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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. +19 »
