, primarily in the chronicle history plays and the tragedies, the child’s corrosive impact on received structures of sovereignty and patterns of lineage. In the second section, I observe how child figures provoke conversations about what Foucault would term biopoliti­cal mechanisms, inasmuch as they constitute instances of population and figures to be educated into humanity; such dynamics appear in Shakespeare’s Roman works. Finally, child figures highlight a world in which ideas of political futurity respond to an increasingly liquid world dominated by emerg­ing notions of risk, insurance, contingency and probability. This appears in plays best described as early and late comedies of shipwreck, or even tragicomedies of trafficking, which prominently feature traffic of children across frequently Mediterranean seascapes.

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