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SHAKESPEARE’S ART OF POESY IN KING LEAR
A Comparative Discovrse of the Bodies Natvral and Politiqve.**° As noted earlier,
Forset offers a good example of Jacobean discourse of legal writings. In the
treaty, the plot is mentioned in corporeal terms as if it “beheaded the whole
Realme,”*’ which exemplifies that the body politic becomes a “mishapen and
distorted” monster if the parts or members do not perform their appointed
tasks." Furthermore, Forset compares the Island of Britannia to a body that
needs only one head instead of two, which is undoubtedly a clear reference
to the Union of England and Scotland embodied by King James, who being a
“vertuous and powerfull head should reunite and draw againe into one, the
distracted and long repugning parts.”?®° Furthermore, even Jacobean public
speeches abound with examples of similar rhetoric, since King James often
called himself the head and his people the body. As mentioned earlier, James
sought with this propaganda to hide his partiality for his Scottish subjects.*”°
Nevertheless, identifying the King with the Head of the body politic has
at least one consequence. Compared to the theory of the King’s two bodies,
the distinctive feature of the organic conception of the state is that it presents
the Prince only as a single member of the larger organism of the body politic.
As Paul Archambault explains, “the analogy of the body served the cause
of a certain type of liberalism: a liberalism which, without repudiating the
excellence of the monarchical form of government, constantly reminded
the Prince that he was but a part, however superior, of a body larger than
himself"?
Shakespeare’s King Lear, a play centered on the figure of a monarch,
must have relied upon the assumed Early Modern audience’s knowledge of
various contemporaneous ideas and notions related to the construct of the
state figuratively referred to as the body politic. So far, academic discussion
has focused on the relevance of the theory of the “King’s two bodies” to the
historical understanding of the play. But this approach limits attention to the
figure of Lear and presents the notion of the body politic from his point of view,
which might promote a deeper understanding of the complexity of the king’s
character but it reveals little about his relationships to the other characters. In
what follows, I examine the traces of these corporeal governance theories in
the poetic features of the 1608 Pied Bull Quarto, which allows for what I have
called an “anthropomorphic mapping” of the characters’ relation to the King.
386 Rolls: The Theory, 40.
387 Forset: A Comparative Discovrse, sig. H.iii. r.
388 Tbid., sig. H.i. v.
389 Ibid., sig. Li. v-Lii. r.
390 Baldo: Partial, 46.
#1 Paul Archambault: The Analogy ofthe “Body” in Renaissance Political Literature, Biblioteque
d’Humanisme et Renaissance 29 (1967), 53.
* 102