Oldal 94 [94]
SHAKESPEARE’S ART OF POESY IN KING LEAR
than the other, it is superior to the “Body natural,” and, as a general rule,
“what the King does in his Body politic cannot be frustrated by any Disability
in his natural Body.”?* However, these two bodies were inseparable, and
they could not exist on their own, but were united in the person of the King:
“Notwithstanding that these two Bodies are at one Time conjoined together,
yet the Capacity of the one does not confound that of the other, but they
remain distinct Capacities. Ergo the Body natural and the Body politic are not
distinct, but united, and as one Body.”*“° Thus, the main function of the Body
politic is to maintain the continuality of the Crown, regardless of the death
of an individual King or Queen: whenever a monarch passes away, only his or
her Body natural dies, and the Body politic is transferred or “demised” to the
new monarch’s Body natural.*” From a legal aspect, this idea also implies that
the actual monarch and his or her predecessors and successors are the same
entities or “souls” successively inhabiting the same “body,” and that a king,
therefore, can never actually die."
Trying to prove Mary, Queen of Scots’ right to the English throne, the
aforementioned group of Catholic lawyers including Plowden, Browne, and
Rastell argued that, regardless of the common practice of primogeniture,
which kept the inheritance of the Crown in the realm of the closest family,
succession and inheritance could not be treated as synonymous terms. While
an ordinary person having only a Body natural could settle any dispute over
his or her heritage by a will, the question of succession did not fall into the
same category, as it concerned only monarchs vested with both a Body natural
and a Body politic.*”
Jacobean lawyers also turned for help to the concept of the body politic
when they wanted to strengthen their arguments for the Scottish King, James
VI’s claim to the English crown. Their ideas were summarized in Edward
Forset’s treaty A Comparative Discovrse of the Bodies Natvral and Politiqve
(1606), which offers “an extended valorization of the sovereign’s supreme role
in the maintenance of the body politic’s health.”°°° In addition to being the Lord
Chief Justice of London,**! Forset was also one of the lawyers representing the
Crown at the trial of the Gunpowder Plot, so his work provides an excellent
example of the royalist attitude and Jacobean discourse of legal writings. Unlike
Plowden’s Report, the Comparative Discovrse reveals that, in the Jacobean era,
345 Tbid., 7.
346 Ibid., 12.
347 Ibid., 13.
348 Ibid., 13.
349 Axton: The Queen's, 16.
350 Jonathan Gil Harris: Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic. Discourses of Social Pathology in Early
Modern England, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, 57-58.
351 Albert Rolls: The Theory of the King’s Two Bodies in the Age of Shakespeare, Lewiston, The Edwin
Mellen Press, 2000, 40.
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