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THREE PHILOLOGICAL APPROACHES AND THEIR ACADEMIC PRECEDENTS
predominantly present in English intellectual thinking since John of Salisbury’s
Policraticus. Since in recent decades considerable attention has been paid in
academic circles to the Early Modern knowledge of the body in the physical
sense, it seems reasonable to emphasize that this chapter does not intend to
follow the line of thinking set by contemporary scholars like Gail Kern Paster,
Michael Schoenfeldt, or Jonathan Sawday, who focus on the physiological
and psychological aspects of the human body as it was understood in the
Renaissance." Rather, I intend to reach back to another tradition, the figurative
reading of the human body, which has been practiced for centuries in Christian
communities, especially when discussing the issues of governance or political
and divine authority. Although this approach might seem unusual in the first
decades of the twenty-first century, it is not unprecedented among Shakespeare
scholars. The most influential scholarship on the representation of the “body
politic” in Shakespearean drama includes the works of Ernst Kantorowitz,
David George Hale, Mary Axton, and, most recently, Albert Rolls, the last
two of whom explicitly focused on the immense importance of the idea of
the “King’s two bodies” to the interpretation of King Lear. The novelty of my
perspective lies in the fact that, instead of considering the representation of
the theory of the King’s two bodies in King Lear, I rely on a closely-related
yet distinct-in-origin idea known as the organic conception of the state. This
idea, most comprehensively described in David George Hale’s 1971 book The
Body Politic — a Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature, applies the
analogy of the human body to social hierarchy, ascribing certain functions to
the various members. To my knowledge, the scholarship on King Lear contains
no discussion of this kind of textual mapping of the body-related metaphors and
their possible meanings in light of this anthropomorphic analogy of the state.
37 For a short yet excellent summary of this trend, see Sean McDowell: The View from the
Interior: The New Body Scholarship in Renaissance/Early Modern Studies, Literature Compass
3:4 (2006), 778-791. For further details see Mary Floyd-Wilson — Matthew Greenfield — Gail
Kern Paster — Tanya Pollard — Katherine Rowe - Julian Yates: Shakespeare and Embodiment:
An E-Conversation, Literature Compass 2 (2005), 1-13. And also Richard Strier — Carla
Mazzio: Two Reponses to “Shakespeare and Embodiment: An E-Conversation,” Literature
Compass 3:1 (2005), 15-31.
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