Page 96 [96]
SHAKESPEARE’S ART OF POESY IN KING LEAR
of dealing with the difference between the two bodies. His personal will has been
collapsed into his political will, and the law has been vested in his natural and body
politic.?°®
Unfortunately, Rolls does not apply his findings concerning Jacobean public
discourse to a detailed discussion of King Lear. Rather, he simply adopts
Reginard Armstrong Foakes’ interpretation of the play and remarks that it
denies “the metaphysical connection ofthe king with state, ofthe father with
the family, and of God with the cosmos.”**4
Although Kantorowitz, Axton and Rolls have made considerable contributions
to twentieth-century readers’ understandings ofthe King’s Two Bodies theory
and its representation in Shakespeare’s age, because of their narrow focus, they
marginalized the relevance of another tradition, which became known in the
secondary literature as the organic conception of the state.
THE ORGANIC CONCEPTION OF THE STATE
In the late Middle Ages, a doctrine spread all over Europe that identified the
Christian community as a corporative and organic structure and defined its
internal hierarchy as analogous to the human body. Even before its Christian
application, this anthropomorphic analogy for the community had been
present in intellectual thinking since Ancient times. The expression “the
organic conception of the state” comes from the book The Political Thought
of Plato and Aristotle, in which Ernest Barker, a prominent British political
scientist, defines its meaning in the following manner: “An organism is a
unity, where each member is an instrument (or organon) in the general plan;
where each member has its appointed purpose or function (ergon); where each
member can only act, and be understood, and indeed exist, through the end
and aim of the whole. But such is the unity of the State and such is the relation
of the individual to the State: the State is an organism and its citizens are its
members.”?°
David George Hale maintains that the first written record that testifies to
the application of this anthropomorphic analogy is the following passage in
Isocrates’ Areopagitaticus from 355 B.C.:
353 Rolls: The Theory, 72. The author intentionally differentiates “king” with a small initial,
meaning the person who is only a member of the body politic (thus emphasizing the body
natural side of his twofold nature), from the “King” with capital letter, which refers to the
body politic, including the whole realm of the people. Cf. ibid., 59.
354 Tbid., 252.
355 Barker cited in Leonard Barkan: Nature’s Work of Art. The Human Body as Image of the World,
New Haven-London, Yale University Press, 1975, 62.
+ 94 +