Oldal 92 [92]
SHAKESPEARE’S ART OF POESY IN KING LEAR
forces of the macrocosm, the globe, would lead to comprehension of the
microcosm, as they imagined the human world, since these two were closely
related.°®° This perception of the political system of the state as an organism
like the human body thus reflects the interrelated nature of the components
of the Early Modern world.
David George Hale, who vividly describes both its history and embedding
in the Early Modern intellectual milieu,**° explains that, although by the
Restoration the “body politic” had become a dead metaphor denoting the state,
during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth I and King James I it was widely used in
public discourses for various purposes, for instance, “to defend and attack the
established church, to promote order and obedience to secular rules, and to
criticize political and economic abuses.”*?”
In academic works, however, discussions concerning the body politic involve
at least two closely related notions which are rooted in Ancient sources but
are distinct in origin. While the “two bodies” theory focuses mainly on the
twofold nature of the monarch’s personality, the organic conception of the
state is concerned with the function of the different members of society in its
hierarchical structure.
THE Kıng’s Two BoDIES
One ofthe central questions for lawyers in sixteenth-century England was to
understand both the reason and implication of the paradox that the person
ofthe monarch, who was not only a sacred man representing God on earth
but also ahuman being who, although mortal, could maintain the continuity
ofthe Crown. The most obvious way of developing a proper legal jargon was
to borrow terms from the field of theology. This became particularly urgent
after Henry VIIL by the Act of Supremacy separating the Church of England
from the Catholic Church of Rome, became the leader ofboth the clericaland
the sociopolitical structure of the kingdom. The theory that lawyers started
to refer to as “the King’s two bodies” was in fact the secularization of the
Medieval concept of “christomimesis.” This theological idea states that the
King is the personification of Christ on earth, and he has a similar, two-fold
nature (“gemina persona”): in addition to having an earthly existence as a
man, he also has a “character angelicus.”*** In other words, the King and
Christ have “two substances” in common, as they are “human by nature,
335 E. M. W. Tillyard: The Elizabethan World Picture, London, Chatto & Windus, 1956, 89.
336 David George Hale: The Body Politic. A Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature,
The Hague-Paris, Mouton, 1971.
337 Ibid., 7.
338 W,R. Elton: King Lear and the Gods, Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 1988, 5.
* 90 ¢