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OCR
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. + 92 +
