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OCR
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 ¢
