Matters of Early Modern Kingship

My paper will begin at the meeting point between the ideal form of early modern kingship, as voiced in a text such as King James’ True Law of Free Monarchies in 1598, and its often imperfect reality as a subject of the world’s competing material forces. The tension between these two poles is a recurring theme on the early modern English stage, and the problem of reconciling the corruptibility of kingship as an essentially human station with its validation through divine terms forms the central action of many histories and tragedies: in Shakespeare's Richard II (1595), the ontology of monarchy finds expression as the precipitous difference between the “happy dream” of the divinely-insured throne and the “grim Necessity” (5.2) of de facto power that the deposed Richard expresses to his wife at their final parting; Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy (1619) confronts its audiences with the victimization of an ardent “jure divino royalist” and a potent scene of regicide; Samuel Daniel's Philotas (1604) asks whether justice transcends the individual law and imperative of the monarch. Staging the complexity of early modern kingship was, it seems, an early modern commonplace: but where does the confrontation of ideologies that link worldly and divine power and the irreducible horizon of materiality leave belief? The unity between political and religious authority was well-articulated from the position of the individual subject (“rebel and atheist too,” says Donne in “Love’s Deity”); the dramatization of kingship as a fragmented, material, and historical phenomenon, however, seems to leave subsequent questions about the religious authority on which the king depends largely unasked. This paper will explore the tacit consequences of isolating kingship from its sources of theological authority and imagining it through the distinctly material processes of history and the stage.

Hugh Grady. Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.

Francis Oakley. Kingship: The Politics of Enchantment. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2006.

James Phillips, “The Practicality of the Absolute: Justice and Kingship in Shakespeare’s Richard II,” Elizabethan Literary History 79, no.1 (2012): 161-177.

Richard McCoy. Alterations of State: Sacred Kingship in the English Reformation. New York: Columbia UP, 2002.