Module 5: Richard II And The Origins Of Political Theology
An Iconographical Inquiry

The second segment of the play (Act III-V) that I would like to focus on today deals with the most poignant part of the play since, as you know, it leads to the fall, the royal dethronement of Richard II. We are today at a point of intersection - a capital moment: (a) from act I to act III, the play culminates in the realization of Richard II’s tyranny and (b) from act III to V, we encounter a sort of cascading effect: “from divine kingship to kingship’s ‘Name’ and from the name to the naked misery of man.”¹ (Two movements then are to be noticed an upward and a downward movement.) And it is in this movement leading to the downfall of Richard II that I should like to concentrate upon in order to illuminate how Shakespeare uses his own artistic medium –theatre- as a powerful and useful instrument to de-construct the concept of kingship in both its political and religious dimension, in other words in its theologico-political dimension. I would like to argue that Shakespeare uses political theology in order to trace affinities and antagonisms between politics and religion that create “states of exception”, suspend traditional order, or spaces of possibility, allowing new modes of understanding power and authority through the lens of Shakespeare’s drama. Power/authority, theatre and resistance are important critical terms: as we wonder if the drama at stake here, which culminates in portraying Richard’s internal self-division and/or self-divorcive process, is not also a strategy to organize resistance on the part of Shakespeare to monarchical power?

Richard II involves this challenging symmetry between theatricality and power, but also between authority and transgression, and transgression and limits. In Language, Counter-Memory and Practice, Foucault writes: “Limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being they possess: a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable and, reciprocally, transgression would be pointless if it merely crosses a limit composed of illusions and shadows”. ² This quote bears quite directly on the fact that the play - as you already know - was not printed during Shakespeare’s time and in performances the deposition of Richard was actually omitted -perhaps considered too inflammatory to print or stage. Consider the famous line by Queen Elizabeth I: “I am Richard II … know you that not.” Only after Elizabeth I’s death was the play actually printed and the performance, included in performance. The anecdote shows how Richard II was a source of danger, of concerns for the incumbent powers of the time. It shows also how Richard II is a means of “transgression of the inside/outside boundary, crossing the barrier that separates the play and its spectators [as well as] the boundary between stage and reality.”³ In other words, the play serves the function of a mirror/looking glass, which, according to Hamlet, not only consists of “hold(ing) as 'twere the mirror up to nature” (Act III, scene, l.21) but also of deconstructing the chiasm between the theatricalities of power and/or the power of theatricalities. And we know how extensive is the use of the mirror imagery in Richard II -- the play seems to draw attention to the serious role of “political” mirrors for rulers. Mirrors (even “textual mirrors”) always play a political/strategic/transgressive part in Shakespeare’s plays as they equally emerge and inhabit the political space/stage of the Elizabethan age. In his book, Elizabeth Backgrounds: Historical Documents of the Age of Elizabeth I, Arthur Kenney recounts a noteworthy political incident, which occurred in May 1582 involving a mirror/looking glass. In the midst of a renewal of Catholic activities against Queen Elizabeth and the growing compassion for the imprisoned Mary - the English crown uncovered a terrorist plot engineered by The Duke of Guise against Queen Elizabeth as one of Queen Elizabeth’s spies,

Keeping watch along the border of Scotland, stopped a suspicion man who posed as a tooth-drawer, discovered he was a servant of (the Spanish Ambassador) Mendoza’s, and learned he was carrying letters for Mary and Guise hidden behind the little looking-glass. This was the first indication the English government had of Guise’s enterprise. ⁴

What this anecdote proves here is that the investigator of political crimes knew exactly where to look and where to find this particular letter/text – i.e. in the interstice/interval between the silvering and the back of the mirror - or beyond the reflective surface of the mirror - where lied the blueprint of a political transgression to come. The anecdote could also help us recognize a particular pattern for a larger possible drama of the story of a monarch’s fall. But more importantly it offers a particular way/method of looking/locating at the textual or visual interstices/intervals at work both within the play and within the royal person of Richard II. What I want to do here is to approach and scrutinize the symbolic inscriptions of interstices/intervals - or rather holes, gaps - the play creates - through and within the character, let alone the body of Richard. In other words, we need to think carefully about this technè of semiotic writing: that is, how precisely—between the blank page and the text— do the (hidden) signs of gaps/holes/fissures/fractures give themselves in a corp(u)s of signs to be read (on the textual ground of the tragedy), and what are their functions in the general economy of the tragedy of Richard II?

¹ Kantorowicz, E. The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton University Press, 1997), 84
² Foucault, M. Language, Counter-Memory and Practice (Cornell University Press, 1980), 34
³ Garber, M. Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers, Literature and Uncanny Causality (Routledge: London & New York, 1987) 87
⁴ Arthur F. Kinney, Elizabethan Backgrounds: Historical Documents of the Age of Elizabeth I (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1975), 138