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Shakespeare's Body Parts: Figuring Sovereignty in the History Plays

Online ISBN:
9781474490863
Print ISBN:
9781474448703
Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press
Book

Shakespeare's Body Parts: Figuring Sovereignty in the History Plays

Huw Griffiths
Huw Griffiths
University of Sydney
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Published online:
20 May 2021
Published in print:
1 September 2020
Online ISBN:
9781474490863
Print ISBN:
9781474448703
Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press

Abstract

This book provides a sustained, formalist and theoretically-informed reading of the multiple body parts that litter the dialogue and action of Shakespeare’s history plays, including Henry V, Richard II, Richard III, King John, and the Henry IV plays. Starting with a literary critical analysis of these dislocated bodies, the book follows Shakespeare’s own relentless pursuit of a specific political question: how does human flesh, blood, and bone relate to sovereignty? Shakespeare’s treatment of the body is also read against two other bodies of work: early modern political writing, and twentieth- and twenty first-century critical theory. Like Shakespeare’s histories, these develop understandings of sovereign power through considerations of the body: from Jean Bodin’s inalienable sovereignty, located in the body of the monarch, through Hobbes’ mechanistic Leviathan, to Kantorowicz’s “two bodies” and Derrida’s “prosthstatics” in which forms of sovereign power are imagined as machine- or animal-like. Along the way, particular body parts – knees, hands, heads, and throats – come to the fore as particular objects of interest.

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