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THE INFLUENCE OF EARLY MODERN THEORIES OF GOVERNANCE
and disregards the monarch’s responsibility for the “body politic.” As
opposed to Gloster, his mistaken judgment of his children leads to more
serious consequences and sets off a series of events which finally results in
the destruction of his state. Extending the scope of research to the “organic
conception of the state” and combining it with the study of body-related
images, this chapter has offered an anthropomorphic mapping of Lear’s
relationships to the other characters. The body-related image cluster that
the text attributes to various characters corresponds to the analogical
social structure of the body politic most comprehensively discussed in
John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, a work well-known even to Shakespeare’s
contemporaries. Focusing on one of the figurative layers of the text, the
chapter has ultimately described King Lear’s fall from power as the result of
the disintegration of his body politic. From a poetical point of view, this fall
appears in King Lear in the form of various textual references to the sick body
of the state, imagery which ultimately derives from the anthropomorphic
analogy permeating early Jacobean public discourses.
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