Fictions of Sovereignty: Temporal

FICTIONS OF SOVEREIGNTY: TEMPORAL

DISPLACEMENTS OF THE MONARCH IN

SHAKESPEARE, MILTON, AND BEHN

MEGAN E. GRIFFIN

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

January, 2019 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES

We hereby approve the dissertation of

Megan E. Griffin

candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.*

Committee Chair

Maggie Vinter

Committee Member

Christopher Flint

Committee Member

Erika Olbricht

Committee Member

Laura Hengehold

Date of Defense

August 24, 2018

* We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any

proprietary material contained therein Table of Contents

Abstract 1

Introduction 3

Chapter One:

Richard II and Katechonic Sovereignty 22

Chapter Two:

Future-Oriented Sovereignty in Henry V 57

Chapter Three:

Paradise Lost and the Origins of Political Community 100

Chapter Four:

Dismembering the Sovereign in Oroonoko 145

Conclusion 186

Bibliography 195 Fictions of Sovereignty: Temporal Displacements of the Monarch in Shakespeare,

Milton, and Behn

Abstract

MEGAN E. GRIFFIN

This dissertation explores how significant works of English literature from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries interacted with the idea of sovereignty, and especially the perceived necessity that a single person possessing sovereign power must act as the foundation for the existence of functional political communities. I argue that depictions of sovereignty in early modern literature are inseparable from both political theology and varying notions of temporality. Furthermore, I argue that the ideal version of the monarch is never depicted as a present, existent force in the literature of the period.

Instead, the ideal monarch is temporally displaced through various means, with a general movement from depicting the ideal monarch as potential and immanent in the late sixteenth century, to depicting him as bygone or inaccessible in the late seventeenth.

In the first two chapters, I analyze Shakespeare’s Richard II and Henry V, plays which explore the ways in which monarchs with absolutist aspirations can effectively assert their authority without self-contradiction or self-negation. This assertion comes to found itself on the hope of a future ideal monarch which the current monarch might usher in; in the process, these plays transform the perpetually recurring hope of kingly 2 succession into a kind of secularized eschatology. In the last two chapters, I move forward in time to Milton’s Paradise Lost and Behn’s Oroonoko, two works which are concerned with the perceived disappearance of a connection to legitimate sovereign authority. Milton, in retelling the origin myth of all human political community, seeks a way to contextualize the political disasters of his career and return sovereign authority to its proper divine place. Behn, on the other hand, explores a fundamental breakdown of sovereign power structures in the face of both colonialism and chattel slavery, moving manifestations of ideal sovereign power irretrievably into the past.

Fundamentally, this dissertation aims to explore the imaginary constructs which create human community, the creative intersections between literary and legal fictions, and the imaginative dimensions of authoritarianism which have been inherited from our cultural and political forebears in the early modern period.

Introduction

In the introduction to her book Periodization and Sovereignty, Kathleen Davis

explains that she began her research intending to investigate how the concepts of

feudalism and secularization became so fundamental to the grand historical narrative

which defines the “modern” over and against the “medieval” or the “pre-modern.”

However, she quickly found that the concept of sovereignty was the unavoidable key to both of her initial interests: the notion of a feudal past was first crystallized in sixteenth century legal debates over the nature and limits of sovereign power, and the idea of a mass transition from religious to secular authority has been theorized primarily to explain the nature and origin of sovereign power.1 In many ways, this dissertation has charted a

parallel but opposite course. I began with the intent to investigate how English literature

of the early modern period interacted with the idea of the sovereign, and especially how it

reacted to the perceived necessity that a single person possessing sovereign power must

act as the foundation for the existence of functional political communities. But in my

research, I was drawn inevitably toward the conclusion that secularization, in the form of

political theology, and temporality were vital components in the early modern conception

of sovereign power. Literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries cannot fully

address the latter without in some way engaging with both how sovereign power adapts

theological concepts to its own ends and how it functions to delineate a certain

understanding of the past and the future.

1 Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 6- 7.

I leave out “the present” from the previous sentence deliberately. My

fundamental contention in this work is that “the sovereign” in its idealized form is not

depicted as a currently existing force in some of the most significant literature of the

period. In the works which I survey in this dissertation, the ideal sovereign is shown as

imminent or bygone, as out-of-reach or a potentiality, as yet-to-arrive or hopelessly lost,

but is never here, never now. Radical as this contention may seem, it becomes less so

when one considers the origins of sovereignty as a concept. The term comes from the

Latin adjective superanus, meaning roughly “pertaining to that which is above or

beyond;” it entered English via French in the late middle ages, where “sovereign” could

be used to refer to anyone with authority over the speaker -- kings could fit into this

category, of course, but so could a variety of authority figures, from local officials to

God. During the sixteenth century it took on an additional, specialized meaning

pertaining only to monarchs, a meaning which coexisted with the older definition

throughout the seventeenth century. It is only after this period that the term is re-

expanded into its contemporary definition referring to the powers held by states and non-

monarchical governments; and, by the nineteenth century, comes to include the vital but

contentious notion of a “personal sovereignty” held by individual citizens.2 Sovereignty is at its most basic level the word we use to denote supreme authority; consequently, its meanings contract and expand with how political authority is conceptualized and

2 See “Sovereign, n.” in the OED Online (Oxford University Press). Though this brief etymological background only covers the history of the term in English, and my research is narrowly focused on England, it should be noted that the seventeenth century is a key period of development for European notions of sovereign power and statehood in general. The concept of the sovereign nation-state, which undergirds the current system of international law, is widely considered to have developed from the Peace of Westphalia, the treaty which ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648.

distributed. But, as many 20th and 21st century theorists have noted, the idea of

sovereignty itself is a kind of paradox. According to philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy,

The sovereign is the existent who depends upon nothing - no finality, no order of

production or subjection, whether it concerns the agent of the patient or the cause

of the effect. Dependent upon nothing, it is entirely delivered over to itself,

insofar as precisely the “itself” neither precedes nor founds it but is the nothing,

the very thing from which it is suspended.3

In order for something to be truly sovereign, it must appeal to no power beyond itself.

This state of being self-founding and self-sustaining is, in a theological worldview, generally the place occupied by God. Considering sovereignty in purely secular terms has therefore been a perennial difficulty, because, as Nancy argues, sovereignty

“essentially eludes the sovereign . . . the same condition that ensures that sovereignty receive its concept also deprives it of its power: that is, the absence of superior or foundational authority.”4 Political power structures are generally conceived with

reference to some higher authority; if not a deity, than a set of principles, a heritage, a

belief system. In order to be politically relevant, sovereign power must be likewise be

founded on a higher authority -- but sovereignty by definition claims to be its own

highest authority, and so negates itself in the very act of asserting its own existence.5 The

consequence of this paradox is that the political exercise of sovereign power, when

3 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. Francois Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany NY: SUNY Press, 2007), 103 4 Ibid, 103. 5 See the introduction to Philip Lorenz’ Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives in Renaissance Drama (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), for a more detailed overview of Nancy in relationship to other scholars on sovereignty.

6 referring to itself to ground its own authority, must also, in order to avoid a tautological self-negation, somehow simultaneously point beyond itself.

Literature and Sovereignty

This pointing-beyond is, as I will argue in the following chapters, exactly what literary depictions of sovereigns in sixteenth and seventeenth century are trying to negotiate. Slippery as sovereignty is in its most barely theoretical form, it becomes even trickier when uneasily wedded to the idea of a single hereditary monarch, as the early moderns attempted to do. Sovereign power, even though it is supposedly held by the monarch, must still by its nature be asserted and displaced in the same movement. In this dissertation, I argue that this displacement is facilitated by the transposition of theological concepts into secular mysteries of the state -- political theology. This theoretical term was first pioneered by arch-conservative Catholic jurist Carl Schmitt, who famously posited that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”6 Restated a bit more generously by early modern scholar Graham

Hammill, and without Schmitt’s infamous Nazism, the basic principle is that:

The problem with constituting power is that it endlessly falls into theological

modes of thinking and representation . . . I do not mean to suggest that political

communities are determined by God or Platonic ideals but rather that political

making assumes supplemental discourses -- myths and founding fictions -- that

play the role of the transcendent for particular political communities.7

6 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 36. 7 Graham Hammill, The Mosaic Constitution: Political Theology and Imagination from Machiavelli to Milton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 5.

The formation of the modern state, according to the theory of political theology, involved a complex historical process of taking those theological concepts which had previously served as transcendent principles and adapting them into a secular format. Schmitt’s go- to example was that the legal concept of the exception was analogous to the theological concept of the miracle: both are a means to explain and justify the idea of the suspension of normal order, with the former being not a newly devised secular framework but in fact a borrowing of the essential structure of the latter. The historical process of secularization therefore emerges not as the shedding of an old worldview and the creation of an entirely new one, but as a complex process of translation and adaptation.8

The early modern era is a supposed crux of this process, since it is considered not only by Schmitt but also by the anti-authoritarian thinkers who oppose him to mark the beginning of the transference from theological to secularized forms.9 But the work of some scholars of the period suggests that what occurs is not actually a move from a pre- existing, well-defined theological scheme of political power to a secularized version of the same. Instead, the “theological past” (so to speak) only becomes fully defined, or sometimes re-defined, in order to serve the political needs of the moment.10 This is what

8 Nancy has questioned whether we can truly refer to this process as “secularization,” given that the very term supposes a binary opposition between the secular and the divine, neither of which can properly define itself without reference to the other. This implies, he argues: Either that politics can never absorb religion if religion has a proper consistency or that there is no autonomous religion and that it is always the instrument of a politics that through it gives itself the ultimate agency of authority and legitimacy. (100) Although I will continue to use the term “secularization” for convenience and clarity, my argument suggests that Nancy’s second supposition may indeed be the case, at least for these particular works. 9 Both Schmitt and the Marxist Walter Benjamin -- the former a Nazi and the latter driven to suicide to escape Nazi persecution -- drew upon early modern texts, including literature, to articulate their rival notions of political theology. See Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977). Benjamin’s analysis of the German trauerspiel may have some parallels to my conclusions here, given his emphasis on how the sovereigns of trauerspiele act as imperfect representatives of history. See also Davis 77-95 for an overview of Schmitt, Benjamin, and their 20th century respondents. 10 Aside from Davis and Kantorowicz, whom I discuss here, see Kevin Sharpe’s historical works on the Tudor and Stuart dynasties. Sharpe emphasizes how early modern English monarchs depended on the

Davis approaches in her investigation of the creation of “feudalism” in the writings of

sixteenth century historiographers, who narrativized their own muddled past in order to

solve certain paradoxes related to sovereign authority.11 But the notion that political

theology necessarily involves acts of definition and narrativization to shape a useful

“past” is given perhaps its most laboriously documented examples in Ernst Kantorowicz’

The King’s Two Bodies. Kantorowicz’ argument (which is in many ways an ur-text for

explorations of political theology in early modern English literature) purports to show

how early modern English kingship co-opted the idea of Christ’s dual nature in order to

create a legal framework in which the king has two bodies: a mortal body natural which

lives and dies, and an immortal body politic which seamlessly passes from heir to heir.12

One of the most striking features of Kantorowicz’ work is that he shows how the notion

of the king’s two bodies was never the result of a single act of transference from a

theological to a secular framework, but instead emerged from a series of ad hoc legal

solutions which built up throughout the middle ages, with the concept of the two-bodied

king only achieving full articulation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Kantorowicz’ work suggests, counter to the mere shifting of concepts implied by Schmitt,

that the actual process of secularization meant not only the adoption of theological ideas

but also the reshaping of those ideas into politically useful forms. In order to be

politically useful these forms must generally appear as though they were the natural

descendants of their theological forebears, even if they are often cobbled-together

creation and management of what we would call their “public image” to maintain and especially to enhance their authority. See Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth Century England (New Haven: Yale UP, 2009), and Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England 1603-1660 (New Haven: Yale UP, 2010). 11 Davis, 7-8. 12 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1957), 21.

solutions to the problems of, or a means of legitimizing support for, sovereign power

structures already looking to assert their own authority for their own sake.

This means, in effect, that early modern English kingship was in the process of

creating itself, at least on a conceptual level -- of trying to figure out how to functionally

articulate its claim to sovereignty in the form of a single hereditary monarch. This

process of creation often involved making historical claims to support the legitimacy of

early modern sovereign power, but these claims need not have been, and indeed often

were not, actually reflective of the realities of medieval kingship. The ability of

sovereign power to tell convincing stories about its own legitimacy is always a key

component of political power structures, but the issue becomes much more acute in a

historical context where kingship is in the middle of inventing/reinventing itself to

support and broaden its own authority. Kantorowicz’ work reveals some of the key ways

in which this storytelling operates -- Victoria Kahn has argued that Kantorowicz’ vision of political theology is “not so much a methodological and existential postulate of ‘the political’ . . . [as] an analysis of the dominant metaphors that inform our social, legal, and political arrangements.”13 At this most basic level, to Kantorowicz, legal fictions such as

the king’s two bodies function like “just a particular kind of artistic fiction.”14 For this

reason, Kantorowicz appears as comfortable referencing Shakespeare and Dante as he is

consulting the legal opinions of actual early modern jurists.

13 Victoria Kahn, The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 66. 14 Ibid, 65. Kahn’s main argument (with which I agree) is that Kantorowicz’ version of political theology embraces metaphorical or illusory notions of transcendence, and is therefore liberal and pro- constitutionalist, as opposed to Schmitt’s insistence on the need for an actual autocrat. (Kahn 70-81)

I do not go quite so far as to argue that legal fiction and literary fiction can be so

fully synonymous, but what I do explore in this dissertation is how notions of political

theology, which jurists so were busy turning into fruitful legal fictions, were also

confronted, accommodated, contradicted, promoted, or otherwise in conversation with the literature of the time. If legal fiction (especially theo-political fictions) and literary

fiction have a certain fundamental similarity -- in that they are both an effort to explore, articulate and affect the imagined communities that make up human society -- then

literature both affects and is affected by the politics of the day on the imaginative and

metaphorical level, irrespective of how one interprets the tangible influences at play.

Literary fiction is in general much freer to play and experiment with notions like

sovereignty and political theology than any jurist ever could be, and so its interactions

with these topics can achieve depths of insight and exploration that other genres of

writing rarely achieve. However, in making this argument, I have intentionally avoided

broad assertions about the relative subversive potential of early modern literature.15 My

concern in this dissertation is to see how key pieces of literature participate in, and

interact with, the process of conceptualizing sovereignty, which is not necessarily

synonymous with either supporting or opposing sovereign power structures.

When looking at literary depictions of early modern English kingship, one of the

most important issues to keep in mind is that the self-conceptualization in which it

engages in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is never truly stable, and, based on the

15 The debate over the role of literature -- and especially theater -- in subverting or promoting early modern power structures was of primary concern to new historicist scholars starting in the 1980s. See Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1988); Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 3rd ed. (Durham NC: Duke UP, 2004).

11 events of the English Civil War, could be considered self-defeating. Kantorowicz saw the beheading of Charles I as the product, and in many ways the final stage, of the idea of the king’s two bodies, arguing that it was a moment “when Parliament succeeded . . . in executing solely the king’s body natural without affecting seriously or doing irreparable harm to the king’s body politic.”16 Setting aside historical quibbles, and the dubious implied teleology, Kantorowicz’ reading of the execution of Charles I approaches but never fully explores another key contention which I make in this dissertation: that not only is the ideal monarch never fully present in the literature of the time, but there is a general movement from seeing the ideal monarch as potential or imminent directly to seeing that monarch as bygone or inaccessible, without a real point in the middle where the king’s full sovereignty can be said to truly manifest itself. Sovereignty by its nature must point beyond itself at the same moment that it points to itself, and in the literature of early modern English monarchy, that paradox is solved by using theo-political concepts to effect various means of temporal displacement.

The means of temporal displacement explored in this work, however, come from different political agendas, and have very different implications for the political communities which they seek to address. In chapters one and two, I examine two of

Shakespeare’s history plays: Richard II and Henry V, the beginning and the end of his second tetralogy, both produced in the 1590s. In chapters three and four, I jump ahead, past the Civil War to the Restoration, and look two at texts with very different perspectives on the overthrow and reinstatement of the monarchy: Milton’s Paradise Lost and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko. The plays of the 1590s are, as I will argue, exploring the

16 Kantorowicz, 23.

ways in which monarchs with absolutist aspirations can effectively assert their authority

without self-contradiction or self-negation, an assertion which ultimately founds itself on the hope of a future ideal monarch which the current monarch might usher in. This perspective is highly reflective of the political situation in the final years of Elizabeth’s reign, when the unanswered question of her successor was a source of both hope and anxiety. Both Milton and Behn, however, wrote after the Civil War and the Restoration -

- past the vanishing point posited by Kantorowicz in Charles I’s execution, and in a time

when the later Stuart monarchs were trying, ultimately futilely, to reassert the absolutist

claims of their predecessors. I argue that Milton, a disgraced supporter of the

Commonwealth, wrote Paradise Lost in part with the aim of making comprehensible the

political disasters which he had endured, by relocating “true” sovereign power back with

God -- and therefore moving it outside the bounds of human temporality. Behn, on the

other hand, was a royalist supporter of James II writing on the eve of the Glorious

Revolution, and I argue that she uses Oroonoko to explore a fundamental breakdown of

sovereign power structures in the face of both colonialism and chattel slavery, implying

in this collapse a potentially disastrous future for English politics and society. Behn’s

depiction moves ideal sovereign power implicitly irretrievably into the past, whereas

Milton’s framework promises its restoration after the end of time and final judgment of

the world. Behn was a supporter of English absolutist monarchy whereas Milton utterly

reviled it. And yet both of their works are still ultimately concerned with the

disappearance of a connection to legitimate sovereign authority and the proliferation of

violent chaos and petty tyranny in its wake.

Although this dissertation is not primarily concerned with biopolitics, the

trajectory of my analysis of sovereignty-- from Shakespeare’s once and future kings to

Behn’s slave plantations -- has potential implications for our understanding of its origins.

Consequently, one of the major theorists employed in the following chapters is Giorgio

Agamben, whose work is deeply concerned with exploring the ties between Schmitt’s

narrative of sovereign power as a theo-political phenomenon and Foucault’s narrative of

the development of biopolitical power from the eighteenth century onwards.17 One of

Agamben’s most fundamental contentions, based on his reconsideration of Classical

sources, is that “sovereignty” should be thought of not in terms of the secular versus the

sacred but instead as “the originary structure in which law refers to life and includes it in

itself by suspending it.”18 Sovereign power, according to Agamben, is in fact the origin of the political in that it derives from the originary decision which delineates between different forms of life -- namely, the “civil life” which makes up civil society, as divided from the “bare life” which is simultaneously excluded from civil society and yet paradoxically included within it by functioning as that which civil life must define itself against. This originary inclusive exclusion is what has created the notions of both the secular and the sacred as we commonly think of them.19 Agamben’s framework connects

Schmitt’s political theology and Foucault’s biopolitics by suggesting that they are both

manifestations of the same operations of sovereign power, taking on new forms as the

17 Daniel Juan Gil uses Agamben in a similar manner to explore the intersections of sovereign power and biopolitics in Shakespeare’s theater, in Shakespeare’s Anti-Politics: Sovereign Power and the Life of the Flesh (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). See especially his introduction, 1-19. 18 Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998), 23. 19 Ibid, 52-4.

boundary of the forms of life which sovereign power includes/excludes shifts depending

on historical development.

The temporal displacements of sovereignty which I examine in this dissertation,

which take on different forms as the English political landscape shifts, should therefore be understood as participants in the process by which the perceived locus of sovereign power initially moves towards a single hereditary monarch and is then dispersed away into a more decentralized form which would eventually give rise to the modern state.

Because theology and notions of the sacred were perhaps never separable from the operations of sovereign power in the first place, the secularization of theological concepts in the service of the early modern English monarchy (with the required adjustment of those concepts), and the subsequent rise of biopolitical concepts of power as the concept of monarchy loses effectiveness, should be conceived not as a rupture or a sea-change but

as further evolutions of the same forces of sovereign power. Operating in the realm of

fiction, which includes both art and the imaginary constructs which create human

community, the literature which I will analyze in the following chapters constitutes a

fundamental element of this process.

Critical Context

This dissertation, in using the theoretical lenses provided by thinkers such as

Schmitt, Kantorowicz, and Agamben, builds upon a critical tradition which has gained

increasing relevance in the past twenty years. Much of the extant criticism examining

sovereignty and political theology in early modern English literature is concerned with

pre-Civil War texts and uses a synchronic approach. Deborah K. Shuger’s Political

Theologies in Shakespeare’s England (2001), Julia Reinhard Lupton’s Citizen-Saints

(2005), Anselm Haverkamp’s Shakespearean Genealogies of Power (2010), and Daniel

Juan Gil’s Shakespeare’s Anti-Politics (2013) all focus primarily on Shakespeare’s plays.

Philip Lorenz’ The Tears of Sovereignty (2013), looks at Shakespeare’s plays in conversation with Spanish Golden Age theater. Victoria Kahn’s The Future of Illusion

(2014) is dedicated to re-examining how theorists such as Schmitt and Agamben analyzed and drew upon their early modern sources.

My diachronic approach to literature both before and after the Civil War is most indebted to Kathleen Davis’ work on periodization, which I have already discussed, and

Graham Hammil’s The Mosaic Constitution (2011), which similarly spans the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries. Hammil’s text takes on a different and broader scope of primary subject works, and uses Mosaic law as its theo-political lens. In this dissertation, I have focused more narrowly on four specific texts, and in doing so have attempted to introduce several new and potentially fruitful strains of political theology. I have also attempted to bring the insights pioneered by the Shakespeare critics mentioned above to bear on the work of Milton, and, even further, onto the work of Behn, whose connections to political theology have heretofore gone relatively unexplored. As a result, my work sheds new light on the temporal dimensions of sovereign power throughout sixteenth and seventeenth century literature, opens up new critical avenues in the relationship between political theology and literature, and calls upon literary scholars to question the ways in which we have assumed deep political discontinuities between pre- and post-Civil War literature.

Chapters

In chapter one, I begin by re-examining the theo-political notions at work in

Shakespeare’s Richard II. Kantorowicz called this play “the tragedy of the king’s two

bodies,”20 arguing that Richard’s downfall both dramatizes the tension between body

natural and body political and prefigures the eventual separation of the same after the

death of Charles I. I challenge this analysis in two fundamental ways. First, in

opposition to most critics, who have tended to focus on the last two acts of the play and

especially on Richard’s mourning speeches, I instead ground my analysis in the first two

acts, which depict the aborted duel between Bolingbroke and Mowbray and both

participants’ subsequent banishment. These opening acts revolve around a partially-

subtextual conflict over the murder of Richard and Bolingbroke’s uncle, the Duke of

Gloucester, which was likely committed by Mowbray on the orders of Richard himself.

The duel and banishment therefore become a contest of Richard’s ability to manage public perception -- not in the interests of exonerating himself, but in order to justify and mystify this violent act as necessary part of his role as a katechon, or sovereign restrainer.

Introducing the notion of the katechon to Richard II is my second major

contention in this chapter. The secularized katechon is another strain of political

theology, at work alongside the king’s two bodies, which was co-opted in the service of

monarchy. The term comes from Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians, and refers to a

mysterious “restrainer” who holds back the eventual end of the world. Even in

theological circles, the katechon was long associated with dominant political institutions;

in its secularized form, as Agamben has argued, it becomes the central self-justification

20 Kantorowicz, 20.

17 for political power structures, a claim that their authority is necessary to hold back violent, anarchic chaos. I argue that Richard and Bolingbroke, throughout Richard II, are engaged in a conflict over who can best act out the role of the katechon, a contest which Bolingbroke wins. However, in depicting this conflict, the play has exposed the fact that it waged between two fallible moral men trying to enact a transcendent role which neither one can ever truly embody. The emptiness of sovereignty has, in effect, been exposed; and so the play ends with a sense of longing for a truly ideal monarch.

Chapter two explores the ways in which Henry V, the conclusion to the second tetralogy and Shakespeare’s last major history play, tries to answer this longing. One of the main points of contention in criticism of Henry V has been to what degree it endorses or opposes Henry’s jingoistic invasion of France, and, consequently, how we should interpret the play’s attitude to both monarchical authority and the historical myths which are employed to prop it up. I argue that the play is not so much a statement about the rightness of sovereign power structures as an exploration of what is required for the idea of the monarch to continue to be a functional locus of political power, given both the emptiness which was exposed in Richard II and the newly emergent concern of historical oblivion. The late sixteenth century was a time of flux for notions of history and historiography, with older providentialist concepts of history existing alongside newer humanist ones; a sharper awareness of linear time, historical change, and anachronism brought with it a more immediate fear of historical loss and being forgotten.

In Henry V, this fear comes into conflict with sovereign authority’s need to turn history into a coherent and advantageous narrative, a process which inevitably involves forgetting or obscuring inconvenient truths. This conflict deepens over the course of the

play, enhanced by Henry’s and the audience’s awareness that being a king is

fundamentally about performing a role which he can never genuinely fulfill. I argue that

the play resolves this tension by switching its temporal orientation towards the future:

the emotional thrust of the war turns to preemptive nostalgia via the St. Crispin’s Day

speech, and the emotional appeal of Henry’s sovereign role becomes focused on the

potential of his heir. This future orientation is reflective of the political situation of the

1590s: with a childless and aging Elizabeth who had refused to officially name an heir, as

Marie Axton has chronicled, the proponents of various candidates pinned miraculous

hopes on their chosen successors.21 I argue that Henry V turns these hopes into a kind of

secularized eschatology, one where an ideal monarch is rendered perpetually imminent

by the recurring process of royal succession. This use of eschatological time in the

service of sovereign power transforms the longing which finishes Richard II into a sense

of expectation and hope; and, in doing so, attempts to avert the self-negation of

sovereignty by displacing its full manifestation into the future.

For chapter three, I move forward to Milton’s Paradise Lost, and confront one of

the central issues in political interpretation of the epic: despite his virulent disdain for the

monarchy, Milton chooses to depict God as speaking and acting in ways extremely

reminiscent of earthly absolutist monarchs. I argue that Milton’s portrayal of God makes

sense if understood not as an analogy for human political institutions but as their origin and

precursor. Using both Agamben’s theories on the connection between sovereign decisions and

the origins of political community, and Milton’s prose tract The Readie and Easie Way to

Establish a Free Commonwealth, I interpret Paradise Lost as a sort of origin story for all human

21 Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977).

19 political community, through which Milton seeks to understand the (to him) political disaster of the Restoration. Human politics is shown to be the result of two originary moments, creating two

“levels” of sovereign authority and thus two sets of parameters on human nature. The first is the

Son’s volunteering to sacrifice himself for humanity, and the second is Adam and Eve’s decision to eat the forbidden fruit. However, because of God’s perfect foreknowledge, these two moments interact in temporally complex ways: the Son’s decision is made in response to the Fall of humanity, but occurs before it, and in fact acts to delineate the scope of human history in which the Fall and its final redemption will take place. Additionally, these two originary moments can be called originary because they both represent a free choice to obey or disobey an arbitrary command laid down by God. The arbitrariness of these moments, combined with their location outside the scope of Fallen human temporality, allow Milton to place ultimate sovereignty back into the realm of the divine.

However, this divine sovereignty is still rendered politically relevant by its delegation through Christ, a delegation which Milton uses to make comprehensible the inherent fallibility of human political community and the broader scope of human history. Effectively, the salvific power of Christ, which is enacted in response/anticipation of the Fall, uses God as its transcendent principle; and that salvific power can in turn itself serve as the transcendent principle for righteous human political communities. This is what allows Milton to articulate the difference between “right” and “wrong” forms of human political community, explain why humans keep gravitating towards wrong and tyrannical forms of rule, and forecast the eventual end of that tyranny with the end of human political community itself in the final judgement of the world. The last two books of Paradise Lost therefore use the form of the jeremiad to give pattern to the narrative of all human history, a pattern intended to both comfort and guide Milton’s righteous readers. For Milton, sovereignty is, in a sense, displaced into the future and the past simultaneously, by being located outside the scope of time itself.

Chapter four concludes by analyzing Aphra Behn’s prose work Oroonoko, or the Royal

Slave. My argument focuses on the final scene of the text, which depicts the violent execution of the title protagonist at the hands of English colonists and slave-owners. Turning back to

Kantorowicz, I argue that throughout the text Behn exaggerates the physical reality of

Oroonoko’s kingly status to such an extreme that it begins to undermine the metaphorical qualities which make the king’s two bodies a politically effective concept, threatening to dissolve the body politic back into a mere association of many bodies natural. At the same time, the text dramatizes the ways in which colonial chattel slavery, which was a relatively new institution to the English of the seventeenth century, fails to correspond to the Classical, war-based notions of slavery with which Behn’s readers may have been more familiar and comfortable. This collision between slavery and political theology makes sense in light of Agamben’s theories of the homo sacer, a form of sacred or bare life which is subject to neither human nor divine law. Agamben argues that the sovereign and the homo sacer exist in opposite but equivalent states of exception: former is in a sense “above” the law, defined solely by its capacity to kill with impunity, while the latter is “below” the law, defined solely by its ability to be killed with impunity. These states are created by the same mechanism, and shape the boundaries of civil life, which exists within the law.

Oroonoko’s death, I argue, is a moment where the sovereign sphere and the sphere of bare life merge, erasing the framework which defines civil life and therefore resisting any form of political signification. This done by showing a king subjected to the type of execution normally reserved for traitors and regicides; but more importantly, by showing the ways in which this anarchic act is enabled and encouraged by the conditions of colonial chattel slavery, which normalizes the supposedly exceptional sovereign/bare life relationship to the everyday relationship between slave and slave-owner. Although Behn’s work is not specifically anti- slavery, it equates the dissolution of absolutist royal power in England with the rising forces of colonialism, viewing both as a source of political chaos. This stance, arising from Behn’s own

Tory politics, effectively displaces “true” sovereignty either into the bygone past, or onto exoticized foreign others who are seen as remnants or reflections of that past. Oroonoko therefore allows us a glimpse into the breakdowns of meaning which constitute the origin points of what would come to be called biopolitics.

Chapter One:

Richard II and Katechonic Sovereignty

Richard II is not the tragedy of the king’s two bodies.

Ernst Kantorowicz gave the play that epithet in 1957. In refuting his claim, I do not wish to argue that the notion of the king’s two bodies is not applicable to this play, but rather that it neither fully encompasses the play’s theo-political concerns nor does it fully explain the play’s place in the historical trajectory of the idea of the monarch.

Kantorowicz used his reading of Richard II to introduces the theo-political concept of the king’s two bodies, an early modern legal theory (borrowing from the theological precedent in Christ’s dual nature) which argued that kings had both a flesh-and-blood body natural and an intangible body politic. To Kantorowicz, Richard II was important because in Richard’s demise it dramatized the “distinctions between the King’s sempiternity and the king’s temporariness, between his immaterial and immortal body politics and his material and mortal body natural.”1 And these distinctions were on a

clear historical trajectory for Kantorowicz, one that led from the middle ages, when

sovereign power first started to be conceptualized in this manner, to the beheading of

Charles II in 1649 – supposedly, the moment when the king’s body natural was killed in

the name of the king’s body politic, an event that was at once both the apotheosis of the

metaphor of the king’s two bodies and also its destruction. So when Kantorowicz calls

Richard II the tragedy of the king’s two bodies, the label has a double meaning: the play

is a tragedy about the king’s two bodies, yes, but more importantly, what happens to

1 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1957), 20-1.

Richard is the tragedy of the king’s two bodies, a sort of prefiguring of a historical

inevitability half a century away.

Critics of Richard II have already refuted Kantorowicz along several axes.

Some, such as Harry Berger, have questioned whether Richard’s deposition and death can

be considered a true “demise,” given how his words continue to haunt not only the audience but also the characters of the succeeding plays.2 Others have questioned

Kantorowicz’ historical mapping of Richard and Bolingbroke onto older and newer styles

of kingship, most notably David Womersly, who on the contrary argues that the play “is

rather a case of the old [Bolingbroke, a true medieval monarch], affronted by the advent

of the new in the form of Richard's absolutist aspirations, reasserting its rights and re‐ installing itself in the place from which it had been banished.”3 The most fundamental

challenge to Kantorowicz comes from Marie Axton’s The Queen’s Two Bodies, which

explores the complicated historical status of the king’s two bodies as merely one early

modern legal framework in conflict with many contemporary alternatives, and a perspective which accordingly complicates any interpretation of Richard II.4 My

approach is similar to Axton’s, in that I wish to further complicate Richard II’s theo-

political roots, and in so doing add greater nuance to our understanding of its place in

both the development of sovereign power and fictional depictions of the same.

In criticism of the play, political theology has sometimes been used as an

explanatory framework for Richard’s downfall, a way of putting pattern and reason to a

2 Harry Berger, Jr., Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page, (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1989. See also Derek Cohen, “History and the Nation in Richard II and Henry IV,” SEL 42, no. 2 (2002): 293–315. 3 David Womersly, Divinity and State, (New York: Oxford UP, 2010), 285. 4 Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and Elizabethan Succession, (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977).

political upheaval that the text (supposedly) presents as sudden and disorienting, full of

opaque character motives and questionable connections between cause and effect.

Kantorowicz’ reading sees in the play a dramatization of the triumphs and faults of the

king’s two bodies. A similar, rival approach to Richard II has been made by Zenón Luis-

Martínez, who instead reads Richard’s downfall through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s

theories of Trauerspiel, which “captured the strong interrelatedness of poetic diction and

theatrical ostentation for the expression of the early modern experience of historicity . . .

[which was] political in its nature, mournful in its outlook, and allegorical in its

aesthetics.”5 For Luis-Martínez, the deposed Richard is a figure of Benjamin’s angel of

history, unable to stop or even fully comprehend the storm of historical action going on

around him. Kantorowicz and Luis-Martínez are similar in that their readings place a

great deal of emphasis on Richard’s monologues and soliloquys in the last three acts of

the play, a point during which Bolingbroke’s coup has already gained enough momentum

that Richard’s overthrow is a foregone conclusion– even if Richard himself takes a while

to realize that. As a result of this focus on the later acts, both readings deemphasize the importance of the political machinations taking place in the first half of the play.

Despite the relative paucity of critical attention which they have received, I argue that the first few acts depict a complicated political dance of rhetorical posturing and strategy that, for all its sometime opacity, nevertheless creates the conditions that lead to

Richard’s death. These machinations in fact have a theo-political logic all their own: they draw upon a secularized version of the theological katechon. Not only does the katechon provide a more complete theoretical framework for the play’s events –

5 Zenón Luis-Martínez, “Shakespeare’s Historical Drama as ‘Trauerspiel: Richard II’: And After,” ELH 75, no.3 (2008), 674.

rendering them not nearly as inexplicable as some critics have assumed – but it also

complicates the development of the sovereign as both a political and a theo-political

concept.

Because readings of Richard II with an eye towards political theology have

heretofore largely built upon Kantorowicz, and have therefore overlooked other

potentially fruitful concepts in political theology, I will begin by introducing one such:

the notion of the katechon. The idea of the katechon, or restrainer, comes from Paul’s

second letter to the Thessalonians. The letter addresses the congregation’s worries about

the nearness of the second coming, and assures them that this event cannot occur until a

mysterious restrainer is removed. In a 1583 edition of the Geneva Bible, the relevant

passage reads:

For the mysterie of iniquitie doeth already worke: onely he which nowe

withholdeth, [shall let] till he be taken out of the way. And then shall the wicked

man be reveiled, whome the Lord shall consume, with the Spirit of his mouth, and

shal abolish with the brightnes of his comming. [Even him] whose comming is

by the working of Satan, with all power and signes, and lying wonders.6

In a modern translation:

For the mystery of anomy (anomia) is already at work, but only until the person

now holding him back [ho katechon] is removed. Then the lawless one [anomos]

will be revealed, whom the Lord will abolish with the breath of his mouth,

6 2 Thes 2: 7-9, Geneva Bible. London: 1583. Online reproduction from Early English Books Online. The King James Version (1611) makes very few changes to this translation: “withholdeth” is changed to “letteth,” “the wicked man” to “that Wicked,” and “abolish” to “destroy.”

rendering him inoperative by the manifestation of his presence [parousia]. The

presence [parousia] of the former is according to the working of Satan in every

power [dynamis].7

This confusing bit of pseudo-prophecy describes two vaguely defined individuals: the

anomos and the katechon. Anomos can be translated as “wicked man” or “lawless one,”

and in this passage the anomos is traditionally identified as the Antichrist (though this is

far from a settled point in theological circles). However, the katechon, this vaguely-

defined person who “withholds” or “holds back” the anomos, remains obscure; the term

in reference to an individual only appears in this particular passage. Additionally, Paul’s

presentation of this figure is highly ambiguous: this mysterious restrainer holds back the

advent of lawlessness, but in doing so only further delays the return of Christ and the

ultimate redemption of the world. Human or divine, holy or unholy, in theological

circles the katechon is a figure of immense importance but frustrating obscurity; even

Augustine admitted bafflement on the matter.8

Despite considerable disagreement, one prominent exegetical tradition dating from at least the fifth century interprets the katechon as the collective embodiment of the

Roman Empire, or by extension, whatever the dominant political power structure happens

to be. In the sixteenth century, a few Protestant writers adopted this view from their

Catholic forebears, but, unlike the Catholics, they believed that Paul’s prophecy had been

fulfilled with the fall of the Roman Empire, letting loose a long line of Antichrist-popes.9

7 Translation by Patricia Daly, taken from Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains, trans. Patricia Daly (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005), 109. 8 See City of God, book xx, for Augustine’s commentary on the passage. 9 See (both retrieved from Early English Books Online) Heinrich Bullinger, A commentary vpon the seconde epistle of S Paul to the Thessalonians, London, 1538; and John Jewel, An exposition vpon the two epistles of the apostle S. Paul to the Thessalonians, London, 1584.

It is ultimately difficult to say whether any interpretation of the katechon was ever (or has to this day ever become) truly mainstream, or even widely accepted beyond specific sub- sects and commentators. Despite, or perhaps because of, its obscurity, there has been a trend of imbuing the concept with a high degree of political import -- from the early

Christians of Rome, to the radical Puritans who redeployed the concept against the Pope, and finally to the 20th century, when it came to new prominence by playing a key role in

Carl Schmitt’s theories of political theology. Schmitt was one of the first popularizers of

the term beyond communities of believers, arguing that the katechon provided the basis

and justification for the existence of Christian empires as historical, political institutions:

I do not believe that any historical concept other than katechon would have been

possible for the original Christian faith. The belief that a restrainer holds back the

end of the world provides the only bridge between the notion of an eschatological

paralysis of all human events and a tremendous historical monolith like that of the

Christian empire of the German kings.10

Schmitt venerated the Holy Roman Empire; he believed that Western political institutions

after the Middle Ages lost their theological understanding of history, turning Christian

empires into just “empires” and flattening theological concepts like the katechon (which

had been embedded within a specific eschatological framework) into mere “neutral

generalizations.”11 Although Schmitt’s authoritarian and pro-fascist view of European history has been frequently refuted, his identification of the katechon as a vitally important concept to political community has been seized upon by many; particularly

Giorgio Agamben, who has radically suggested that “every modern theory of the State . .

10 Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2003), 60. 11 Ibid, 63.

. can be taken as a secularization of this interpretation of 2 Thessalonians 2.”12 Despite their differences, these various political interpretations of the katechon share the idea that the katechon is somehow a key to fundamentally understanding the workings of sovereign authority and dominant political institutions in the Western tradition, and – potentially – a key to disrupting that authority.

In other words, the katechon constitutes a previously-obscure but highly important element of political theology, one that was undergoing transformations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries somewhat parallel to the those traced by Kantorowicz regarding the twinned nature of the sovereign. Kantorowicz posited that the dual nature of Christ was coopted and eventually secularized by early modern kingship; Schmitt and

Agamben have argued that early modern sovereignty was undergoing a similar process of adopting and secularizing the role of the katechon – taking it from a theological notion tied to specific historical moments and institutions, and turning it into a political generalization whose significance was a secular matter of preserving (or disrupting) good order.

In the early modern period, the idea of sovereignty – and indeed, any notion of a dominant political institution – was inextricably tied to the idea of hereditary kingship.

This tie was so profound that early modern English versions of the Bible translated fourteen distinct Hebrew terms (with more literal meanings ranging from “judge” to

“local governor”) as “prince,” instilling a false sense of uniformity across the Old

Testament’s varying structures of government and an equally false sense of conformity

12 Agamben, 110.

between the Old Testament and early modern forms of hereditary monarchy.13 Indeed,

this flattening trend in translation increased over the sixteenth century; marginal notes

from the King James Version of 1611 indicate that the translators deliberately replaced

many more diverse and accurate terms from earlier texts with “prince,” quite possibly

under direct political pressure.14 Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) could be called the

most important text in the secularization of the katechon, since it puts forth a “theory of

sovereignty [that] seeks precisely to ward off the anomic catastrophe of war of every man

against every man,”15 and is explicitly invested in promoting the idea of hereditary

monarchy. If the katechon stands in for the dominant political institution of the time,

then the dominant political institution of the early modern period was a single, hereditary,

often proto-absolutist monarch. Indeed, the monarchs of the time were often insistent on

creating the impression that theirs was the only form of political order that ever was or

ever could be. The secularization of the katechon meant the overt politicization of the

katechon; the politicization of the katechon meant the (often highly unstable) equivalence

of the katechon with the reigning monarch.

The early modern sovereign understood as a secularized katechon – or, more

properly, as a katechon in the process of being secularized – is thus placed in an

interesting position. He is the force that restrains chaos and violence, but unlike the

theological katechon he is not by definition waiting for an inevitable moment of giving

way to a superior power that will redeem and remake that chaos; his only fundamental

13 Naomi Tadmor, “The Social and Cultural Translation of the Hebrew Bible into Early Modern England: Reflections, Working Principles, and Examples.” In Early Modern Cultures of Translation, ed. by Karen Newman and Jane Tylus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 182-87. 14 Ibid, 183-4. 15 Sergei Prozorov, “The katechon in the age of biopolitical nihilism,” Continental Philosophy Review 45.4 (2012), 487. For more on Hobbes and the katechon, see Wolfgang Palaver, “Hobbes and the Katechon: The secularization of sacrificial Christianity,” Contagion 2.1 (1995), 57-74.

goal is to perpetuate himself, or rather the institution he represents, not out of pure self-

interest, but out of the conviction that he, the sovereign, is the only means of preventing a

chaos from which there is no redemption but the sovereign. The circular nature of this

reasoning is maintained by – or perhaps itself produces – a re-elevation of the sovereign

beyond the merely political. Sergei Prozorov labels this line of thought the Hobbesian-

Schmittian tradition of the katechon:

The secularized katechon is legitimized as the only force that wards off the

natural anomie and thus the end of the social order as we know it. The political,

understood in terms of the sovereign decision on the friend–enemy distinction that

restrains the extension of anomie to the entire existing order, is thus not merely

grasped by analogy with the theological [. . .] but is rather itself theologized as a

transcendent foundation of political order. 16

In other words, what Schmitt and Hobbes describe is not just the collapse of a theological

concept into a secular self-justification for holding onto power, but a theological concept

that is secularized and then re-theologized into a justification for sovereign power, a

justification which transcends the merely prosaic, day-to-day operations of politics. This transcendence is, at least on one level, a tactic for diverting attention away from the violent means through which katechonic sovereignty perpetuates itself. Some view that

diversion as a misdeed, but the Hobbesian-Schmittian tradition – which can be broadly labeled as the theory of the “positive” katechon -- casts the sovereign restrainer as a necessary, if often unheroic, component of the collective political imagination. The re-

theologization or mystification of the katechon is therefore an inevitable process to be

embraced rather than scrutinized.

16 Prozorov, 488

The early modern theater was deeply enmeshed with just such a system of

mystified sovereign power, one which created and perpetuated the katechonic sovereign

as a force for good order. Sovereignty in this period relied heavily upon theatrical

displays to perpetuate itself, as Stephen Greenblatt has famously argued about the nature

of Elizabethan power:

A poetics of Elizabethan power . . . is inseparably bound of with the figure of

Queen Elizabeth, a ruler without a standing army, without a highly developed

bureaucracy, without an extensive police force, a ruler whose power is constituted

in theatrical celebrations of royal glory and theatrical violence visited upon the

enemies of that glory . . . Elizabethan power, by contrast, depends upon its

privileged visibility. As in a theater, the audience must be powerfully engaged by

this visible presence, while at the same time held at a certain respectful distance

from it.17

In the context of the late sixteenth century, effectively presenting power is, in many senses, synonymous with being powerful – a notion that held true in both theatrical

performance and actual politics. And so I argue that the all-important transcendence of katechonic sovereignty comes, at least in the context of early modern theater and in

Richard II especially, from how the operations of power – and particularly the exercise of violence – are mystified by presentation and ceremony.

In applying this theoretical lens to Richard II, there are two important factors to consider. The first is that, in this case, “mystification” refers not to a cover for the “real” power struggle, nor do presentation and ceremony constitute a misdirection or sideshow from the backroom dealings that make up the true political game. The public spectacle is

17 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 57.

the power struggle, and he who wins it is by definition more worthy to hold power. Nor

is the audience (within and without the play) simply hoodwinked – if the ability to

mystify is the real test of power, then that is precisely the test that the audience, on- and

off-stage, is looking for Richard to pass in the first acts of the play.

Second, mapping the re-theologization of the katechon along a precise historical trajectory would be a mistake. It (and, in theory, other elements of political theology) is a system of thought whose elements, even in their proto-forms, must exist together. In other words, it is not that, at some historically definable time, the katechon was thoroughly secularized, and then at a later historically definable time was re-elevated due to some lack or dysfunction in the secularized version; rather, the re-elevation occurs simultaneously with the secularization, as ideas which depend upon one another, though perhaps not first manifesting in the highly sophisticated form that Prozorov articulates. I wish to posit that Richard II, and the indeed the second Henriad at large, participants in and interrogators of this process of manifestation.

The first two acts of Richard II can be understood as a test of Richard’s ability to perform the role of katechonic sovereign. Although the immediate spark of the later rebellion is Richard’s attempt to banish and disinherit his cousin Bolingbroke for financial and political gain, this only occurs in reaction to the first-act dispute between

Bolingbroke and Mowbray. The play actually opens with Bolingbroke bringing various

charges against his rival Mowbray, with Bolingbroke’s major concern being Mowbray’s

possible complicity in the murder of Bolingbroke’s and King Richard’s uncle, the Duke

of Gloucester. Gloucester’s unsolved murder, which occurred before the start of the play,

is in fact believed by many characters to have been committed by Mowbray, the then-

governor of Calais, on Richard’s orders. The conflict over Gloucester’s murder, rather

than Bolingbroke’s later banishment, is thus the actual inciting incident of the play; and

the first act is in fact Richard and Bolingbroke’s first battle over who is more worthy of

the throne.

Though Richard himself never admits fault at any point, both John of Gaunt

(Bolingbroke’s father and Gloucester’s brother) and Gloucester’s widow consider it a

given, during their conversation in 1.2, that Richard arranged Gloucester’s death.

Historical sources contemporary to the late sixteenth century generally treated it as an

open fact that the actual Richard II was indeed responsible for his uncle’s death, because

he saw Gloucester’s influence as a threat to his own power. Holinshed’s Chronicles,

though admitting some disagreement on the details, explicitly describes Richard’s

orchestration of the murder and his reasons for doing so; and Hall’s Chronicle, while it

starts with the Bolingbroke-Mowbray conflict and deliberately downplays Gloucester’s

death, makes no effort to rebut accusations of Richard’s involvement.18 It reasonable to assume that a certain percentage of the play’s audience already knew of Richard’s culpability from the moment they walked into the theater. Bolingbroke’s attack on

Mowbray is therefore quickly recognizable as tactic for bringing this matter in front of the king making a direct accusation – it is, in actuality, Bolingbroke’s first attack on

Richard.

18 For Holinshed, see Volume 6 (retrieved from The Holinshed Project, accessed 29 Nov. 2016, www.cems.ox.ac.uk/holinshed/); Hall, Edward. Hall’s Chronicle. New York: AMS Press, 1965.

Even if the audience was aware of Richard’s involvement, however, Mowbray’s

guilt was far from a settled matter of historical record. For instance, the manuscript play

Thomas of Woodstock, also dated roughly to the 1590s, uses Richard’s assassination of

Gloucester as its main plot but anachronistically replaces Mowbray with Lapoole as the

collaborating governor of Calais.19 Shakespeare’s Mowbray denies guilt, but gives an

answer which is equivocal enough to suggest a larger conspiracy: “For Gloucester's

death, / I slew him not, but to my own disgrace / Neglected my sworn duty in that case"

(1.1.132-4).20 Assuming that Mowbray is not simply lying, this statement admits at least three possible interpretations. The first and most obvious is a simple defense:

Mowbray didn’t kill Gloucester, though he did fail in a “duty” to defend him from his

(unnamed) murderers. The second is a tacit confession of collusion: Mowbray didn’t kill

Gloucester, and in failing to kill him he neglected a sworn duty – perhaps a duty to obey his king’s orders. The third is an odd dodge: Mowbray didn’t kill Gloucester, but during

“that case” he failed a duty in some way not directly related to killing or not killing

Gloucester. This third meaning may suggest that Mowbray somehow failed to cover up

Gloucester’s death, or to prevent public suspicion from falling on himself and thus the king – perhaps due to the hesitance and resulting delay in carrying out the murder which

Holinshed attributes to him.21 In any case, all three readings leave open the possibility

19 Thomas of Woodstock, ed. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge (New York: Manchester University Press, 2002). Corbin and Sedge note that this may be due to the author’s desire to conflate and compress various events from the 1380s (when Lapoole was governor) to the late 1390s (Mowbray’s tenure, when Gloucester died). The choice may indicate that the extent of Mowbray’s involvement in the murder was not a matter of common knowledge or concern. 20 All Richard II quotes taken from the Oxford World’s Classics edition, ed. Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. 21 Holinshed, Volume 6. The theory that Mowbray is concerned with the failed cover-up is bolstered by his focus on reputation in subsequent lines: “My life thou shalt command, but not my shame. / The one my duty owes, but my fair name, / Despite of death, that lives upon my grave, / To dark dishonor’s use thou shall not have” (1.1.166-69).

of Richard’s complicity – quite probably exactly what Bolingbroke was looking to do by

leveling the charge in the first place.

What follows is thus reframed into a contest of managing public perception – with

Bolingbroke trying to undermine Richard, Richard trying to maintain his appearance of

authority, and Mowbray (who is mostly just caught in the middle) trying to betray neither

his duty to the king nor his duty to his own reputation. Pairing this with Richard’s later

open corruption and Bolingbroke’s seemingly-impenetrable motives in overthrowing

Richard, some critics have thus read the play as an exploration of the inherent hypocrisy

of those who seek and hold power – for instance, Hugh Grady insists that “from its very

opening the world depicted in Richard II is already a fully fallen, Machiavellian . . .

world,” full of the “value-free logic of power at work.”22 If one assumes that the object

of the first act simply is to foreground the hypocrisy of power, then it becomes too easy

to read the remainder of the play as either radically subversive in questioning the

monarchy as a whole, or as a more conservative attempt to show the bad end of those

who would pervert the power and dignity of the sovereign’s role.

However, reframing the contest as one where Richard is attempting to assert and

defend his role as a katechonic sovereign cuts through this apparent dichotomy.

Understanding how and why Richard fails in this most important task also sheds a better

light on both his and Bolingbroke’s subsequent actions. Most importantly, an

understanding of katechonic sovereignty shows that the logic of power at work in the

play is hardly “value-free,” even if that logic admits hypocrisy, scheming, and

assassination as viable tactics for holding on to power. The problem faced at the

22 Hugh Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), 67. See also Cohen, 300-301.

beginning of the play is not the presence of hypocrisy or corruption, but an inability for

Richard’s theatrics of power to mystify, incorporate, and elevate their perhaps-inevitable existence into one of the transcendent mysteries of the state, to outshine ugly practicalities with the light of a sovereign restrainer whose existence is and must be made quasi-theological through the voluntary participation of the believer-audience.

The opening act is thus a situation wherein the bulk of Richard's audience (inside and outside the play) knows or at least strongly suspects that he was the one who ordered

Gloucester's death, and that this was done as a means of consolidating Richard's hold on his sovereign power. This act is neither legal nor moral, even for a king, but Richard’s status as a supposedly divinely ordained monarch may still shield him from consequences. Gaunt acknowledges this:

God’s is the quarrel, for God’s substitute,

His deputy anointed in his sight,

Hath caused his death, the which if wrongfully,

Let heaven revenge, for I may never lift

An angry arm against his minister. (1.2.37-41)

There are actually two justifications for not confronting Richard in this passage. The first is hierarchical: Richard is the king, and as such answers only to God. But the second and more intriguing concerns a doubt about whether Richard’s killing of Gloucester was in fact wrong at all – which is an entirely separate question from whether subjects have the right to punish the crimes of their king. Gaunt knows that Richard had Gloucester killed; he knows that Richard killed Gloucester for political reasons. And yet he still says if wrongfully – a doubt that even Gloucester’s wife does not challenge.

If we read the duel in 1.3 not as a contest between Bolingbroke and Mowbray, but

as a sort of referendum on Richard’s fitness for the throne in the wake of Gloucester’s

murder, then we can also see it as an attempt by Richard to settle the doubts in that if: a

defense of the legitimacy of his power via a defense of how he wields the prerogative for

violence that comes with that power. Importantly, this defense does not inhere in an

attempt to prove his status as a king anointed by God (it is not theological) or to prove,

even indirectly, that killing Gloucester was justified in a legal sense.23 Even though,

Richard and those around him make plenty of references to his divine right to rule, these

exist as bald assertions, to be believed or disbelieved – they are not meant as persuasive,

and need no justification.

Richard does, however, make attempts to justify himself on two points. The first

concerns his prerogative to ignore the ties of blood relations. York confronts him in 2.1

about his attempts to disinherit Bolingbroke, arguing, “for how art thou a king / But by

fair sequence and succession?” (2.1.198-99). Richard seems to dodge this pointed

question with a “Think what you will” (2.1.209), but in fact he already answered it in the

first act when responding to Mowbray’s fears of partiality towards Bolingbroke:

Mowbray, impartial are our eyes and ears.

Were he my brother, nay, my kingdom’s heir,

As he is but my father’s brother’s son,

Now by my sceptre’s awe, I make a vow

Such neighbor nearness to our sacred blood

Should nothing privilege him nor partialize

23 Even the hasty trial convened by Bolingbroke in 4.1 is interrupted and goes nowhere. Besides which, the unlawful nature of Gloucester’s assassination was not up for debate in that inquiry – criminality was assumed, and the question at hand was to identify the perpetrator.

The unstooping firmness of my upright soul.

He is our subject, Mowbray, so art thou.

Free speech and fearless I to thee allow. (1.1.115-123)

Among all these disavowals of potential and actual blood relations, the unmentioned but

most clearly heard one is of course “my uncle,” the relative that Richard has actually

assassinated. And, although these lines at first appear to be an assertion of impartial

justice, the actual language makes no reference to justice or fairness – Richard swears

“by my sceptre’s awe,” and cites “the unstooping firmness of my upright soul.”

Mowbray and Bolingbroke are not equalized by the application of blind justice or by

being equal in the eyes of God; they are made the same in status by both being “our

subject.” The total implication, then, is that Richard’s status as king gives him the

prerogative to ignore his own family ties and also that this prerogative emerges from the

need to be categorically above those he rules, who must all be equally “subjects” and

therefore equally beneath him. Again, a sacred origin for this elevation is cited but not

dwelled upon – the emphasis is on our blood, not on sacred blood. As a defense for

Gloucester’s death, these lines argue that since Richard is so categorically above his

subjects, so committed to impartiality, he has the prerogative to eliminate subjects who

are a threat to his position – even if those subjects happen to be a Duke, or his own uncle.

His actions during the ensuing hearing and duel are intended to reinforce this assertion of

superiority and impartiality.24

The second point in Richard’s self-defense, which is mutually constitutive with the first, is based on his katechonic function, more specifically on his obligation to stop

24 This logic of power also appears in Foucault’s readings of pre-nineteenth-century sovereignty- see History of Sexuality, and, to a lesser extent, Discipline and Punish.

civil conflict by any means necessary. This is his cited reason for halting the duel in 1.3, which must be stopped lest it “wake our peace, which in our country’s cradle / Draws the sweet infant breath of gentle sleep” (1.3.132-3). On one level, he means that an escalating series of reprisals between Bolingbroke and Mowbray’s families could cause civil unrest; but this argument also works as a defense for Gloucester. Gloucester’s attempts to undermine Richard’s power could have led to open conflict had he not been stealthily assassinated, and this duel, as a proxy attack against Richard for Gloucester’s murder, must be diverted for the same reasons. The very deferral of even the ritualized violence of a duel is another reassertion of Richard’s katechonic skills – he is the dam that holds back both the macro-level threat of civil war and the micro-level threat of inter-family conflict between the nobility, no matter how technically legal that conflict might be.

We must remember, however, that the true test of Richard is not the logic of his arguments, either stated or implied. The real test is the presentation, the theatricality of the proceedings, which must mystify and re-elevate Richard’s katechonic actions as the unquestionable bulwark against violent chaos -- even if those actions are themselves violent. Although there is a logic at work, and an argument underlying Richard’s actions, success consists in making his conclusions and actions seem inarguable, unassailable, as if sent from above. Neither the play nor the characters have a naïve view of divine-right kingship; even if they may believe it in theory, it is understood that, for the concept to actually function politically it must be made up of carefully orchestrated displays of power. Richard, despite his arrogance, is not naïve either; his actions in the first few acts show that he has a fairly sophisticated grasp of what he needs to accomplish to solidify

his authority. His dialogue is artful double-speak, and he orchestrates the rising tension of the duel such that he can step in at the last possible moment.

Yet, in the end, he still stumbles – handing out a less severe sentence to

Bolingbroke, then clumsily trying to disinherit him and wildly underestimating the level of Bolingbroke’s popular support. Richard’s undoing in this scene is not Bolingbroke, but Mowbray. If we understand the first act as performed for an audience (within and without the play) that is aware of the subtextual conflict over the murder or Gloucester, then it is important for us to consider Mowbray’s position. Based on Mowbray’s own words, it seems almost certain that he was involved in Gloucester’s death somehow – either carrying it out himself, or deliberately looking the other way when it happened.

This was done, of course, at the command of the king – a command that Mowbray is honor-bound to follow. We might then expect that Mowbray’s anguish would emerge from a conflict between his loyalty to the king and his moral obligations not to be complicit in a murder, but this is not so. What we do see is that Mowbray is absolutely crushed by the public smearing of his reputation, which is the occasion of his most impassioned pleas to Richard:

Myself I throw, dread sovereign, at thy foot:

My life thou shalt command, but not my shame.

The one my duty owes, but my fair name,

Despite of death, that lives upon my grave,

To dark dishonor’s use thou shalt not have. (1.1.165-9).

Mowbray’s fixation on reputation – which we might be tempted to read as the mere preoccupation of a guilty hypocrite – makes perfect sense when we relate it back to the

function of the katechon. Richard has the prerogative to kill his uncle – to violate normal moral and legal codes – in order to maintain his own power, because that power is the bulwark against chaos. Thus, those who he enlists to carry out this task, Mowbray among them, are helping to fulfill a katechonic function, and their actions should therefore be justifiable. But this justification is only upheld by a theatrical mystification, a presentation that allows both the doers of misdeeds and the audience to believe in and understand these actions as part of a transcendent, ongoing order that supersedes mere political practicality. As an accomplice to the assassination, Mowbray sees himself as entitled to the benefits of that mystification. In other words, Richard’s job is not only to assert his own katechonic status, but to protect Mowbray as a subsidiary: Richard gets to go on being a powerful and revered king, but in return Mowbray continues to be seen as the unstained scion of a noble house.

It is only here that the genius of Bolingbroke’s tactics becomes apparent. By attacking Mowbray as a proxy for Richard, Bolingbroke is not only forcing Richard to defend himself, but also prompting Mowbray to demand that Richard defend him. And

Richard’s chosen strategy – which is to play off the Bolingbroke/Mowbray conflict as an inter-nobility quarrel and himself as a disinterested observer – cannot do both. Mowbray refuses to return Bolingbroke’s gage, even against a direct royal command, because to do so would leave unanswered Bolingbroke’s challenge to his reputation. And Richard cannot let the duel go forward, not only because of his openly stated reasons (i.e., ongoing conflict between their houses), but also because a victory on either Bolingbroke or Mowbray’s part would not lay to rest the charges of treason they had made. If

Richard’s goal is smooth over the case of Gloucester’s assassination, to provide an

unassailable center of power that all observers can believe in, then he cannot admit an official “narrative” that would open the door for further investigation or falsification. He must end the duel before it begins and banish both participants, refocusing the performance away from questions of murder and treason and back on to the figure of an even-handed king quashing the recklessness of hotheaded aristocrats.

Unfortunately, this ending means that Mowbray is given an even worse fate than the one that he pleaded with Richard to avoid – not only public shame, but permanent exile. As for why Mowbray is given a harsher sentence than Bolingbroke – which even

Richard admits he levies “with some unwillingness” (1.3.149) – no clear answer is given.

Perhaps it is a concession to Gaunt’s powerful influence, or perhaps Richard, already backed into a corner, is more frantically trying to disclaim his culpability in Gloucester’s murder by passing a harsher sentence on Mowbray. Even this could be theoretically being justified in a katechonic sense, an act that Richard could present as his own willingness to sacrifice an ally for the sake of the greater good. But that is not what the audience sees, because Mowbray again refuses to go quietly:

A heavy sentence, my most sovereign liege,

And all unlooked for form your highness’ mouth.

A dearer merit, not so deep a maim

As to be cast forth in the common air,

Have I deserved at your highness’ hands. (1.3.155-8)

The key question here is not whether Richard betrays Mowbray, or whether that betrayal was justified – just as the key question was not whether Richard had Gloucester assassinated, or whether that act was justifiable. The key is in the presentation, in

whether Richard has the ability to dramatize these events in such a way that he can maintain the transcendent superiority of his kinghood, his katechonic sovereignty.

Mowbray is the one who punctures that presentation, giving the audience a figure of sympathetic tragedy to fixate on – a man who obeyed his king and received only betrayal in return. This narrative of tragedy cannot coexist with, and thus subverts, Richard’s own attempts at a narrative of impartial royalty. The audience on some level chooses to believe in the katechon, yes, but that choice has to be easy, comforting, so natural that it appears as barely a choice at all. This is the choice that Richard fails to solicit. Whether

Bolingbroke planned this all along is largely immaterial, though he is more than willing to take advantage of this turn of events in his later uprising.

III

To understand the nature of that uprising, we must once again stop and consider the dubious position of the katechon. The view of katechonic sovereignty I have been working with so far – and the one that Richard struggles to uphold in the first act – is based on the notion of the positive katechon championed by Hobbes and Schmitt. But

Paul’s original letter admits for both a positive and a negative interpretation: the katechon is he who maintains order, but also he who holds back a chaos which will ultimately remake the world for the better. In a theological sense, the katechon is the opposite of the eschaton, and the eschaton, despite heralding the end of time, order, and politics as we know them, ushers in salvation. Thus it is entirely possible to look upon the katechon, despite its beneficial effects, as a malevolent entity.

One might expect this “negative” katechon to disappear during the process of

secularization, since secularization means the rejection of literal end-of-the-world eschatology. But Agamben has offered a just such a secular vision of the negative katechon. He argues that Schmitt’s state of exception (which is one of the cornerstones of

Schmitt’s view of sovereignty, and thus of his view of the katechon), entails two

“fundamental features” of the law: first, since according to Schmitt the law enforces itself through its own suspension, there can be no distinguishing between “inside” and

“outside” the law; and second, because of this, “it becomes impossible to distinguish between observance and transgression of the law.”25 The law in the state of exception is

unformulable, potentially allowing or disallowing any action: it is therefore in practice inseparable from lawlessness. And if the potential for a state of exception is what undergirds the law, then that means lawlessness undergirds the law. All of which leads

Agamben to one inevitable conclusion:

It is therefore possible to conceive of katechon and anomos not as two separate

figures (unlike John, Paul never mentions an antichristos), but as one single

power before and after the final unveiling. Profane power – albeit of the Roman

Empire or any other power – is the semblance that covers up the substantial

lawlessness [anomia] of messianic time. In solving the “mystery,” semblance is

cast out, and power assumes the figure of the anomos, of that which is the

absolute outlaw.26

As Prozorov explicates:

25 Agamben, 105. 26 Ibid, 111.

Agamben’s reading suggests that the katechon is the Antichrist that perpetuates its

reign by concealing the fact of its long having arrived and pretending, as a ‘lesser

evil,’ to ward off its own advent . . . While for the Hobbesian-Schmittian

orientation the restraining function of the katechon stabilizes the existing terrain

of the political as ‘all there is’ and its disappearance is only thinkable as the self-

destruction of humanity, Agamben’s messianic approach insists on the removal of

the katechon as the condition of the possibility of life beyond the familiar

coordinates of the political, defined by the logic of sovereignty.27

Although Agamben’s interpretation of Paul serves the purposes of twenty-first century radical critique of the modern state, his reinvestigation of the original text once again uncovers an important but previously-unarticulated subtext, one that (I would argue) has been in operation behind the scenes for a long time. Namely, that the two versions of the katechon, positive and negative, are a matter of perspective.

In Agamben’s language, this is a matter of “unveiling” – the katechon appears as

a force for good, until a final revelation allows us to see that it is, and has always been,

part of the negative forces it pretended to hold back. But if we turn back to the theory of

the positive katechon, we can see that this “revelation” is what the Hobbesian-Schmittian school has been trying to guard against the whole time. The reason that the katechonic sovereign must be re-theologized, mystified and elevated, is that a prosaic katechon – a katechon whose actions are comprehended in terms of utilitarian good and political expediency – invites the possibility, perhaps the inevitability, of subjects questioning

whether the katechon truly is the best and only means of maintaining order. A katechon

who operates in concrete and logical terms may be questioned in concrete and logical

27 Prozorov, 488-9

terms – and so subjects may ask, why must this man be king, when some other could do a

better job? Why must there be a king, when we might find out some better system?

Even if the supporters of the katechonic sovereign argue that theirs is the best option, an

argument of that type can be countered, debated, disbelieved – it does not elicit the

affective sense of unity that a re-theologized katechon creates, and so in a very real sense

that argument has been lost the moment it even takes place.28

To the proponents of the positive katechon, however, this revelation heralds not a

new beginning or a redemption of the social order, but a potentially unending descent

into chaos. In Richard II, none of the main characters truly holds a position that

advocates a negative view of the katechon – they all appear to assume a binary choice

between monarchy and anarchy.29 Instead, the possibility that the populace will cease to

believe in the monarchy is a weapon that Bolingbroke wields against Richard. The

revelation of the negative katechon, requires that subjects understand that lawlessness is

the hidden foundation of the law – that the katechon wields violence and chaos to his own

advantage on the false pretext of preventing it. This lawlessness manifests itself in the

state of exception, the supposed suspension of the law which is enacted to preserve the

law. A person caught in the state of exception will find it impossible to distinguish

between obeying the law and violating it, will be unable to predict whether a given act

will be called treason or loyalty, and will have no way to appeal their fate beyond the

singular whims of the sovereign. This is, essentially, the state the Mowbray is caught in

during the first act – there is no “right” action that he can take, no way to defend against

28 One might easily argue, therefore, that a growing understanding of sovereignty in such prosaic terms was the necessary pretext for the English Civil War – a conclusion that could further complicate Kantorowicz’ overreliance on the king’s two bodies as an explanatory theory for the execution of Charles I. 29 Shakespeare’s unflattering portrayal of the Jack Cade Rebellion in 2 Henry VI is arguably a parody of the negative view of the katechon.

his banishment, no way to articulate precisely what he did wrong or what he could have done differently. Rather than being protected as an agent of the sovereign exception, he becomes its victim.

Bolingbroke – even if he did not prearrange this outcome --- takes advantage of it, starting almost immediately, by associating his fate with Mowbray’s and playing to the sympathies of the populace. As Richard narrates sneeringly in 1.4:

How he did seem to dive into their hearts

With humble and familiar courtesy.

What reverence he did throw away on slaves,

Wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of smiles

And patient underbearing of his fortune,

As ‘twere to banish their affects with him. (1.4.25-30)

In fact, the affection of the people really is banished with Bolingbroke – Richard loses their love after these events, and when that love reappears it does so on the side of

Bolingbroke’s coup. Bolingbroke, though often inscrutable, seems to be doing the same thing to the common people that Mowbray has just done for the audience: namely, presenting them with the figure of a man caught in the exceptional state of being targeted by the sovereign, a man whose plight they sympathize with much more than they sympathize with the distant figure of the restrainer-king. Richard therefore begins to appear in the light of a negative katechon – a sovereign who pretends to be the lesser evil in order to cover his own misdeeds, a ruler who falsely claims to hold back the forces of anomy when those forces are already at work against the unfavored and the unlucky.

And yet, despite Agamben’s framework, this revelation does not upend the entire system.

Instead, Bolingbroke focuses the critique of the monarch on a sympathetic figure – or,

more precisely, on the convincing performance of a sympathetic figure – so that the

critique is not based on reason, logic, or even legality. Framing the conflict as one of

affective bonding rather than utility or political expediency means that the specter of the

negative katechon does not automatically usher in either chaos or redemption; instead, it

is used to create a temporary disruption in the structure of sovereign power that opens up

the possibility of redirection.

In other words, once Bolingbroke breaks the sense of affective unity that

previously centered on Richard, he deftly steps in to become the new center. The

“revelation” of the negative katechon – which in its full form would spell the end of the present sovereign system—consequently becomes the narrative, not of a corrupt system, but of a corrupted man, with an uncorrupt man conveniently at the ready to replace him.

This is how Bolingbroke can violate the apparent bedrock rules underlying the monarchy, such as primogeniture and divine right, without actually destroying the monarchy itself.

Because the actual bedrock of sovereignty, at least in this case, lies not the codified customs of kingship but in the perpetuity of a katechonic ruler maintained through the belief of the populace. And again, we must remember that this belief is not necessarily based on deception, because it is not the result of a deductive thought process. Subjects do not start out by evaluating the personal qualities of kings, or the current condition of civil society, and then arrive at the logical conclusion that a katechonic sovereign is needed and that such-and-such a man would be the best one for the job. Rather, they assume the need for the katechon, and adhere to the one who best plays that role, because

the alternative to the katechon is eschaton – the end of civil life, understood in this

context as the advent of quasi-satanic chaos.

Bolingbroke’s actions during and after the coup become much more

comprehensible once we understand that he is playing the role of the “new” and “better”

katechon. It is tempting to view his strongman tactics – which are, at best, morally

dubious – as a reconfirmation of or reversion into the supposed hypocrisies of power that

dominated Richard’s court in the first act. The summary executions of Bushy and Greene

are a perhaps the crowning example – much like Gloucester’s murder, they are

extrajudicial killings used as a means of securing or re-securing power. In this case,

Bolingbroke is getting rid of the advisors who encouraged Richard’s plotting against him.

But instead of carrying out these killings in secret, Bolingbroke makes a spectacle out of the proceedings: first he publically labels them “the caterpillars of the commonwealth, /

Which I have sworn to weed and pluck away” (2.3.165-6), and then, when they are captured, convenes not so much a trial as an airing of grievances, where their deaths are a foregone conclusion and this ceremony a means “to wash your blood / From off my hands, here in the view of men” (3.1.7-8). Bushy and Green (and by extension the absent

Bagot) are cast not as personal enemies of Bolingbroke, but as threats to both the prosperity of the nation (caterpillars) and, most importantly, the continuity of the monarchy. They have “made a divorce betwixt his queen and [Richard], / broke the possession of a royal bed” (3.1.12-3), and turned Richard against Bolingbroke himself,

who is “a prince by fortune of my birth, / Near to the king in blood and near in love / Till

you did make him misinterpret me” (3.1.16-18). The public killing of Bushy and Greene is used as a means of furthering Bolingbroke’s position that it is not he who is a threat to the monarchy – despite actively being in the middle of a coup – but rather these perverted

councilors. Such a position makes sense when the king is viewed not primarily as an

individual or even as the product of dynasty but as the performer of the katechonic

function, a function which Richard cannot perform with Bushy and Greene causing civil

and household strife. But on another level, we may think of this spectacle as an audition:

by killing Bushy and Greene so decisively, and especially by doing so as part of a

spectacle which frames their deaths as an act in defense of the civil order, Bolingbroke is

proving his own fitness for the position of katechonic sovereign.

The test of that audition is of course its reception by the audience, both inside the

play and out. Inside, Bolingbroke has already gained the support of a significant chunk

of the nobility – so much so that they are happy to follow him into a campaign against

Glendower immediately following the executions. But the reception of the common

people is much more important, and we get our first taste of it in 3.4, when two gardeners

use their work as a metaphor for talking about the political situation, growing ever more

explicit until they are commenting openly on the failures of King Richard:

O what pity is it

That he had not so trimmed and dressed his land

As we this garden! We at time of year

Do wound the bark, the skin of our fruit trees,

Lest being over-proud in sap and blood

With too much riches it confound itself.

Had he done so to great and growing men

They might have lived to bear and he to taste

Their fruits of duty. Superfluous branches

We lop away that bearing boughs may live.

Had he done so, himself had borne the crown

Which waste of idle hours hath quite thrown down. (3.4.55-66)

The way that these gardeners present the role of the king is instructive, because their

disdain for Richard and support for Bolingbroke can seem paradoxical without the notion

of the katechon as a guide. Richard is derided for not suppressing the influence of “great

and growing men,” lines which are often read as referring to Bushy and Green (since this

passage comes immediately after a discussion of their deaths). But these lines are also

immediately preceded by the comment that “Bolingbroke / Hath seized the wasteful

king” (3.4.54-5), introducing a deliberate ambiguity and suggesting that the gardeners believe that a successful King Richard would have curbed both parties – Bushy and

Green the parasites and Bolingbroke the ambitious usurper. Yet they deride Bushy and

Green (calling them “weeds . . . / That seemed in eating [Richard] to hold him up”

(3.4.49-50), echoing Bolingbroke’s “caterpillar” language from the previous scene) while cheering Bolingbroke, who is himself – by the definition that they themselves have offered – one of those very same fruit trees “over-proud in sap and blood,” a “too fast-

growing spray” whose head should have been struck off for being “too lofty” (3.4.29-31).

If the overgrown fruit tree (Bolingbroke) and the weeds and caterpillars (Bushy and

Green) are equally threatening to the good order of the garden, why cheer when the one

defeats the other? The answer, of course, is that in doing so Bolingbroke has convinced

these men of his fitness of the role of gardener – his actions as an over-proud rebel matter

much less than his ability to restore order to the commonwealth-garden, to act as the katechonic sovereign Richard should have been. More importantly, we see here that the idea of the katechon is thoroughly embedded and naturalized among the common people of the play – because they accept this role as natural and necessary, and because they see it as a role, a set of tasks to be fulfilled rather than a simple state of being, Bolingbroke’s performances have convinced them easily.

This leaves us, finally, with the question of how the audience of the play itself is supposed to perceive these events. The theatricality of power – indeed, the anchoring of power in theatricality – was a central feature of the early modern stage, but theater is well known to be a double edged sword, and so it has been a mainstay of Shakespearean criticism to note the ways in which putting power on a literal stage has the potential to expose its bare workings. The theater has the ability to, in the language that I have been using here, undercut its own re-theologization of various political concepts by giving the audience the opportunity to see the prosaic means and motives behind them. But in

Richard II, and in the second Henriad as a whole, there is a lack of such straightforward cynicism, and an emphasis on feeling rather than logical interrogation. Belief in the katechon can be presented as a sort of choice, but the nature of the katechon requires that, in order for that belief to work, the choice must be obscured or forgotten immediately, and the performance of power accepted on its own terms as natural and inevitable. This is, more or less, what the audience inside the play is experiencing, but the audience outside the play is provided with a step of removal that makes such a natural and

inevitable acceptance difficult if not impossible to feel. They are watching Bolingbroke

go through his ‘audition’ and seeing the commoners charmed by it, but they are also

given a close-up view of the complicated aristocratic meddling that still happens behind

the scenes, the ways in which Bolingbroke’s seizure of power leaves him open to other

ambition noblemen employing the same tactics (a thread that will be further emphasized

in the two Henry IV plays), and, perhaps most significantly, Richard’s accelerating

breakdown as he is overthrown, imprisoned, and killed. Mowbray was a figure of

sympathy in the first act, and so was Bolingbroke, to a lesser degree, in the second – in

these cases, the affective bonding solicited from the audiences within and without the

play matched. But once Richard is overthrown, these two points of view split, and the

play-audience’s window in to the increasingly private mourning of a former king is what

makes the narrative tragic rather than triumphalist.

These mourning speeches of Richard’s are often the grounding for various critical

interpretations – especially those of Kantorowicz and Luis-Martínez, which opened this

essay – and rightly so. But I am less concerned with the internal workings of Richard and

his collapsing sovereignty than I am preoccupied with how the audience is being signaled

to feel about these developments. Anselm Haverkamp has offered one possible answer:

while contrasting Kantorowicz’ emphasis on the theo-political construct of the medieval

and early modern king with 13th-century jurist Henry de Bracton’s more prosaic and concrete legal writings, he speculates:

Or is it . . . [that] Shakespeare’s point is that Bracton’s juridical pragmatism, in

order to reinforce the secular enactment of the law, provoked with the deposition

of Richard an afterimage of what this king could not be, but, as king, could very

well elucidate and expose through his deposition, the law’s supra-legal

foundation? In short, on stage, and only on the stage, the king is “above the law,”

and this shows . . . in the paradoxical performance of self-deposition.30

Haverkamp’s ultimate point is that Richard’s deposition and post-deposition speeches

help expose the king’s status as simultaneously above and below the law (in the

Agamben/Schmitt sense). But if, as I have argued here, the notion of katechonic

sovereignty is of greater importance in understanding how kingship operates in Richard

II, and if the play itself is thoroughly entrenched on the side of the positive katechon

(with the negative a terrifying but fleeting specter), then what Richard’s introspective mourning does is give the audience an afterimage, or rather a dream and a hunger for the katechon as it should be. The audience has seen, in other words, one katechonic sovereign fail to perform his role adequately and descend into creaturely despair; and another take over that role and, for all his merits, still become embroiled in the bloody and pragmatic side of politics, and act as a strongman rather than the transcendent monarch that Richard tried and failed to be. Caught between these two extremes, the emotional state of the audience is not anger or cynicism but rather yearning, a disposition personified in the groom who sneaks in to see Richard right before his death. Asked why he contrived this visit, the groom replies:

I was a poor groom of thy stable, King,

When thou wert king, who travelling towards York

With much ado at length have gotten leave

To look upon my sometimes royal master’s face.

O how it erned my heart when I beheld

30 Anselm Haverkamp, Shakespearean Genealogies of Power (New York: Routledge, 2011), 51.

In London streets that coronation day

When Bolingbroke rode on roan Barbary,

That horse that thou so often hast bestrid,

That horse that I so carefully have dressed. (5.5.72-80)

Key to this passage is the complicated wordplay on the word “erned,” a variant spelling of an archaic form of “yearn.” Used transitively, it means to cause a strong desire or longing for something.31 In other words, the groom is, on one level, explaining that

seeing Bolingbroke’s coronation gave him a strong desire to see Richard again. But the

phrasing is ambiguous enough also admit the reading that seeing Bolingbroke’s

coronation instilled in the groom a strong affinity for Bolingbroke, one which he is now

testing out by sneaking in to see his old monarch. Complicating this picture is the fact

that, used intransitively, to “erne” means to be affected with strong grief. So the groom

could actually be using “erned” intransitively with “my heart” as the subject (“o how it

erned, my heart, when I beheld”), meaning that his heart was stricken with a strong but

ambiguous grief at Bolingbroke’s coronation. Finally, the early modern “erne/yearn”

appears to have been a homophone with “earn,” which had much the same meaning then

as it does today.32 This allows for a reading of “it earned my heart,” in the sense of “it

won my heart,” in addition to all the others – implying that all this grief and longing has

also somehow prompted a renewed loyalty, though to whom is not clear. The following

short conversation between Richard and the groom does little to clarify the ambiguity, as

31 For the full definition, see "† earn, v.2". OED Online. December 2016. Oxford University Press (accessed January 31, 2017). 32 Various editions of Richard II have written the word as “erned,” “earned,” or “yearned,” due to discrepancies between the quarto and folio versions. The idea of earn/yearn as homophones, at least in some dialects, is bolstered by the fact that the OED records the spelling “earne” being used for both meanings.

Richard waffles between rage and pity at the horse Barbary for proudly carrying

Bolingbroke on his back. The equivalency of Barbary with the common people is obvious, but the groom’s personal motives are never precisely spelled out.

What we see in this scene is the expression of a feeling – at least on the part of the groom – difficult to name, one which cannot be reduced simply to mourning, or to anger, or to confusion. This is the feeling of a subject “born to bear” (5.5.92) who, like the horse, truly believes in the need for a master, indeed desperately longs for one and takes pride in having one, and yet finds the possibilities on offer unfulfilling despite their technical qualifications for the role. Barbary and the gardeners have accepted

Bolingbroke with enthusiasm, but the groom – who is in many ways an audience stand- in, with his desire to spectate – has not, and cannot. The sight of Bolingbroke excites/grieves him, but the sight of Richard seems to provide him no relief or real ability to articulate what he is feeling – “What my tongue dares not, that my heart shall say”

(5.5.97). The important issue here is that the groom’s ambiguous longing does not seem to show any doubt in the underlying idea of the monarch; it is not a revolutionary longing. Rather it is the longing for the ideal monarch – the truly transcendent katechon

– running up against the failure of the current monarch(s) to truly perform that ideal, or perhaps, more drastically, the fear that no current monarch can actually fill that role.

This longing sets up the problem that will echo through the following three plays of the second Henriad, one that will culminate in Henry V’s efforts to get around the dilemma of the inevitable inadequacy of the current monarch by creating a vision of sovereignty that transcends temporality.

Chapter Two:

Future-Oriented Sovereignty in Henry V

If Richard II ends with longing, then Henry V might be expected to provide the

answer to that longing. Beyond its placement as the climax to the second tetralogy,

Henry V is obsessed with resolving both the moral and emotional consequences of the

events which have lead young King Henry to the throne. The most famous example is

probably Henry’s pre-Agincourt prayer that God “think not upon the fault / My father

made in compassing the crown” (4.1.281-2),1 but the connections to Richard II pervade

the play, most noticeably as Pistol rouses the tavern crew in the second act:

No, for my manly heart doth erne. Bardolph,

Be blithe; Nim, rouse thy vaunting veins; boy, bristle

Thy courage up. For Falstaff he is dead,

And we must earn therefore. (2.3.3-6)

These lines echo the erne/earn/yearn wordplay by the groom in the final act of Richard

II,2 just before the deposed king is murdered. Here, it is re-employed in a similar but more significant context. The groom’s line, “O how it erned, my heart,” merges the concepts of being aggrieved and being won over, simultaneously expressing a longing backwards toward the old king and forward toward the new king as one and the same emotion. In Henry V, the wordplay revolves around a causal link between Falstaff’s

1 All Henry V quotes taken from the Oxford World’s Classics edition, ed. Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008). 2 The folio text spells both words in Henry V as “erne,” though some modern editions correct the second usage to “earn.”. Richard II uses “erned” in the quarto and “yern’d” in the folio, as earn/erne/yearn had not yet fully diverged in pronunciation or meaning.

death, which was set in motion by the newly crowned Henry’s rejection, and the tavern

crew’s newfound need to earn a living by joining the King’s war in France. In Pistol’s

mouth, however, the emotional significance of both events merges: Falstaff is dead by

the king’s action, so they must grieve; Falstaff is dead by the king’s action, so they must

rouse themselves for the king’s war.3 It is a similar combination of distress and confused

loyalty, here deployed not in the murky transition from one king to another, but in a new

king’s attempts to build his own legacy on the bodies of friends and enemies alike.

It is the nature of that legacy which is a perennial sticking point for critics of

Henry V, who have long been torn over to what extent the play endorses or criticizes

Henry’s invasion of France and its jingoistic overtones. Some scholarship in the mid- twentieth century, following the tradition popularized by E.M.W. Tillyard,4 saw both of

Shakespeare’s tetralogies as following an arc that chronicles a violation against the

divinely ordained monarchy with the deposition of Richard II, followed by an inevitable

series of catastrophes, ending with the inception of the Tudor dynasty and the restoration

of right order. Such a reading positions Henry V as tragic but heroic, and the play as “a

splendid interlude, when the ancestral curse was for the moment suspended,” even if that

curse will come back to doom Henry V’s bloodline and will not be laid to rest until the

rightful ascension of Henry Tudor. In this reading, Shakespeare’s history plays in general

are taken as fundamentally ideologically aligned with Tudor myth-making and propaganda, and with the hegemonic rule of Elizabeth as a proto-absolutist monarch;

Henry V in particular is thus seen as undeniably pro-war and pro-(proto-)nationalist. But,

3 Gary Taylor, editor of the Oxford World Classics edition, deliberately changed the second “erne” to “earn” lest readers be “in danger of continuing to assume that Pistol means ‘No, I do not grieve; cheer up, for we must grieve’” (140). I contend that this emotional confusion is, in fact, part of the point. 4 E.M.W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays. New York: Macmillan, 1946.

as opposing critics have argued, the text itself has so many moments of ambiguity, such a

preoccupation with highlighting the brutality of Henry’s invasion, and shows such an intense disconnect between the playful Hal of the Henry IV plays and this newly warlike

Henry, that it is very difficult to accept a simplistic pro-war reading. Barely five years

after Tillyard, Harold Goddard argued that they play was in fact condemning Henry and

his war by contrasting the elevating language of the Chorus with the gritty reality of

warfare, with the crowning irony being that Henry had “turned his back on the wildness

of his youth only to confirm it on a grand scale in the anarchy of war.”5 Another problem with the Tillyard-style, Tudor propagandist reading is that even though the historical events covered in Shakespeare’s history plays begin with Richard II’s deposition and end with Henry VII’s ascension, the plays’ production order begins with Henry VI Part 1 and ends with Henry V. This ordering gives the plays a cyclical rather than teleological trajectory, ending almost where they began: Henry VI Part 1 starts with the funeral of

King Henry V and the accession of his infant son to the throne; and Henry V ends very close to the same historical moment, culminating in the marriage which will produce that same infant son, destined to become an infant king barely two years later. As Phyllis

Rackin has argued, when considered in production order, the plays are not a “teleological, providential narrative of Tudor propaganda, [but] a self-referential cycle that ends by interrogating the entire project of historical mythmaking.”6

An interrogation to what end? As we can see, critics over the past hundred years

have come down firmly on diametrically opposed interpretations of both Henry and his

5 Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 260. 6 Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca NY: Cornell UP, 1990), 60- 61.

war. And this particular point of interpretation is vital, because Henry and his French

invasion are positioned as the climax of Shakespeare’s history plays, and thus the final

word on what those plays have to say about their fundamental topic: sovereign power in

its relationship to both history and the theatrical performance of history. Fittingly for a

matter of such importance, this final word is both complex and ambiguous, and so the

critical trend since the 1980s has been to explore this very complexity, to understand how

and why it juxtaposes jingoism with atrocity, hierarchy with camaraderie, and failure

with triumph. Norman Rabkin famously compared the play to an optical illusion that

depicts two different images depending on the viewer’s focus, arguing that its “ultimate

power is precisely the fact that it points in two opposite directions, virtually daring us to

choose one of the two opposed interpretations it requires of us.”7

In this essay, however, I would like to explore not how supposed opposites can

coexist in the same text, but how the text manages to harmonize themes which would

normally be mutually exclusive. This harmony, as I will argue, results from the play’s

self-conscious interrogation of both the entire project of performing history as narrative

and the more pressing question of what that presentation means for sovereign power,

given that sovereign power is itself a kind of performance. Such self-consciousness

about these issues is in part a product of the specific historical context in which the play

was written, a time when older providentialist notions of history were being supplanted

by new humanist ones, and when Queen Elizabeth’s proto-absolutist rule was at its

apparent apogee, at the height of its power but staring down a potentially messy end if the

queen died heirless. I argue that Henry V confronts these issues as one. In its circularity,

7 Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 34.

self-referentiality, and ambiguity, the play reaches for a new sense of temporality acknowledges by attempts to transcend the chaotic potential of linear history. As Linda

Charnes has said, “temporality has a politics; time does not”8; that is, when we take a

natural force like the passage of time and conceptualize it around the human notions of community and continuity, we automatically imbue it with political significance. And, as

I will argue, the political significance of Henry V’s style of temporality takes the form of

a kind of secularized eschatology revolving around kingly succession, a recurrent hope

that the ideal monarch is always about to arrive. This attitude toward the sovereign was

highly relevant in a time when an aging Elizabeth was soon to die without an heir, and

when history as a literary/theatrical enterprise was rapidly diverging from history as

factually-based antiquarianism. This combining of hope and fear is an answer to, or

rather a transformation of, the longing -- the “erning” -- set up in Richard II. Henry V, and Henry V, do not so much as fulfill that longing are re-orient it, uniting past and present into a perpetual anticipation toward an imagined future.

Given that the primary concern of Henry V is the relationship between history and sovereign power, and given that critics continue to be split on the degree to which the play aligns with Tudor propaganda, one of the most fundamental questions which must be asked about this text is to what degree it endorses or subverts the authoritarianism it depicts. One of the more ambitious attempts to answer this question is Stephen

Greenblatt’s famous essay “Invisible Bullets,” which advocates not only a particular

8 Linda Charnes, “Anticipating Nostalgia: Finding Temporal Logic in a Textual Anomaly,” Textual Cultures 4.1 (2009), 73.

interpretation of the plays themselves, but also a broader thesis about the interplay of authority and subversion in late Elizabethan politics. I would like to begin by complicating several assumptions in Greenblatt’s argument, and, in doing so, paint a more nuanced picture of both the state of sovereign authority in Henry V’s original context, and how theatrical performance interacted with that authority.

Greenblatt begins by positing “the self-validating, totalizing character of

Renaissance political theology -- its ability to account for almost every occurrence, even(or above all) apparently perverse or contrary occurrences.”9 From there, he argues that the last three plays of the tetralogy -- Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, and Henry V

-- show the development of the young Prince Hal into the ideal hero-king Henry, and, importantly, that “such an ideal image involves as its positive condition the constant production of its own radical subversion and the powerful containment of that subversion.”10 The two Henry IV plays deliberately tantalize the audience with Hal’s deviations from the social hierarchy, with potential avenues of subversion, only to use that emotional hook to draw the audience back in the end to a more firmly re-established hegemonic power structure. Henry V is thus the culmination of this project, turning these tactics finally to nationalistic and warlike ends:

The subversive doubts the play continually awakens serve paradoxically to

intensify the power of the king and his war, even while they cast shadows upon

this power . . . For the play’s enhancement of royal power is not only a matter of

deferral of doubt: the very doubts that Shakespeare raises serve not to rob the king

9 Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance authority and its subversion, Henry IV and Henry V,” in Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism 2nd edition, edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994), 28. 10 Ibid, 30.

of his charisma but to heighten it, precisely as they heighten the theatrical interest

of the play.11

Greenblatt’s fundamental argument is that by presenting the audience with simultaneous

opposing visions of idealized kingship and brutal power-mongering -- in other words, by

grabbing their attention with Rabkin’s optical illusion -- the play prompts them to

become deeply engaged with the theatrics of it all, and then uses those same theatrics to

make them identify with, and thus reaffirm their loyalty to, the totalizing power wielded

by Henry. This is because “the ideal king must be in large part the invention of the

audience, the product of a will to conquer which is revealed to be identical to a need to

submit.”12 In other words, Greenblatt’s reading of the play is predicated on a similar

emotional state to the one I have identified in the “erne” wordplay that Henry V echoes from Richard II, that sense of simultaneous loyalty and betrayal.

However, the argument which Greenblatt builds around this insight has two serious flaws. The first is that he vastly overstates the totalizing character of royal power in the late sixteenth century, ascribing to it the potential ability to subsume almost any theatrical production into its propagandistic network. Not only that, but he conceptualizes royal power as a monolith, able to manifest itself as a unified force unhampered by internal division. Neither is accurate to the actual politics of Elizabeth’s final decade, which were riven by lingering discomfort with female rule, haunted by awareness of an incipient succession crisis, and bogged down in perpetual Irish wars.

Even a play seeking to paper over these issues with a rousing nationalist celebration would have account for them a bit more cannily than Greenblatt allows. Furthermore, my

11 Ibid, 43. 12 Ibid, 43.

own reading of Richard II in the previous chapter argues that the first play in the

tetralogy encourages a split between the in-play “audience” of commoners (who seem to

accept Bolingbroke’s performance) and the theatrical audience, who are made very much

aware of the theatrical nature of royal power. I agree with Greenblatt that this awareness

is not subversive in a revolutionary sense, that it does not seek to arouse real opposition

to the idea or the ideal of monarchy. But I disagree with the notion that this awareness

can be redirected into an uncomplicated identification with and celebration of the

monarchy. To participate in the theatricality of power while very much aware of that

power’s theatrical nature fundamentally changes that relationship; the bell cannot be

unrung.

This leads us into Greenblatt’s second major flaw, which is that he does not

sufficiently differentiate between the theatrics of power in a literary/artistic format and

the theatrics of power in actual real-world politics.13 His reading asserts that, although these realms are technically separate, they feed into one another such that their means and ends become congruent.14 While I do not dispute that the two are deeply and fundamentally interrelated, Greenblatt makes little room for what the theater-as-art adds to the equation, and even less room for how its priorities and tactics might differ. In the case of Henry V, I contend that what the theater adds is a particular sense of temporality, one born out of the history play as a genre. Elizabethan theater had to contend with the question of what it means to adapt history into a narrative play, how that adaptation, being a live performance, differs from more conventional genres of historiography (such

13 This is a perennial complaint about New Historicist methodology. For a more extensive criticism, see Neema Parvini, Shakespeare’s History Plays: Rethinking Historicism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012). 14 Greenblatt, 32-3 & 44.

Hall and Holinshed’s chronicles), and how that adaptation affects its own and its

audience’s sense of place within history. Shakespeare’s history plays, and Henry V in particular, existed during important turning points for all of these issues.

To illustrate these turning points, I would like to turn to one of the most important historical anecdotes associated with Shakespeare’s second tetralogy: the Essex Rising.

Hardly a “rising” in the usual grand sense, the disturbance occurred on February 8th of

1601, started and quashed on the same day. This took place about two years after the premiere of Shakespeare’s Henry V, a premiere that can be dated with unusual precision to the first half of 1599 based on references to the Earl of Essex’s expedition to Ireland as an ongoing event. The failure of this very expedition marked the beginning of Essex’s fall from favor and was thus the origin point for his uprising. The conventional story goes that Essex planned a coup against Elizabeth in retaliation for his fall from grace, and paid to have Shakespeare’s Richard II staged on the eve of his rebellion in order to drum up public support for the overthrow of tyrant monarchs. Essex and his friends had counted on the support of the people of London, and unsuccessfully tried to whip up a mob that would overwhelm Elizabeth’s guards. However, the historical accuracy of this version is dubious; recent scholarship has argued that Essex’s so-called “rising” was more likely an ill-conceived attempt to win back Elizabeth’s favor by forcing his way into her presence and denouncing his rivals at court.15 Regardless, the part most

interesting to Shakespeare scholars is a conversation, possibly apocryphal, that Elizabeth

supposedly had with an advisor afterwards:

15 See Paul Hammer, “Shakespeare’s Richard II, the Play of February 1601, and the Essex Rising,” Shakespeare Quarterly 59.1 (2008), 1-35, and Jonathan Bate, ‘Was Shakespeare an Essex Man?’, Proceedings of the British Academy 162 (2009), 1–28. According to Hammer, he and Bate independently came to similar conclusions after re-examining the historical record.

When Elizabeth reached the section related to records of the reign of Richard II,

she said: “I am Richard 2nd. Know yee not that?” Lambarde responded by

alluding to Essex: “such a wicked immagination was determined and attempted

by a most unkind gent[leman], the most adorned creature that ever your Majestie

made.” Elizabeth replied that “hee that will forget God will alsoe forgett his

benefactor; this tragedie was played 40tie times in open streets and houses.”16

These remarks have often been taken as a direct reference to actual stagings of Richard

II, and accordingly used to support various pro- or anti-monarchist readings of that

play.17 But Paul Hammer argues that the exchange is more about Essex personally:

Elizabeth’s opening remark alludes to both the uprising and the play, which Lambarde

picks up on; but her follow-up statement (“He that will forget God will also forget his

benefactor; this tragedy was played forty times in open streets and houses”) is a two-part

commentary:

For Elizabeth, it is Essex’s failure to obey divinely ordained duties and his

consequent selfish ingratitude that constituted the heart of his crime . . . Essex not

only forgot his duty to his royal benefactor but also repeatedly displayed his

hubristic ingratitude “in open streets and houses” -- that is, both publicly for the

commons to admire and privately in the houses of well-to-do friends and

followers.18

16 Hammer, 23-4. Hammer takes these quotes, which are frequently paraphrased, directly from their manuscript source. 17 The accuracy of the manuscript from which Elizabeth’s supposed words were taken is hard to verify; see Bate for a more thorough explanation. However, if it is a fabrication, it dates back to at least the mid seventeenth century -- and is therefore still a potentially reliable indicator about early modern attitudes toward history. 18 Hammer, 25.

This interpretation is highly plausible, much more so than the idea that Elizabeth

considered the plot of Richard II so scandalous as to persistently weigh on her mind; if

that were so, one would have expected more censorship of the play or legal consequences

for the players than was historically the case. But I would like to complicate Hammer’s

reading a bit by suggesting that these remarks refer not just to specific contemporary

events but also to a certain understanding of history, theater, and the connections between

them. Elizabeth’s “I am Richard” actually has three layers of commentary:

contemporary allusion (the 1601 performance of Richard II was aimed at her), specific

historical reference (her situation is like the historical Richard II), and recurring historical

pattern (she, like Richard, is one of a long line of monarchs who have been and will be

betrayed by their followers). Her next comment, “He that will forget God will forget his

benefactor,” has the character of an aphorism; and the final line likewise has a triple

meaning: Richard II has been played many times; Essex’s public behavior led to his

downfall; and the recurring tragedy of betrayal has played out many times across history

and society. As Hammer points out, the use of 40 may well be a Biblical-style shorthand for “a great many,” giving these remarks a more universal weight.

In other words, Elizabeth’s attributed remarks play on an assumed congruence between actual historical events, the theatrical recreation of those events, actual contemporary events, and the higher principles that supposedly manifest themselves in all three. But as the long fallout of the Essex rising itself proves, this congruence cannot safely be assumed. The long-popular narrative (possibly encouraged post-facto by

Essex’s rivals) asserted that the Richard II performance was intended to paint Richard as an unfit king, and Elizabeth as an equivalent to Richard. Elizabeth’s remarks, however,

seem to interpret Richard (the play and the historical version) as unjustly deposed and

equates Essex to those who overthrew him. And, if Hammer is correct, Essex himself

saw Richard as a good king led astray by bad councilors, with the performance intended

as a warning to Elizabeth about what a disastrous fate might await if she did not dismiss

his corrupt rivals.19 Theatrical recreations of history are sites that encourage diverging

interpretation, and, more radically, they are publicly presented sites of multiplying

interpretation, much more accessible than written chronicles (which did often disagree with one another) could ever be in an era of such low literacy. By recreating historical events onstage, not only does theater have an unusually ripe potential to depart from whichever historical narrative is preferred by the monarch (or to broadcast the

inconsistencies in that historical narrative), but the act of performance itself can all-to-

easily inspire diverging interpretation. And what can be said of the divergent interpretive

potential of Richard II can be said just as much, if not more so, about Henry V. Although

Greenblatt asserts that this subversive potential is both generated and contained in the

service of hegemonic royal power, the Essex incident shows that this is no simple

monolithic process: a multiplicity of interpretation is generated, and in order to stay afloat, power structures must find a way to accommodate or incorporate this multiplicity.

That royal power can do so was by no means a bygone conclusion; we need only look at the execution of Charles I a mere fifty years later to learn that royal power was more than vulnerable to being undermined or co-opted.

The growing relevance and subversive potential of the popular theater was also occurring at a time when conceptions of historical causation and historiography were in

19 See Hammer, 11.

flux. The late sixteenth century was a time of uneasy coexistence between older, cyclical

providentialist notions of history and newer, linear humanist ones. According to Phyllis

Rackin, the medieval sense of history was, broadly speaking, not concerned with linear

time or with questions of secular causation; instead “the progress of human life in time

was the wheel of fortune, an endlessly recurrent cycle of rising and falling . . . only at the

hub, the still center that represented the will of God and the intersection of time with

eternity, could true meaning be found.”20 That is, individual events only had meaning in

the sense that they reflected the transcendent patterns emerging from the will of God,

travelling down the great chain or being to manifest in various earthly ways. The

sixteenth century - in England especially -- saw the upheaval of this understanding, fueled by the usual suspects of the Renaissance: the renewal of deductive reasoning, the reemergence of certain Classical texts, the Reformation. There was a growing movement to view history as a series of linear developments, propelled by knowable human and natural causes, and therefore instructive and valuable in its details, not just in its broad moral strokes. It must be acknowledged, however, that this somewhat neat picture of a clear old/new, medieval/early modern, religious/secular division is considered rather dubious by current scholarship, given that it artificially simplifies medieval thought and treats the medieval period as though it were static and stunted. In many ways, this narrative of secularization is a back-formation, encouraged by later generations in order to play up their own enlightenment and mask the persistence of political theology well into the modern day.21 Indeed, as Rackin herself emphasizes, these older and newer

20 Rackin, 6. 21 For a more detailed treatment, see Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

senses of history readily coexisted in Shakespeare’s day, even in contexts where one would expect their contradictions to cause irreconcilable conflict.22 The Tudors, for instance, simultaneously relied on providentialist history to justify their preferred narrative about the Wars of the Roses, and at the same time turned to genealogical record and historical detail to substantiate their claim to the throne.

In other words, we cannot simply assume that a humanist or providentialist understanding of history would be an either/or question for Shakespeare’s plays, nor that even plays which appear to accept a humanist notion of history would be conveniently secular or anti-authoritarian. Newer and more humanist approaches to historiography still brought with them new anxieties, anxieties which had to be accommodated somehow. These included a rising awareness of and concern about anachronism -- and thus the attendant realization of material and cultural gulfs between past and present -- and a greater focus on antiquarianism and physical artifacts to cope with the fallibility of written records. Underlying both was a growing fear of loss:

The heroic ambition of Renaissance historiography to recover the noble names

and glorious deeds of past heroes from the universal grave of oblivion was

threatened by the very power that made it necessary. Time, the universal enemy

of all human achievements, also threatened the works of history that attempted to

preserve them.23

It is in this milieu that Shakespeare’s history plays exist. History as a field was at once yearning towards the certainty of transcendent patterns to produce meaning and yet drawn in by the fascinating possibilities of the contingent, chaotic, fleeting realm of

22 Rackin, 2-6. 23 Ibid, 17

linear history. And popular theater as a venue was emerging as a new nexus for the circulation of power, where meaning could be generated, diversified, and often guided, but rarely simply controlled. Thus, any history play, but especially one addressing such a culturally potent topic as the famous victories of Henry V, had a dizzying array of issues to navigate, and an even greater challenge in trying make its engagement of those issues coherent.

I wish to argue that Henry V is responding to these circumstances by reaching for a kind of self-conscious historical myth-making that deliberately defies the threat of loss embedded within linear history. This does not mean that it rejects or disbelieves in contingency and humanist causation -- in fact it acknowledges and engages with them directly -- but rather that it reaches for a new sense temporality that is embedded within, but attempting to transcend, rising humanist concepts of historiography. In effect, it tries to find a political theology which can rein in these fluctuations in how history is understood. The fact of being a theatrical production is key to this process, because this vision of history also plays with the role of collective belief in (re)creating a sense of national mythology. In this way, I argue, the play is not so much pro- or anti- authoritarian as it is exploring the question of what is required, in its contemporary circumstances, to continue a functional belief in the power and importance of the sovereign.

From the very beginning, Henry V tackles the need to be remembered alongside the competing necessity of forgetting or ignoring that which is inconvenient, and

highlights the constant tension between these two impulses. The fear of historical oblivion and the desire to turn history into a coherent and advantageous narrative have a fraught relationship, because accomplishing the latter means erasing or reframing important facts and details -- courting the very oblivion that one wishes to avoid. It is this threat of loss which takes center stage at first, in the famous lines of the opening

Chorus:

O for a muse of fire, that would ascend

The brightest heaven of invention:

A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,

And monarchs to behold the swelling scene.

Then should warlike Harry, like himself,

Assume the port of Mars, and at his heels,

Leashed in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire

Crouch for employment. (1.0.1-8)

The Chorus’ words imply a desire for accuracy -- a play staged with real princes, real

kingdoms, a Henry “like himself” -- while still acknowledging that stage can still contain

only a recreation, no matter how lifelike. But this dream of an accurate re-enactment is

then overtaken by a vision of Henry larger than life, apotheosized into Mars, wielding the

scourges of war like divine powers. The quest for historical accuracy is abandoned

before it is even begun -- and not just because the “unworthy scaffold” (1.0.10) is simply

incapable of it. As Brian Walsh argues, it is because “the Chorus cannot conceive of a

way to present history that gets outside the contingencies of its telling or beyond the

‘like-ness’ of all re-presentation.”24 True recreation is impossible on its face, even given

the most worthy scaffold, because, as the Chorus cannot help but remind us, “this is a

project taking place within a time scheme shared by the actors and the audience -- and

thus necessarily separated from the past.”25 Those “very casques” of Agincourt are

mostly long gone, re-forged or rusted to nothing. The closest approximation is to work

on the audience’s “imaginary forces,” but in order to do so, the play must paradoxically

remind us that the real events, and the real people that caused them, are irrevocably lost.

This is the inevitable threat of loss that comes packaged with a linear understanding of

history. Thus the vision of Henry as Mars, with all its mythological grandiosity, is

situated within, and therefore defiant of, the possibility of historical oblivion.

This pattern is taken up again, in a more extended fashion, during the first act.

The contrast between the high words of the Chorus and the low, Machiavellian scheming

of the bishops is striking and deliberate; while discussing Henry’s sudden change of character, the Bishop of Canterbury remarks that “miracles are ceased, / And therefore we must needs admit the means / How things are perfected” (1.1.68-70). Beyond an explicit denial of providentialist history, this line provides context for the whiplash between the Chorus and the first act -- given a humanist understanding of history, the play must also admit the often unsavory causes of how Henry’s famous victories came about. Not only unsavory, but sometimes dependent on complicated and unexciting minutia, such as the long digression on Salic law that follows. These scenes of political plotting and legal wrangling appear to have two purposes: the first is to raise questions

24 Brian Walsh, Shakespeare, the Queen’s Men, and the Elizabethan Performance of History (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009),182. 25 Walsh, 182

about the justness of Henry’s cause and therefore culpability for the many deaths that are

about to ensue. Questions about just war and culpability become a running theme,

especially once battle is engaged. The second is to contrast the minutiae of dynastic

records and Parliamentary bills -- the sort of details that an accurate recounting of history would demand -- and the elevated language of power and glory that follows it. After

Canterbury finishes his speech on Salic law, he jumps to a quote from the Book of

Numbers, and then to the example of Edward the Black Prince, Henry’s great-uncle, as a

figure for imitation. The Bishop of Ely goads:

Awake remembrance of those valiant dead

And with your puissant arm renew their feats.

You are their heir, you sit upon their throne,

The blood and courage that renowned them

Runs in your veins (1.2.105-9)

To some degree, this is a turn back to a cyclical understanding of history: God’s laws of

inheritance playing out again, the warlike ways of an ancestor repeated in his

descendants. But this speech, like the Chorus, cannot help reminding us of loss, of dead

heroes whose deeds are in danger of being forgotten and whose feats have been

overridden in the endless upheavals of the Hundred-Years War. The audience cannot

help but be reminded that Henry himself is destined to be one such as the Black Prince,

whose deeds will need to be resurrected in the form of this very play and whose gains

will be lost once more. This specter of loss is compensated with the idea of biological

and royal succession -- a topic to which I will return later in this essay. For now, we

should note that despite his advisors’ encouraging words, Henry is also worried about

defying historical oblivion. He vows:

Or there we’ll sit,

Ruling in large and ample empery

O’er France and all her almost kingly dukedoms,

Or lay these bones in an unworthy urn,

Tombless, with no remembrance over them.

Either our history shall with full mouth

Speak freely of our acts, or else our grave,

Like a Turkish mute, shall have a tongueless mouth,

Not worshipped with a waxen epitaph. (1.2.225-33)

The phrasing here is ambiguous. The first sentence can be read as an imperative, where

Henry is ordering his fellows to scorn his memory if he does not succeed; in that case, it appears like a conscious choice of glory-or-nothing, born of his own pride. The “shall” of the second sentence, likewise, could express intention and determination rather than a simple prediction of alternative outcomes. But these lines can also be read as an expression of inevitability, an explanation of what will happen, like it or not, if Henry fails to make a sufficient name for himself. He is, after all, anticipating his own death in surprisingly lurid detail for a young and ambitious king -- a piece of deliberate foreshadowing for an audience already aware that Henry died not long after his French expedition. Once again, the audience cannot be asked to revive Henry -- to speak freely of his acts and worship his epitaph -- without being reminded both of his already being long dead and of the historical oblivion that did and still might threaten him. With these

unremembered tombs and silent graves gaping at their backs, the audience may naturally

be driven to engage in this imaginative resurrection all the harder. To “make imaginary

puissance” (1.0.25), not just in the sense of imagining past powers, but in the sense of

discovering power in the imaginary faculty itself.

However, this drive towards remembrance is soon confronted by the many

unsavory aspects of Henry’s war and of Henry himself, details that -- if remembered with

as much enthusiasm as the Chorus and Henry himself try to drum up -- would undermine

this celebratory picture of the monarch. Beyond the fact that such an undermining would

threaten the power structures that Henry and his memory are meant to bolster, the open

inclusion of such unattractive detail could potentially destroy the emotional fascination

on which all forms of historical remembrance (from the mundane to the theatrical)

depend. Questions of Salic law are merely boring, and may be skimmed over; questions

of war-guilt and atrocity are not so easily dismissed. And although there was a great deal

of writing by the late sixteenth century, on how and why a nation could wage war in a morally just manner, the gulf between theory and actual practice remained as large as it has always been. As Paola Pugliatti argues, this gulf was just as wide for staged depictions of war in the period, which also tended to stick to the principles of the war

manuals while ignoring or glossing over the Machiavellian motives and brutal methods

which dominated the wars of the period.26 She holds up the declaration of war with

France in the first act of Henry V as an example of procedures technically followed to the

letter, with the justification for Henry’s claim to the throne of France elaborated at length

and the Dauphin duly warned of his intentions.27 This by-the-letter declaration of war is

26 Paola Pugliatti, Shakespeare and the Just War Tradition (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2010), 66-7. 27 Ibid, 120

then set up as a way for Henry to try to absolve himself of all responsibility for the

carnage to come, with the initial invasion laid at the feet of the Dauphin’s disrespect:

Tell the pleasant Prince this mock of his

Hath turned his balls to gunstones, and his soul

Shall stand sore charged for the wasteful vengeance

That shall fly from them - for many a thousand widows

Shall this his mock mock out of their dear husbands,

Mock mothers from their sons, mock castles down;

Ay, some yet ungotten and unborn

That shall have cause to curse the Dauphin’s scorn. (1.2.281-8)

There is, of course, a fierceness in these words with which a patriotic audience might identify, but placed so soon after the high idealism of the Chorus, the naked scheming of the bishops, and a dull lecture on inheritance law, the first act of the play seems to be aiming for with nothing less than a sense of emotional whiplash. Even the above lines are followed by a sharp turn into cordiality (“But this lies all within the will of God”

(1.2.289)) which can easily be read as merely a further tactic of intimidation rather than a legitimate prayer. Thus, at the same time that it threatens the audience with historical oblivion and pushes them to join in this imagination recreation, the first act also confronts them with a perplexing jumble of motivations and explanations for the war, and a looming awareness of the level of bloodshed which awaits. Accepting Henry’s actions as straightforwardly admirable means forgetting or eliding everything about them which is questionable.

This problem increases once the war actually comes to France, particularly in the

siege of Harfleur. In a move similar to that used with the Dauphin, Henry blames the

threatened sack on Harfleur on the citizens’ own resistance:

What is’t to me, when you yourselves are cause

If your pure maidens fall into the hand

Of hot and forcing violation?

What rein can hold licentious wickedness

When down the hills he holds his fierce career?

We may as bootless spend our vain command

Upon th’enraged soldiers in their spoil

As send precepts to the leviathan

To come ashore. (3.3.99-107)

However, this justification is now showing even more cracks. The possible atrocities against the city are imagined in the most lurid terms possible (“Your naked infants spitted upon pikes” (3.3.118)) and attributed to the supposedly unrestrainable nature of the common soldiers once set on spoil. Not only does this scene turn the notion of “collateral damage” in Henry’s war against the king of France from a matter of theory to a vividly described reality, but Henry’s use of the sack of Harfleur as a threat lays bare one of the more unsavory realities of war in the period: that the damages inflicted in sieges like this one are not just collateral but tactical, useful for terrorizing enemies into submission and/or for enlarging the spoils of the invaders. It also lays bare a central contradiction in the rhetoric of war employed thus far: the soldiers are, at one moment, praised for their innate courage and bravery (“On, on you noblest English / Whose blood is fet from

fathers of war-proof . . . And you, good yeomen, / Whose limbs were made in England, show us here / The mettle of your pasture” (3.1.17-27)) and then, when it is convenient, cast as equally vicious and ungovernable. Indeed, as the invasion of France continues, the on-paper justification of the war beings to ring more and more hollow in the face of its realities, and the venal motives of Pistol and company prove more and more accurate to the situation.

Again, we see the central problem: if we are to defy historical oblivion, we must remember, but in order to make that defiance resonate, we might also have to ignore and forget that which is accurate but repellent. The contradiction is foregrounded, and grows more pressing over the course of the play, culminating in Henry’s nighttime trip to talk to his soldiers in disguise. Although the trope of the monarch in disguise was a mainstay of the theater, in this circumstance it defies all practical advice found in the war manuals of the period, threatening to disrupt the chain of command and potentially disturbing the all- important watchfulness of the camp on the eve before battle. Accordingly, some critics have read this scene to cast Henry in a deliberately negative or narcissistic light. Nina

Taunton calls it a case where “the head usurps” and infringes on the duties of multiple underlings in order to, as she sees it, “appease his insecurity and vanity, to justify to himself a costly and difficult campaign, to assure himself of his rightful claim and above all to test out claims that God is on his side.”28 Pugliatti agrees with this characterization of Henry’s actions, seeing his conversation with Williams, Bates, and Court as evidence of how “Henry seems eager to dispose of . . . downward responsibility,” hanging on to the idea that he is absolved of any deaths in the war by the justness of his cause and

28 Nina Taunton, 1590s Drama and Militarism (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2001), 174-77.

adding a new disclaimer against any responsibility for the state of any individual soldier’s

soul. But as a keen observer of the conversation will note, the total sum of Henry’s

rationalizations for the war is inconsistent. To Henry’s assertion that the war is for a just

cause, Bates responds that they have no way of knowing such a thing for certain, but that

“if his cause be wrong, our obedience to the King wipes the crime of it out of us”

(4.1.127-9). If the cause is not just, however, Williams insists that the king will bear all

of the blame for it on Judgment Day -- but, following that train of thought, he notes that

many soldiers are led by the circumstances of war, regardless of the justness of that war,

into committing acts of brutality which they would never have otherwise done. He then

lays this, too, at the feet of the king, since “if these men do not die well, it will be a black

matter for the King that led them to it -- who to disobey were against all proportion of

subjugation” (4.1.138-40). As Ros King notes, it is this moment where “Williams has

actually begun tentatively to advance the argument that if the damage to innocents is

immoral, and since war cannot avoid causing such damage, it should be avoided.”29

Henry’s response is, as King notes, a dodge: he begins to discourse on individual sin and

punishment of the dead where Williams was speaking of a general responsibility toward

the welfare of the living. Williams does not respond directly to this evasion, but the

pattern repeats itself when Henry claims that the king will not be ransomed and Williams

scoffs at what little power the common soldier has the hold a king to his promises.

Henry’s responses in this scene are put to the combined effect of paradoxically

encouraging unquestioning obedience to the king’s authority while simultaneously

29 Ros King, “‘The Disciplines of War’: Elizabethan War Manuals and Shakespeare’s Tragicomic Vision,” in Shakespeare and War, edited by Ros King and Paul J.C.M. Franssen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 22-3.

downplaying his abilities as an individual. His disclaiming of responsibility for soldiers’

misdeeds especially rankles in light of how he himself used the threat of those misdeeds

to his tactical advantage at Harfleur. He starts out his encounter with the soldiers by

insisting that “the King is but a man,” and takes this theme up again once he leaves them,

soliloquizing for some time on the notion, “What have kings that privates have not too, /

Save ceremony, save general ceremony?” (4.1.99 & 225-6). The answer appears to come

at the end of the speech:

The slave, a member of the country’s peace,

Enjoys [sleep], but in gross brain little wots

What watch the King keeps to maintain the peace,

Whose hours the peasant best advantages. (4.1.269-72)

We come around again to a katechonic notion of sovereignty, similar to the one in

Richard II, but in this case it is more self-aware: for Henry, part of playing the role is to admit his own awareness that he is playing a role. The vision of the sovereign that

Richard and Bolingbroke fought over in Richard II was one where the king had to play his role so well that this role could never be questioned, that it could become naturalized and almost re-theologized as a sacred mystery of the state, and the audience’s awareness of the artificiality of this process was a potentially fatal flaw. But now the theatrical audience has been made very much aware of that artificiality, not only in the progression from Richard II to Henry V, but also in the way that Henry V directly confronts the contradictions inherent to that sovereign role. Thus, in the climax of this play, we see the beginnings of a version of sovereignty where the king himself must find a way to maintain his authority while admitting the artificiality of the role he plays. Henry’s

strategy is to cast the king as a sort of victim of circumstances, and more importantly a

relatable person on the individual level, so that king and subject are cast as fellow mortals

all in service to the greater goal of the nation. This is thus a switch in the tactics of

maintaining the emotional hold of sovereign power, from hoping that the unsavory parts

of Henry’s wars will be simply ignored in light of the high rhetoric of patriotic fervor, to

admitting some level of fault which is attributable to the king’s own mortal fallibility.

Williams’ questions are dodged with wordplay, but any audience questions provoked by

Williams are dodged by the emotionality of the soliloquy that follows.

This kind of special pleading, and the role that it plays in mediating the tension

between remembrance and forgetting, is encapsulated in Henry’s concluding prayer:

Not today, O Lord,

O not today, think not upon the fault

My father made in compassing the crown.

I Richard’s body have interred new,

And on it have bestowed more contrite tears

Than from it issued forced drops of blood.

...... More will I do,

Though all that I can do is nothing worth,

Since that my penitence comes after ill,

Imploring pardon. (4.1.280-93)

Technically addressed to God, this prayer is in many ways actually addressed to the audience: it asks them to think not on past faults (in-story, the past of Richard’s death;

out-of-story, Henry’s war, which is the past to them) by directly appealing to them on the

basis of sympathy for Henry as an individual. In this case, admissions of personal

inadequacy on the part of the king are not -- as they perhaps were in Richard II - signs of

a sovereign’s dissolution, but a strategic form of self-abasement that seeks further loyalty from subjects. Isabel Karreman has dubbed the overall authoritarian strategy of the play as one of “nationalist oblivion,” where scenes that appear to focus the most on remembering and memorializing instead become about forgetting: when the play directs the audience’s attention toward something, it is simultaneously distracting it away from something else.30 Directing the audience’s attention toward Henry’s performance of repentance and humility distracts attention away from the incisive doubts just raised about his responsibility and culpability. But whereas Karrreman’s reading emphasizes the subtlety of this tactic, the pointedness with which the play has so far confronted the

particular issue of memory indicates that the audience is expected to be aware (on some level) of the game being played, and therefore must in a sense voluntarily engage with this scheme of remembrance and forgetting. What motivates them to want to do so is perhaps just as important as the patterns of misdirection which allow them to do so.

Here, the audience is meant to be united with Henry on a personal as well as the national level, caught on one side by attachment to him as an individual and on the other by desire to believe in the national dream which his reign represents.

However, the above mostly applies to Henry as a person, and to the preservation of his own personal legend. In order to be applied in a wider sense -- to be applied to the kind of royal power which Elizabeth’s government wanted to maintain -- this stance of

30 Isabel Karreman, The Drama of Memory in Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015), 125-7.

nationalist oblivion needs a more enduring motivation. Such a motivation makes its grand appearance in Henry’s St. Crispin’s Day speech:

This day is called the Feast of Crispian.

He that outlives this day and comes safe home

Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is named

And rouse him at the name of Crispian.

He that shall see this day and live t’old age

Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors

And say, “Tomorrow is Saint Crispian.”

Then he will strip his sleeve and show his scars

And say, “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.”

Old men forget, yet all shall be forgot,

But he’ll remember, with advantages,

What feats he did that day. (4.3.40-51)

The emotional state which this speech relies on is one of preemptive nostalgia. Much of

Henry’s previous language about being remembered was cast in either abstract terms of monuments and legends, or in the more personal terms of living up to his own bloodline.

This speech both particularizes and universalizes the idea of remembrance -- painting it in individual details that become generalized to a communal experience -- and, more importantly, changes the temporal orientation of the need to be remembered. Instead of emotional weight being placed on enduring deeds of past heroes or the need to save present deeds from the yawning oblivion of time, the locus of feeling is now in the future, imagining how it will feel to celebrate and be celebrated for what they are about to do. It

is, as Charnes calls it, “nostalgia on credit . . . weav[ing] nostalgia from the future about

the past into the present, promising his men the future good old days.”31 This kind of

future orientation has the triple benefit of prompting the audience to accept past and

current misdeeds in service of a more vividly painted golden future, of flattening

distinctions between past and present in light of that future, and of appearing to erase

class distinctions in such a way as to further listeners’ identification with the sovereign

and his power. This latter issue is key, as Henry moves from talking about the “he” of

the common soldier, to the “us” of the nobility (“Then shall our names / Familiar in his

mouth as household words -- / Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot,

Salisbury and Gloucester / Be in their flowing cups freshly remembered” (4.3.51-5)), and finally to a “we” that appears to unite them:

This story shall the good man teach his son,

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by

From this day to the ending of the world

Be we in it shall be remembered,

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. (4.3.56-60)

Of course, Henry does not literally mean that participation in the battle will “gentle [the] condition” (4.3.63) of lowborn soldiers, or that any tangible social levelling will occur.

Instead, as Karreman argues, “Harry is not simply lying to his soldiers, promising what he never intends to deliver . . . Rather, his promise of a soldierly community is not cancelled entirely but displaced onto the ultimate aim of a national community.”32

31 Charnes, 80. As she also notes, the term “nostalgia” would not even be coined until the late 17th century, but Henry V can easily be seen as a places where proto-versions of the concept show up long before its official recognition. 32 Karreman, 140.

Nationalism here takes the form of a dream of future glory, rather than the past glories

with which the play began.

It is also important to note that the St Crispin’s Day speech is co-opting a religious observance for nationalist ends. Instead of a cyclical holiday associated with providentialist history, it can now become a nationalist holiday tied to a specific achievement. But lest we assume that this move simply secularizes it and moves it into the realm of linear humanist history, we must also remember that this play is dramatizing not the actual nationalist commemoration of St. Crispin’s day but the feeling of hoping for that commemoration. As a history play directed towards the late Elizabethan audience of 1599, one of the central concerns of Henry V is the application of the past to present political and social circumstances. Just as the St. Crispin’s day speech flattens past and present for the common soldiers, for its theatrical audience it flattens the past of

Henry’s lifetime and the present of Elizabeth’s latter reign by drawing them into the dream of a better future. It is no accident, after all, that the Chorus for the next act begins by referring to hopes of success for the Earl of Essex’ present Irish expedition:

As, by a lower but high-loving likelihood,

Were now the General of our gracious Empress --

As in good time he may -- from Ireland coming,

Bringing rebellion broached on his sword,

How many would the peaceful city quit

To welcome him! (5.0.29-34)

The emphasis, again, is on the hope for victory; descriptions of celebration and commemoration serve primarily to drum up that hope. This is what makes the

conversion of religious to nationalist celebration, and the engagement with memory and

forgetting throughout Henry V, not simply a matter of accepting a secular, linear notion

of history. While accepting that idea of history, and confronting its anxieties, the play

seeks to out ways to defy it, and also explores how that defiance may be turned to

authoritarian ends. In other words, the play trying out another form of political theology,

one revolving around the relationship of sovereign to temporality. This perpetual hope

and expectation for a golden future, and the collective longing for it despite agonies past

and present, comes in the final act of the play to coalesce into a type of secularized

eschatological time, one which is tied into the recurring hopes surrounding kingly

succession.

III

I previously read Richard II in light of the theo-political notion of the katechon, or restrainer, ending on a powerful longing in the audience for the ideal monarch who could truly fulfill the role of a transcendent katechon. Here I want to argue that Henry V tries to fulfill that longing by incorporating a secularized notion of eschatological time into its depiction of the monarch.

A positive katechonic sovereign always risks a shift in public perception toward the negative. The heart of this risk is the fact that the positive secularized katechon, without its aura of transcendence, can only justify itself in purely instrumental terms. As

Steven Ostovich argues, the Schmittian notion of the katechonic sovereign sets up a situation where “there is no positive meaning to political activity in this world . . . politics

is not substantive but a matter of doing whatever is necessary to maintain order.”33

According to Ostovich, Schmitt’s turn to pure instrumentalism in his secularized katechon loses the temporal dimension that was so critical to the theological katechon: a hopeful orientation towards the advent of the messiah and thus the erasure of political life as we know it. This orientation is that of eschatological time:

Eschatology describes a very different critical move in which one does not escape

from time but experiences the conflict that comes from being aware of living in

different times at once. What apocalyptic literature unveils is the possibility of

living in both this age and the “age to come” simultaneously, which in turn

demands a critical engaging of the present that is political by definition, and that

involves a critical distance based not on space but on time.34

Eschatological time, in Ostovich’s formulation, does not neglect the instrumental nature of political activity in the present time, but instead engages with it in the understanding that the ugly details of pragmatism with eventually be subsumed and transcended in the messianic moment. The theological version of eschatological time is grounded on a belief in the inevitability of a religious apocalypse -- or, more specifically, a belief that that the apocalypse is inevitable but that its advent is impossible to predict. Political life is what occurs while believers are held in abeyance; the length of that abeyance may be substantial, its sufferings will be redeemed when the eschaton finally arrives. In this way, eschatological time is fundamentally different from linear time, because it is fundamentally based in the expectation of an inevitable future moment; rather than past

33 Steven Ostovich, “Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, and Eschatology,” KronoScope 7 (2007), 65. 34 Ibid, 65.

and present determining the future, the future is already known but reaches back to

illuminate past and present.

The theological notion of the katechon is the product of the theological notion of

eschatology. Thus, a secularized katechon will perhaps inevitably fail without a

secularized notion of eschatological time to accompany it -- without an end goal beyond

the purely pragmatic perpetuation of the status quo to justify its existence, the secularized

katechon (especially in the form of the early modern monarch) cannot elicit the sort of

belief from its subjects necessary to maintain its authority. What a political, secularized

version of eschatological time would look like depends heavily on context. Agamben,

for instance, posits his notion of the secularized katechon in order to argue that its

removal is the necessary precondition for casting off and remaking the idea of the modern

state -- in this case, the eschaton takes the form of a leftist revolution, as is does in a great

deal of 20th and 21st century political thought.35 In the late sixteenth century, I argue, the secularized version of eschatological time often took the form of anticipation for the arrival of an idealized monarch, a sovereign whose ability to unify and glorify the kingdom would outshine the failures of his predecessors.

Henry V ultimately ends on this promise. Moving from the fear of oblivion, to the hope and expectation of remembering and being remembered, this hope is at last identified not so much with the king himself as the potential that he represents, the world

that his successors might create. This is why the play can end with the conception of

35 See Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains, trans. Patricia Daly (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005). In addition to leftist political notions of secular eschatology, the idea of the technological singularity has also risen to popularity (especially in the past few decades) as the secular eschaton of choice for techno-utopian and pro-capitalist thinkers.

Henry VI, despite acknowledging the actual failures of his reign: because the dream is

not particular to Henry VI himself, but to the ever-recurring hope that he represents, a hope for which the audiences of the 1590s may have been particularly desperate living under an aging virgin queen with no clear successor.

Accordingly, the play’s epilogue goes through a routine similar that of the prologue, embedding a promise of transcendence within the threat of historical loss:

Thus far with rough and all-unable pen

Our bending author hath pursued the story,

In little room confining mighty men,

Mangling by starts the full course of their glory.

Small time, but in that small most greatly lived

This star of England. Fortune made his sword,

By which the world’s best garden he achieved,

And of it left his son imperial lord. (5.3.1-8)

The first few lines take up again the impossibilities of historical re-creation -- not only the “little room” and “small time” afforded by the theater itself, but also the fact that

Henry’s reign has been “mangled by starts,” that is, chopped up into highlights, in order to fit into a single coherent plot. But the fifth and sixth lines confuse the boundaries of theater and actual history: the “small time” refers not just to the 4-hour performance on stage, but the actual foreshortened life of the historical Henry V. This has the effect of re-framing the first sentence, since the one doing the “confining” and “mangling” could either be “our bending author” or “the story” itself. If taken as the former, the lines are a commentary on theatrical limitations, but if taken as the latter, then the lines refer to the

tragedies and lost potentials of the historical figures themselves. “Mighty men,” including Henry himself, are historically confined by the little room of their lifespans and achievable deeds; the “full course of their glory,” that is, their full potential, is mangled and thwarted by the course of events. The epilogue is thus confronting again the limits of successful historical recreation, not only the impossibility of full accuracy but also need to re-acknowledge the disappointing outcome of the historical events in question.

And yet, paradoxically, the epilogue still insists that Henry achieved “the world’s best garden.” Even if taken mainly to refer to the unification of England and France, this is hardly accurate -- Henry V was never crowned king of France, since Charles VI outlived him, and even upon Charles VI’s death the Dauphin refused to accept the legitimacy of the English kings’ succession, setting himself up as Charles VII.

Regardless of what transpired on paper, the Hundred Years’ War was still ongoing in the latter years of Henry V’s reign and England only had reliable control of the northern parts of France. “The world’s best garden” may be taken to refer merely to domestic peace in

England, but this is not supported even by the world of the play, where Pistol will go back to his life of thieving, hundreds of good men are dead from the wars, and the Scots are still an ongoing threat. However, we can also take “the world’s best garden” as an allusion to Eden, and therefore not a statement of literal truth, but an expression of the eschatological political hope which the play intends to invoke. What Henry achieved was not the union of England and France, nor the establishment of an idealized monarchy, but the potential for both of those events in his son’s reign. Much as the return to an edenic state of righteousness is the promised outcome of the theological apocalypse, an edenic state of political unity is the promised outcome of the idealized monarch.

This hope was particularly relevant in the latter two decades of Elizabeth's reign,

a time when, not coincidentally, history plays as a genre were experiencing a surge in

popularity. Ruled by an aging virgin queen who refused to name an heir or even allow

public discussion of the topic, England spent the 1590s staring down a looming

succession crisis, a situation which seems to have inspired a fascination with political

crises of the past. This incipient crisis also pressured the jurists of the time to sharpen

and solidify their ways of thinking about the relationship between the monarch and the

nation, because the legal foundations of that relationship had a chance of soon

determining the fate of the nation. The king’s two bodies was only one of these; as

Axton has shown, it developed alongside several competitors, each of which was

formulated around specific possible contenders for the throne.36 With reference to

Edmund Plowden’s original 1566 treatise on the succession (to which Kantorowicz did

not have access), Axton demonstrates that Plowden’s articulation of the king’s two

bodies was partially formulated with the express purpose of supporting Mary Stuart as

Elizabeth’s rightful heir.37 The reception of Plowden’s theories was complex: he made

his original arguments in favor of a Catholic monarch, which made them doubly

politically dangerous once that monarch was implicated in the Rodolfi and Babbington

plots and subsequently executed. But after Mary’s son James was raised Protestant -- and

thus gained the support of Protestant jurists and nobleman -- Plowden’s legal argument in

favor of the Stuarts was vindicated, quite possible against his original pro-Catholic

intentions. With the benefit of historical hindsight, one might make the mistake of seeing

36 Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977). 37 Ibid, 18-20

the success of the theory of the king’s two bodies as inevitable, but Axton shows that it

was heavily in competition with at least two other theoretical camps: polemicists such as

John Hale who wrote in favor of the Protestant Suffolk line by refuting a distinction

between royal and common inheritance under common law; and hardline Catholic

scholars, Robert Doleman chief among them, who advanced a contractual theory of

monarchy in order to advance the claim of the Spanish Infanta.38

Despite its politically dangerous nature and its almost accidental historical

vindication, Plowden’s vision of the king’s two bodies seems to have latched on in the

popular consciousness of the time, especially the theater. This was driven in part by its

analogical relationship to history. Axton argues that “the circumstances of Elizabeth’s

reign encouraged [Plowden] to interpret historical precedent and custom as immutable

legal theory.”39 The king’s two bodies is, as Kantorowicz stressed, a theo-political

construction, a secularized version of a religious construct which argued for a politically

“miraculous” view of the monarch and the state. Both Kantorowicz and Axton

acknowledge the almost-accidental character of much political theology, as solutions

confabulated to resolve the crises of the day -- Axton says that given “no tenets in either

law or theology . . . only by metaphor could the king impart immortality to the state and

the state reciprocate the gift. Lacking an acknowledged tradition which would make their

theory acceptable law, the lawyers attempted to cross the irrational abyss with a bridge of

legal logic.”40 However much it arose from circumstances, it seems as though the irrational character of political theology was actually an attractive feature -- it promoted a

38 Ibid, 21-25 & 91-95 39 Ibid, 26 40 Ibid, 14

belief in the monarch and the nation supposedly unshakable by evidence, a form of belief

potentially reassuring to monarchs and subjects alike. It also made for excellent theater,

and was an underlying assumption in a great majority of history plays and historical romances, which tended to explicitly reject the more rational ideas of contractual kingship.41

The “irrational,” or rather miraculous, character of political theology is especially

relevant which confronting contemporary sixteenth century anxieties about linear time

and historical oblivion. Axton argues:

Plowden’s stories of old kings of England applied by analogy to Elizabethan

England, yet pointed beyond Elizabeth, further still, into the future when the

Queen would be as unerring as her body politic, and the succession would be

perpetual. Such a prophetic view could only be achieved by faith.

Plowden’s writings erase historical change by presenting past precedent as indicative of a

sort of immutable, immortal legal theory; the notion of the king’s two bodies was

supported by its presentation as having always already been at work in the English

monarchy. The natural extension of this treatment of history is to extend it into the

future, promising an unbroken continuity of king and state. According to Axton,

“lawyers and dramatists warned that the mistakes of history might be avoided only if the

monarch’s body natural were mortified . . . for the sake of his body politic.”42 That is, a

perfected theo-political version of the monarch has always been possible, in the

background of history, but only in the future can England see its actual fulfillment. This

is, in effect, an eschatological orientation towards time; it asks adherent to live at once in

41 Ibid, 97. 42 Ibid, 37

the present-day anxieties of Elizabeth’s reign and in the imagined future of idealized

monarch which would be ushered in by her successor. Importantly, being attracted by

this vision did not necessarily mean that one believed in the king’s two bodies as a

definitive legal theory. Axton points out,

A dramatist who doubted the miracles of the body politic might still use a figural

view of history because it offered an immediately recognizable political testing

ground. If it granted that Elizabeth’s reign, however admirable, was not for these

men the final and assured millennium then the celebratory element in their plays

may be seen as prophetic of future events.43

In other words, engagement with the king’s two bodies and other notions of miracles of

the state was as much about the urge to bring together past, present, and future into a coherent whole as it was about anxieties about Elizabeth’s successor. In this formulation the two topics in fact merge, so that the future of the monarchy becomes the future of the nation, the people, and the culture. This creates a secularized version of eschatological time, the beginnings of a theo-political belief in a political “apocalypse” which would usher in a new and better kingdom; the redemption of the flawed kings of the past in the form of Elizabeth’s successor, whomever the preferred candidate may be.

This joining of eschatology with succession allows us to make greater sense of

Henry V’s ending, and why the militarism of the previous four acts is, with apparent incongruity, capped off by comparatively light and comical wooing scene. The epilogue

implies that Henry created the possibility for a new Eden in his short reign -- by which, it

43 Ibid, 88.

seems, the play means that he created an incipient age of national unity and a legitimate

heir to sweep away the murky succession of Henry IV. The epilogue concludes:

Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crowned king

Of France and England, did this king succeed,

Whose state so many had the managing

That they lost France and made his England bleed,

Which oft our stage hath shown -- and, for their sake,

In you fair minds let this acceptance take. (5.3.9-14)

The final two lines are often read as a reference to the Henry VI plays, a way to elicit

audience approval by reminding them of previous hit performances. The “they” in “for

their sake” thus refers to the players and the author, who beg the audience to accept their

latest offering in a series of history plays. But the grammar is once again ambiguous.

The “they” may also be a continuation of the previous “they [who] lost France,” that is,

the actual historical figures depicted in the previous Henry VI plays. It would seem odd

to ask an audience to praise a play about Henry V’s victories in the name of those who

later squandered all his successes, but it makes more sense in light of the eschatological

orientation towards time for which I have argued. The final full scene of the play,

coming directly before the epilogue, is all about Henry’s marriage to Catherine, and is

effusive in its promises for a better future. Leading directly into the epilogue equivalence

of the unified England and France with Eden, it is full of images of nature and fertility.

Burgundy’s speech opening the negotiations describes the war-torn nation as a neglected garden, asking, “why that naked, poor, and mangled peace, / Dear nurse of arts, plenties, and joyful births, / Should not in this best garden of the world, / Our fertile France, put up

her lovely visage?” (5.2.34-7, emphasis mine). This picture of nature’s fertility is then equated to Catherine’s fertility and her upcoming union with Henry. Queen Isabel blesses them:

God, the best maker of all marriages,

Combine your hearts in one, your realms in one.

As man and wife, being two, are one in love,

So be there ‘twixt your kingdoms such a spousal

That never may ill office or fell jealousy,

Which troubles oft the bed of blessed marriage,

Thrust in between the paction of the kingdoms

To make divorce of their incorporate league. (5.2.344-51)

This “incorporation” is not just the joining of England and France into one legal whole,

but also the literal in-corporation of that union in the upcoming birth of Henry VI.

Catherine’s function in this scene is to be the final means of Henry’s conquest, to be

territory made flesh. He, at his own admission, “cannot see many a fair French city for

one fair French maid that stands in my way” (5.2.306-7). King Charles certainly sees it

Catherine as a stand-in or substitute for the nation, agreeing with Henry that “you see

them perspectively, the cities turned into a maid - for they are all girdled with maiden

walls that war hath never entered” (5.2.308-10). Henry’s reply, though, insists on returning to the more explicitly sexual terms already introduced in his preceding conversation with Burgundy, remarking that “so the maid that stood in the way for my wish shall show me the way to my will” (5.2.314-5). “Will,” of course, being common

early modern slang for penis. Henry’s preoccupation is as much with producing an heir

via Catherine as it is obtaining France through her; in their private courtship, he asks her:

I get thee with scrambling, and thou must therefore needs prove a good soldier-

breeder. Shall not thou and I, between Saint Denis and Saint George, compound a

boy, half-French half-English, that shall go to Constantinople and take the Turk

by the beard? (5.4.198-202)

This fixation seems to be tied to his own doubts about his father’s accession to the throne,

as he remarks almost immediately afterward, “Now beshrew my father’s ambition! He

was thinking of civil wars when he got me; therefore I was created with a stubborn

outside with an aspect of iron” (5.2.216-19). What we see, then, is a connection being

drawn between France as a fallen Eden, to Catherine and Henry’s marriage as the means

to restoring both England and France, and finally to Henry’s son via Catherine being the

heir and guarantor of success for this returned paradise. Henry was conceived while his

father plotted to overthrow Richard II, and therefore he is tainted by this, not only

physically but, he fears, morally. Henry VI will be conceived and born as the result of a

peace treaty, with his father dreaming of England’s full union with France, and will thus,

it is implied, be untainted by the original sins of Bolingbroke.

None of this will happen in the actual history, however. So why lean on it so hard

in the final scene of the play? Henry’s line above about his own ugliness is closely

followed by an assurance that “the elder I wax the better I shall appear” (5.2.220), which cannot help but remind the audience that Henry never had the chance to grow old. The ending scenes of the play are thus a paradoxical mix of hope and mourning, a window into a historical time of vivid hope which only serves to bring to audience to a greater

awareness of how that hope was squandered. In other words, it ends with the same sense of “erning,” of longing, which has haunted the tetralogy since Richard’s death, but here that emotion has been expanded to encompass not just the monarch but also the passage of time. That is what it means to say that Henry V embraces eschatological time in defiance of linear time: the audience cannot help but be aware of the actual course of events, the inevitable anachronisms of historical recreation, the limitations of the theatrical medium. And this may remind them of how they themselves live in a time of hope that may be squandered, that their time will perhaps one day only exist as a truncated reenactment on a stage somewhere. But instead the play asks them confront their longing and believe in a secularized version of eschatology, a mode of temporal thinking where past and present can be unified in their shared expectation of a redeeming future. In many ways the story of Henry V is a comfort even in the face of likely disaster after Elizabeth’s death: the England of the 1420s had a hope for an ideal ruler, and ideal kingdom, that ultimately collapsed, and yet here they are in the 1590s waiting in hope again. Because, to eschatology, the past is always present in its perpetual expectation of the redeeming future, then even if the hopes of the 1590s are squandered, the perpetuity of the monarch’s body politic and the perpetually-arriving nature of the idealized future monarch guarantee that the wheel will always come around again. This is, in effect, the final word of Shakespeare’s history plays on the relationship between history and sovereign power: in the shadow of the depredations of history, in the uncomfortable light of the popular theater, the way for kingly power to persist in its absolutist ambitions and overrule its own contradictions is to point forever forward. Chapter Three:

Paradise Lost and the Origins of Political Community

How do we interpret the politics of Milton’s God in Paradise Lost? This question

is rendered particularly complex for two interrelated reasons. The first and more general

dilemma is how to parse out the connections (and disconnections) between the

theological and political concerns of the epic. Doing so is no small task, especially given

the generic shift from Milton’s prose works -- where he lays out his views in extensive,

though sometimes byzantine, detail -- to a literary, narrative format which makes the

application of those views both more concrete and more obscure. The second and much

more specific problem, which has preoccupied Milton scholars almost since the

beginning, is how to reconcile Milton’s portrayal of God in a form highly reminiscent of

an earthly monarch with his well-known disdain for the monarchies of his day, and indeed for absolutist monarchy in general. Any reading of Milton’s God must somehow answer these two issues, with the added complication that -- if the poet-speaker is to be

believed -- the epic is meant to have a consistent, persuasive agenda:

And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer

Before all Temples th’ upright heart and pure,

Instruct me, for Thou know’st . . .

. . . What in me is dark

Illumin, what is low raise and support;

That to the highth of this great Argument

I may assert Eternal Providence,

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And justifie the wayes of God to men. (1.17-26)1

Although there are multiple ways to interpret this goal of “justification” -- a question to

which I will later return -- one of the most popular readings understands “to justifie” in

the common sense of to vindicate or to prove righteous. So, we are put into a situation

where we can safely assume that Milton is trying to translate some of the political and

religious beliefs espoused in his prose into a literary form; we can suppose, based on a

given understanding of “justification,” that one of his key concerns is demonstrating the

righteousness of God; and -- yet -- we also cannot help but see that Milton has also

depicted his narrativized version of God with many of the trappings of the earthly

monarchies he had earlier condemned as oppressive and even sacrilegious. There have

been many attempts to reconcile these apparent conundra, with the dominant approach in

the 20th century -- exemplified by critics such as Stanley Fish and William Empson2 --

being predicated on the supposition that Milton is trying to draw some kind of analogy

(either positive or negative) between Heavenly and earthly politics. As I will argue later

argue, these attempts have generally failed to provide fruitful or satisfying answers to the

enigma of Milton’s God.

My argument in this essay therefore begins by addressing and dispensing with the

two assumptions which, I believe, have misled previous readings of Milton’s God: the

assumption that Milton’s process of “justification” is a straightforward matter of showing

that God acts righteously, and the assumption that the connection which Paradise Lost is

drawing between Heavenly and earthly politics is analogical in nature. In dispensing

1 All Paradise Lost quotes taken from The Riverside Milton, edited by Roy Flannagan (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). 2 See William Empson, Milton’s God (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981) and Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997)

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with an analogical paradigm, I am following in the footsteps of many other 21st century

critics reacting to the apparent deadlock between various analogical readings. Samuel

Fallon, for instance, has read God’s autocratic presentation as lacking much direct

political import at all, being instead the unfortunate side effect of “the poem’s attempt to

solve the metaphysical and epistemological problems of God’s interactions with his created world. God is simply different. He resists narrative expression.”3 But John

Rogers has offered a more fruitful and substantive reworking of God’s political

significance:

[T]he political theology of Milton’s Heaven does not . . . function analogically,

his heavenly polity serving simply as a positive or negative example of, or

contrasting foil for, an ideal political structure or religious vision on earth.

Milton’s shockingly unsympathetic representation of arbitrary authority in

Heaven works, rather . . . to provide a radical mythological point or origin for the

principles of human liberty he had long idealized as the foundation for successful

political institution on earth.4

Setting aside for now Rogers’ proposed relationship between Heavenly autocracy and human liberty (a topic to which I will return later), his fundamental idea of reading

Heaven, and God’s rule over it, as a mythological origin point for human politics has massive interpretive potential. For one, by dismissing the need for analogy, it avoids many of the difficulties encountered by Fish, Empson, and many others: if God’s autocratic rule over Heaven is not meant to be a comparison to earthly politics, but

3 Samuel Fallon, “Milton’s Strange God: Theology and Narrative Form in Paradise Lost,” ELH 79.1 (2012), 48. 4 John Rogers, “The political theology of Milton’s Heaven,” in The New Milton Criticism, ed. Peter C. Herman and Elizabeth Sauer (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012), 70.

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instead to explain the conditions that gave rise to human political community as Milton knew it, then the strangeness of Milton using kingly trappings for his God is significantly lessened. Additionally, dispensing with analogy also prompts us to re-examine exactly what Milton may mean by “justification.” If the goal were to prove God’s righteousness, then doing so by analogy to righteous or unrighteous political systems with which the audience is familiar makes sense; but if the persuasive tactic is not analogical, this is evidence to suggest that the goal of “justif[ying] the wayes of God to men” is both subtler and more complex than merely demonstrating that God acted righteously during the Fall of humanity.

And, finally, reading Milton’s depiction of God as both theological and political origin story resolves one of the more troubling features of most analogical readings: the subordination of the epic’s political meaning to its theological meaning. Many analogical critics ultimately argue that Milton is using political imagery to make a theological point, implying, essentially, that Paradise Lost’s version of God has little to tell us about politics, sovereign authority, or forms of government which Milton has not already more- or-less said in his prose tracts. It is this notion to which I object most of all. As I will argue, Paradise Lost does indeed show further development of Milton’s political beliefs, something which is almost inevitable when translating the ideas of his more analytical prose writing into a literary, narrative format. Fallon has argued that “narrative in

Paradise Lost is an intellectually generative form . . . a mode of theological and metaphysical hypothesis” that allows Milton to work through apparent contradictions encountered in his theological writings.5 I wish to argue something similar regarding

5 S. Fallon, 35-6

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Paradise Lost’s political concerns, that it is generative not merely in resolving internal contradictions of Milton’s political beliefs, but primarily in helping him reconcile those beliefs with the reality of the failure of the Commonwealth and the ignominious end of his own political career.

In the pages that follow, I will begin by briefly reviewing previous criticism, then

re-examining the idea of “justification” to argue that the relationship between Milton’s

God and Milton’s politics is best understood not as analogical but explanatory. Milton’s portrayal of God is, in other words, not meant to parallel human politics but instead to

shed light on its origins. I will go on to argue that these origins are the Fall of humanity

and its surrounding events, which are meant to give context to the inherent fallibility of

human political communities and also create a paradigm for understanding and enduring

those flawed human politics until their endpoint in the form of Christ’s redemption of the

world. As an origin story, Paradise Lost attempts to make comprehensible the scope of

all human politics by shedding light on their foundation.

The basic assumption made by many 20th century critics was that Milton deliberately draws a parallel between Heavenly and earthly politics, using the latter to illustrate the more ineffable aspects of the former. This is, after all, exactly what Raphael says in his disclaimer to Adam when describing the war in Heaven:

What surmounts the reach

Of human sense, I shall delineate so,

By lik’ning spiritual to corporal forms,

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As may express them best, though what if Earth

Be but the shaddow of Heav’n, and things therein

Each to other like, more then on earth is thought? (5.571-6)

Accordingly, the common critical assumption is that while Milton is not saying that God literally sits on a throne surrounded by angels decked out in military insignia (as Raphael goes on to relate), he is trying to express God’s rulership via an analogy to these images.6

Such a use of metaphor and simile to give approximate expression to the inexpressible

qualities of God is a mainstay of Christian religious literature. However, given Milton’s ongoing disdain for earthly monarchies (which was still in effect even after the

Restoration, when Paradise Lost was published), this supposed analogy cannot be understood so straightforwardly. Accordingly, two general critical camps have coalesced: the first argues that Milton’s God is not meant to reflect flawed, earthly monarchies, but instead some kind of perfected heavenly version of autocracy, one to which human kings only falsely aspire. The second argues that Milton deliberately painted his God in the appalling form of an absolutist monarch in order to make some point about the right and wrong ways of conceptualizing God’s authority. As I will argue, however, these two camps both ultimately fail to resolve the inherent contradictions that arise from assuming an analogical relationship between Milton’s God and Milton’s view of earthly monarchs.

Perhaps more importantly, both interpretations also unduly subordinate the political implications of Milton’s depiction of God to his intended theological message.

6 Fish, for instance, argues that Milton’s imagery simultaneously gives the reader a concrete referent for events beyond human comprehension while also forcing the reader to recognize the inadequacy of the comparison (25-7). Michael Bryson argues (with similar tactics but a different goal) that Milton’s use of kingly imagery is likewise a mere metaphor, but a metaphor which readers are supposed to recognize as fundamentally incorrect (23-5).

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Those in the first critical camp of analogy generally argue that Milton’s Heaven is

meant to represent a sort of idealized monarchy, a picture of absolutist kingship done

right, with the implicit understanding that such a situation can rarely or never exist on

earth.7 Such an interpretation either implicitly or explicitly attributes any readerly

discomfort with God’s absolutist style of rulership to a misunderstanding of the text. The

discomfort generally emerges from comparing events like the royal pomp surrounding

the creation of the Son:

. . . th’Empyreal Host

Of Angels by Imperial summons call’d,

Innumerable before th’Almighties Throne

Forthwith from all the ends of Heav’n appeerd

Under thir Hierarchs in order bright

Ten thousand thousand Ensignes high advanc’d (5.583-8)

And God’s autocratically-phrased command that “by my Self have sworn to him shall bow / All knees in Heav’n, and shall confess him Lord” (5.607-8), with Milton’s previous disdain for:

[Those] who through custom, simplicitie, or want of better teaching, have not

more seriously considered Kings, then in the gaudy name of Majesty, and admire

them and thir doings, as if they breath’d not the same breath with other mortal

men.8

7 As examples, see Stevie Davies, Images of Kingship in “Paradise Lost”: Milton’s Politics and Christian Liberty (Columbia MO: University of Missouri Press, 1983), and Robert Fallon, Divided Empire: Milton’s Political Imagery (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989). 8 Eikonoklastes, from The Complete Works of John Milton, vol. vi, edited by N.H. Keeble and Nicholas McDowell (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013), 279.

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As this first interpretive camp would point out, Milton’s fundamental objection to hereditary monarchy was that kings were essentially no better than their subjects, that they held no inherent superiority over other morals. Such a criticism obviously does not apply to God. But this still does not quite explain Milton’s choice to use this particular imagery, and copy the trappings of a form of government which he so often derided, to essentially make an opposite point. If the goal of the poem is to justify the ways of God

(in the sense of proving righteousness), then the justification in this case would be no more substantial than the mere fact that God is God, and entitled to act as He likes; as an effort at persuasion it is lacking. Stanley Fish rather famously tried to cut this Gordian knot back in the 1960s by arguing that Milton’s portrayal of God (in Book III especially) is actually meant as a sort of test for the reader: having undergone “the experience of overhearing a legal brief in which he is the defendant and pronounced guilty,” the reader’s negative reaction is merely proof of being fallen. Milton’s ultimate aim, Fish insists, is to prod readers to recognize their own faults:

God’s word is distinguished from the manner in which the reader receives it. The

‘human impression’ if it is there (and for most of us it will be) is what the reader

must answer for; it is after all his impression . . . To God belongs the essence of

the speech, the completeness, the logical perfection, the perfect accuracy of its

perceptions; all else is the reader’s, the harshness, the sense of irritation, the

querulousness.9

Michael Bryson has (rightly, I think) derided Fish’s argument for depicting Paradise Lost

as an “extended game of poetic ‘gotcha,’” and notes that it relies on the presumption of

9 Fish, 83-6.

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anticipating the inner motives for a given reader’s reaction to the text.10 And, despite his

attempt to sidestep criticism of Milton’s poetic abilities, Fish actually condemns them

further -- if the only way that Milton can justify God to the reader is to start with a reader

that already agrees with Milton’s understanding of God (i.e., a reader that would be able

to interpret their negative reaction in the correct way) then this supposed enterprise of

justification, if understood in this particular sense, is doomed from the start.

Bryson himself is part of the second major group of critics, those who argue that

Milton’s portrayal of God is deliberately negative.11 Bryson takes as a grounding principle the notion that readers who are put off by Milton’s God - or, more specifically,

God-the-Father - are reacting correctly, contending that Milton actually intends to show

the inherent perversity of imagining God in kingly terms:

Milton’s portrayal of God disturbs because it brings to light all of the normally

hidden ugliness of a monarchical concept of God . . . Paradise Lost forces its

readers to stare directly in the face of a God conceived in terms of military might

and kingly power, presenting a God who is obsessed with his own power and

glory, manipulative, defensive, alternately rhetorically incoherent and evasive,

and an arranger of political dialogues designed to mold angelic opinion.12

To this almost Satanic vision of God, Bryson opposes Milton’s portrayal of the Son in

both Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain’d, who rejects all these same trappings of

military might and kingly power. Milton, according to Bryson, is showing us two

10 Michael Bryson, The Tyranny of Heaven: Milton’s Rejection of God as King (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 22-25. 11 For these, see Empson and also A.J.A. Waldock, Paradise Lost and Its Critics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1947). Empson’s reading of God is also famously predicated on the notion that Christian theodicy itself is inherently flawed. 12 Bryson, 25.

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alternative ways of depicting divinity in human terms, one (the Father) a wrongheaded

reflection of human political evils, and the other (the Son) a more proper defiance of

false, fallen notions of hierarchy. Though Bryson’s contrast of the Father and the Son as

characters has a great deal of merit, he is -- despite having so derided Fish for a “gotcha”

reading -- also forced to assert that Milton is playing a sort of trick on readers by giving

them a deliberately disturbing God. The second critical perspective as embodied by

Bryson additionally asks us to selectively assume that the poetic voice is congruent with

authorial intent, and at other times to assume that it is not - for instance, to take

seriously the poet’s praise of the Son, and yet to disregard not only the poet’s direct

praise of the Father but also the repeated assertion that the Son and the Father are in

harmony with one another, that “in [the Son] all his Father shon / Substantially

express’d” (3.140).

Aside from any internal contradiction, however, both of these critical camps also tend operate as though Milton were merely using his political beliefs to better illustrate theological concepts related to God. This is certainly true on some level, but it neglects to consider the ways in which Milton is using his depiction of God to better illustrate political points, and indeed to reconsider and reinvigorate his political vision by putting it

into a literary format. Critical debate along these lines is ongoing in reference to Samson

Agonistes, Milton’s post-Paradise Lost closet drama, sparked by its potential

endorsement of terroristic violence in pursuit of simultaneously political and religious

goals.13 As Samson Agonistes arguably makes clear, not only did Milton continue to use

literature to think through political problems even during the Restoration, but the lines

13 For an overview, see Tobias Gregory, “The Political Messages of Samson Agonistes,” SEL 50.1 (2010), 175-203.

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between political and theological action were increasingly blurry. Rejecting an

analogical reading of Paradise Lost and instead viewing it as a sort of political origin

myth gets around the problem of falling into a political / theological dichotomy, and hews

much closer to the conflation seen in Samson Agonistes a few years later.

Another area which is lacking in previous readings, and therefore must be re-

examined and re-complicated, is how we approach the epic’s stated purpose of

“justification.” To fully re-frame the relationship Milton is drawing between Heavenly

and earthly politics, we must turn back to the language of the opening lines in question.

Book I’s invocation of the Muse ends with Milton’s wish “That to the highth of this great

Argument / I may assert Eternal Providence, / And justifie the wayes of God to men”

(1.24-6). The phrasing of the latter two clauses implies that they are dependent on one

another; rather than pursuing two separate goals, Milton apparently intends to accomplish

the latter by means of the former. However, these clauses admit of two different

readings. This first and most common reading understands “to assert” in the sense of “to

champion” or “to take the cause of,” and “to justify” in the sense of “to declare or to

prove to be righteous.” In this reading, the passage signifies that Milton will take up the

cause of Eternal Providence and therefore prove that the ways of God are righteous. But

both of the terms in question had, and indeed still have, extant alternative meanings. “To

assert” can also mean to declare or to affirm; “to justify” can also mean to verify or to corroborate. Using these meanings drastically reframes the issue at hand, from one of defense to one of definition. Thus, to “assert Eternal Providence” may alternatively mean

“to assert/affirm that Providence is Eternal,” and “justifie the wayes of God” may

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alternatively mean “to verify/corroborate (the existence or nature) of the ways of God.”14

In the second reading, therefore, the passage signifies that Milton will show the eternal

nature of providence and therefore demonstrate the existence, or perhaps the workings of,

the ways of God. I would like to argue that both of these readings are valid and intended;

to a Christian like Milton, the nature of God and the righteousness of God would be

fundamentally inseparable. But the second reading shows that Milton’s main point of

contention is not to debate the ethical status of the actions which God takes, but rather the existence and nature of those actions. To properly understand that nature will, of course, necessarily prove God’s actions to have been right all along. And yet the distinction between proving that God acted righteously, and proving how and why God acted (which will ultimately show God’s righteousness) is deeply important. Adding to this, we must note the emphasis that Milton places on the ways of God, and not on God himself -- to debate the behavior of God is not precisely the same as debating the nature or character of God.

This distinction is especially important in light of the additional, specifically theological meaning of justification, which refers to the process of humans being cleansed from sin and reconciled to God.15 For Milton, the ways of God are always and

finally embodied in the figure of Christ, who is the culmination and fulfillment of God’s

interventions on Earth. When describing this process in De Doctrina Christiana, Milton

uses some of the same language as the opening of Paradise Lost:

14 All of the above definitions were extant in the 17th century. See “justify, v.,” definitions 2a and 3a, and “assert, v.,” definitions 2 and 7a, both in the OED Online, Oxford University Press (accessed April 2018). 15 Again, see “justify, v.,” definition 1, in the OED Online, Oxford University Press (accessed May 2018).

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For religion’s supreme mystery is not Christ, but God the father in Christ [. . .]

Christ did not come to make himself, but the father, manifest: John 14:8-9 ‘he was

justified in the spirit’ -- for who would be justified rather than the father? [. . .]

He who was in the son, when reconciliation had been made, returned with the son

into glory, or he took himself into glory which, supremely, he had achieved in the

son.16

Milton here makes the potentially radical implication that the Father is justifying himself through the Son; saying, in other words, that theological justification is a bidirectional process between God and humanity primarily enacted and facilitated by Christ.17 It

stands to reason, then, that if there is an element of bidirectionality in theological

justification, Milton’s overall project of justification in Paradise Lost (which holistically

incorporates both theology and politics) also relies on the Son as a sort of go-between, a

means by which Heavenly and earthly politics can comprehend and interact with one

another. Thus, as Bryson argued, the Son and the Father must be viewed in politically

distinct ways; but I argue also that the relationship is translational and complementary

rather than contrasting. This relationship simultaneously casts the Son as not a full

member of the godhead (Milton was famously non-Trinitarian), but also means that the

character of the Son is made more directly applicable to human political community in

ways that the Father is not.

16 De Doctrina Christiana, Book One, Chapter V, from The Complete Works of John Milton, vol. viii, ed. and trans. by John K. Hale and J. Donald Cullington (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012), 177. The introduction to this volume also addresses the controversy over De Doctrina’s authenticity, arguing that the balance of evidence indicates that the text is most likely genuine. 17 For a more detailed exploration of this concept in relationship to Milton’s theology, see Russell M. Hillier, Milton’s Messiah (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), 39-47.

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To summarize, my rereading of Book I’s invocation reframes Milton’s treatment of God in three key ways, all of which have important consequences for relating Milton’s portrayal of God to human political institutions. First, this rereading shows that Milton’s positive depiction of God is predicated on the eternal nature of Providence. Thus, we can conclude that God transcends the human experience of time, and since all human politics take place within time, direct comparison is inadvisable. Second, my rereading shows that Milton’s focus on the “wayes” of God indicates that he is more concerned with vindicating God’s actions than demonstrating the righteousness of God’s nature, which is largely taken as a given. Therefore, a political reading of God must focus on God’s interactions with the human political sphere, rather than using his style of rule in Heaven to read into his character. Third, my rereading shows that any form of justification between God and humanity is bidirectional and mediated by Christ, who reconciles God and humanity to one another. This indicates that God’s relationship to human politics must be read through the lens of the Son’s salvific role, and specifically what that role implies within the political sphere.

Taken together, these conclusions point definitively away from the impulse to view Milton’s portrayal of God as directly metaphorically or analogically related to human politics. Instead, they show God’s rule of Heaven to be at a further level of remove, not intended as a direct parallel but instead a sort of necessary precursor, a backdrop, to the human political structures which will become necessary after the Fall.

As I intend to argue, God’s actions in anticipation/response to the Fall (the two categories are shown as indistinguishable for a being which lies beyond time) help explain the origin and thus the nature of human politics as we know them, a nature that relates directly to

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the role of the Son/Christ. The Son as Christ thus emerges as a being who interposes into

time, and into human politics, to give guidance and definition to those politics. The

scope of Paradise Lost’s concern in this matter is in fact laid out in the opening lines:

Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit

Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast

Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,

With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,

Sing Heav’nly Muse (1.1-6)

The scope of Paradise Lost is the scope of all earthly time, explained and encapsulated in the story of its origin. Accordingly, Milton’s justificatory project, at least in its political sense, is therefore tied to how his portrayal of God explains the origins of human politics, in the Fall of humanity, gives context to the woe inherently contained therewithin, and also forecasts the end or the way out of human politics, in the form of Christ’s redemption of the world. The politics of Heaven must therefore primarily be understood not as a simple parallel, but rather as the state from which human political community descends and to which it will eventually re-ascend.

The relationship between sovereignty and the origins of political community has

been explored extensively by 20th and 21st century theorists, especially Carl Schmitt and

Giorgio Agamben. However, this potential theoretical lens has largely gone unexplored

by Milton scholars, and almost entirely unexplored as it relates to Paradise Lost. The

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first effort to analyze Paradise Lost using this theoretical tradition, to my knowledge, is a

2014 article by early modern scholar Daniel Juan Gil,18 who argues that Milton’s God both defines certain parameters for human nature and encourages the capacity to grow beyond those parameters -- thus demonstrating the importance of potentiality and flexibility in Milton’s view of ideal political community. In this section, I will make use of the theoretical framework outlined by Gil, but revise key elements of his argument as they apply to Milton and to Paradise Lost specifically. First, I will explore how Milton’s political and theological attitudes changed between the publication of The Tenure of

Kings and Magistrates (Gil’s main piece of prose evidence) and the publication of

Paradise Lost nearly twenty years later. And second, I will demonstrate how these changes reemphasized the centrality of Fallenness in Milton’s vision of the political, thus showing that, however Milton may imagine ideal and un-Fallen communities, his view of the current and necessary state of human politics is defined more by frustration than by flexibility.

The modern critical tradition linking sovereignty with the origins of political community arguably begins with Schmitt’s theory of political theology,19 a theory which

was heavily revised in the late 20th century by Agamben. Both thinkers share the belief

that sovereign power is a necessary precondition for political community -- and, more specifically, that legal and political norms must be founded and backed by a higher power

18 Daniel Juan Gil, “What Does Milton’s God Want? Human Nature, Radical Conscience, and the Sovereign Power of the Nation-State,” Literature and Theology 28.4 (2014), 389-410. 19 Namely, that: All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development [ . . .] but also because of their systemic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2005), 36.

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which dwells outside the law and thus has the prerogative to suspend it. However,

Agamben dispenses with Schmitt’s explicitly Christian framework, and instead looks back to the Classical concept of the homo sacer, a kind of life outside of both human and divine law:

Homo sacer presents the originary figure of life taken into the sovereign ban and

preserves the memory of the original exclusion through which the political

dimension was first constituted [. . . ]If we give the name bare life or sacred life to

the life that constitutes the first content of sovereign power, then [ . . . ] the life

caught in the sovereign ban is the life that is originally sacred -- that is, that may

be killed but not sacrificed -- and, in this sense, the production of bare life is the

originary activity of sovereignty.20

For Agamben, the idea of the sovereign exception has its origin in the sovereign’s ability to define different modes of life -- namely, the boundaries that separate civil life from bare or sacred life, which is not subject to the law and defined solely by its vulnerability to being killed. Agamben’s approach dispenses with Schmitt’s notion that political community existed in first a theological and then a secularized form, and instead suggests that those very theological structures which Schmitt misidentified as original, along with the secular structures that descended from them, were both born from the original sovereign decision that separated life into its civil and bare forms. The “higher power” that Schmitt saw as a necessary guarantor of the law is in fact a reference back to the values embedded in that originary decision, which, in defining the boundaries of human life, also implicitly defines the boundaries of human nature. As Gil states, Agamben’s

20 Giorgio Agamben, Homor sacer, trans. By Daniel Heller-Roazan (Stanford CA: Stanford UP, 1998), 53.

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theory denies the idea of a “transcendental human nature rooted in timeless structures of the human body and mind,” but instead posits that “human political communities are nevertheless always constructed on the hypothesis of a particular and distinctive version of human nature that is defined and guaranteed by a transcendental sovereign power.”21

Gil’s coinage of “transcendence” here refers not necessarily to any religious conviction, or even an appeal to biological essentialism, but merely to any powerful concept which is

“transcendent” in that it lies outside and beyond the bounds of the particular political community that believes in it.

This framework has profound implications in the realm of ethics and political decision-making, but most importantly for our purposes here, Gil shows how the transcendent nature of a sovereign power can paradoxically undermine an apparently all- encompassing authority to define the boundaries of political and civil life. He argues:

The transcendental principle to which a political order appeals is, by its very

nature, outside of the concrete political order. That transcendental perspective

can therefore provide a standpoint from which to critique or undermine the

political community and its particular vision of human nature.22

In other words, because sovereign power must appeal to a principle outside and beyond itself in order to ground its own authority and thus enforce a corresponding view of human nature, this means that subjects can, given enough savvy and disgruntlement, appeal to that same principle to defy sovereign power and redefine, or at least dispute, its corresponding definition of human nature. This model describes, in broad terms, much of the religious and political conflicts which dominated Europe in the 17th century, and is

21 Gil, 395 22 Ibid, 397

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also particularly descriptive of the politics surrounding both the English Civil War and

the rise and fall of the Commonwealth. Gil uses it to explain both the rise of divine-right

monarchy (because nation-states wanted to expand their power over the populace, they

accordingly strengthened their appeal to the transcendental principle) and also the

widespread theologically-based opposition to those monarchies (foregrounding God as a

justification for the political order means that appeals to God are massively more

effective at undermining that same political order).23

This same debate about the God-given nature of kingship was also of primary concern to Milton in his political writings of the late 1640s. The Tenure of Kings and

Magistrates, written by Milton in 1648-9 to drum up public support for the execution of

Charles I, confronts the question of divine-right kingship directly, and, as Gil shows, prefigures many of the insights later developed by Schmitt and Agamben. One of

Milton’s key tactics in that pamphlet is to emphasize the separation between a particular political order and the transcendental principle (in this case, God) that both grounds and may undermine that order. Particular forms of government are all, according to Tenure,

“a human ordinance . . . which we are there taught is the will of God wee should alike

submitt to;”24 further, since scripture “cannot show the time when God ever set on the throne [kings] or thir forefathers, but onely when the people chose them” and since “God

ascribes as often to himself the casting down of Princes from the throne,” Milton

concludes that a monarchical or non-monarchical government “is found in Scripture to be

all one; visible only in the people, and depending meerly upon justice and demerit.” 25 In

23 Ibid, 398. 24 The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, from The Complete Works of John Milton, vol. vi, 160. 25 Ibid, 161.

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other words, God functions as the transcendental foundation for political order, but can

function as such (or merely be appealed to as such) both in favor of or against any given

form of government which the people may choose. Gil concludes that Milton’s God, as

envisioned in Tenure, both wants humans to submit to their chosen form of sovereign

order, and yet simultaneously “militates against the particular form of human life that that

sovereign order secures.” This seemingly paradoxical stance implies that what Milton’s

God ultimately wants is for people “to transcend any politically delimited human nature” even as they necessarily dwell within one.26

For the Milton of 1649, this may very well have been so. That Milton wrote in defense of the newly-founded Commonwealth, still in flux but seemingly full of potential; at the close of a Civil War which had completely upended the nature of English politics as he knew it, Milton had good reason to believe in an endless human capacity for political reinvention, and thus to be enamored with a vision of God which encouraged the same. But that vision did not remain unchanged across the later scope of his political career or his prose writings. This, I would argue, is where Gil’s analysis goes wrong; he uses the vision of God Milton presented in 1649 to analyze the one that appears in

Paradise Lost in 1667, assuming that Milton retained the same belief in God’s mandate of potentiality and flexibility.27 Accordingly, I will now turn to The Readie and Easie

Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, Milton’s last published prose work, in order to

26 Gil, 402. 27 Although there are debates about how early in his life Milton began writing Paradise Lost, he continued to work on it post-Restoration. Early biographer John Aubrey claimed, based on the testimony of Milton’s nephew, that the work was completed around 1663 (see “Minutes on the Life of Mr. John Milton,” in The Riverside Milton, 5). Thus, the ideas it contains are doubtless more reflective of his thinking in the latter years of the Commonwealth and the early years of the Restoration than they are of his mindset in the 1640s.

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show how Milton revised his previous stance on God’s ambivalence toward particular

forms of political order in light of the looming reinstatement of the monarchy.

The tract appeared in two editions in February and April of 1660, shortly after

General George Monck called back the pro-monarchy members of Parliament who had been removed in 1648, a move which all but guaranteed the restoration of Charles II to the throne in May of the same year. The Readie and Easie Way was Milton’s last-ditch

attempt to persuade the public against the Restoration, and by the writing of the second

edition he most likely knew this attempt was destined to fail. In it, Milton dispenses with

any celebration of flexibility, and instead argues firmly to the Commonwealth as an ideal

form of government:

A free Commonwealth, [is] not only held by wisest men in all ages the noblest, the

manliest, the equallest, the justest government, . . . most cherishing to vertue and

true religion, but also (I may say it with greatest probabilitie) planely commended,

or rather enjoind by our Saviour himself, to all Christians, not without remarkable

disallowance, and the brand of gentilism upon kingship. God in much displeasure

gave a king to the Israelites, and imputed it a sin to them that they sought one: but

Christ apparently forbids his disciples to admitt of any such heathenist

government.28

This commitment to the Commonwealth comes packaged with a refocusing of attention

on Christ, who received relatively little attention in Tenure. Unlike the Milton of 1649,

the Milton of 1660 is seemingly convinced that -- although the Old Testament God

allowed to Israelites to indulge in the sinful practice -- monarchy is an unfit form of

28 The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (2nd edition), from The Complete Works of John Milton vol. vi, 485-7.

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government for Christians. Quoting Christ’s criticism of gentile kings in Luke 22:24-30, and especially his commandment to his disciples that “he that is greatest among you, let him be as the younger; and he that is chief, as he that serveth,” Milton concludes:

And what government coms neerer to this precept of Christ, then a free

Commonwealth; wherin they who are greatest, are perpetual servants and drudges

to the public at thir own cost and changes, neglect thir own affairs; yet are not

elevated above thir bretheren; live soberly in thir families, walk the streets as

other men, may be spoken to freely, friendly, without adoration.29

Departing from the calculated ambivalence of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, The

Readie and Easie Way more forcefully insists that the Commonwealth, with some

adjustments, can be the best available form of government; that Christians are in fact

prohibited from forming monarchical governments; and, by implication, that to act in

support of the Commonwealth is to act in accordance with the will of Christ. The Milton

of 1649 wrote carefully, and with a certain level of even-handedness, in order to persuade

skittish readers that the seemingly massive act of beheading their king was both morally

justifiable and liable to create a better outcome for their nation; correspondingly, he

seemed more entranced by the sheer human potential to reorganize and refine forms of

government. The Milton of 1660 wrote in an effort to stop the collapse of everything his

political career had worked for, with little to gain by moderation and little to lose by

directness. This latter Milton is more firmly wedded to the Commonwealth, and --

perhaps most importantly -- newly concerned with the human potential to change forms

of government for the worse as much as, if not more so, than the better. In many ways,

29 Ibid, 487.

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the Milton of Readie appears disillusioned about the very flexibility implicitly lauded in

Tenure; and, most importantly, this disillusionment comes much closer to the beliefs and

attitudes which he held while composing Paradise Lost under house arrest during the

next few years.

A key component of this change in attitude was a greater concern with the role of

Christ in human politics. As discussed in the first section of this essay, the Milton of De

Doctrina Christiana saw God and Christ as having distinct but complementary roles the

relationships to human political community: although God was the ultimate source of all

righteousness, Christ was God’s chief manifestation into the human world and thus, by

inference, must be God’s main vehicle for intervention into human politics. Although

the dating of De Doctrina Christiana is difficult, the manuscript was most likely recopied

and finalized for the blind Milton in the very late 1650s,30 placing it squarely within the transition between the politics of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and those of The

Readie and Easie Way. To comprehend the connection between disillusionment with political flexibility and a renewed interest in the political dimensions of Christ, we must revise the Gil-Agamben model delineated above in order to accommodate Milton’s various changes in belief. The latter Milton separates out the figures of God and Christ as they apply to the political sphere: the one ambivalently allows humans to choose any given form of government, but the other lays out specific guidelines by which some forms of government are more or less righteous. If we accept the Gil-Agamben model - in which political communities are founded around a particular vision of human nature backed up by a transcendental sovereign power -- then it seems clear that Christ, rather

30 Hale and Cullington, Introduction to The Complete Works of John Milton, vol. viii, p. xxii-xxiii.

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than God, is assuming the role of that transcendental power. It is Christ who, for Milton,

provides the horizons of moral decision-making which any notion of political community requires: the command cited by Milton, “he that is greatest among you, let him be as the

younger; and he that is chief, as he that serveth,” delineates the political conditions under

which humans will thrive and the conditions under which they will not. This act of

delineation assumes and asserts are particular vision of human nature, one that can be

appealed to - in the form of Christ and his words - by those political subjects that exist

within sovereign regimes based upon a belief in Christ.

But we cannot merely shift our focus from God to Christ. The Gil-Agamben

framework assumes the existence of a single “level” of transcendental principle -- i.e.,

regardless of whether that power is imagined as a god or gods, an abstract concept or a

set of abstract concepts, it is taken collectively as the one founding element that grounds

an understanding of human nature and thus of political community. However, Milton,

working from a literalist interpretation of Christianity and from a specifically non-

Trinitarian theology, appears to see God and Christ, though working in congruence, as

existing on two separate levels: while Christ’s salvific function is the transcendental

principle for human communities, God the Father functions as the transcendental

principle which founds and guarantees the rule and essential nature of Christ. This two-

level system is significant in that it puts God at an additional step of removal from human

political community, and resolves the apparent discontinuity between the Old Testament

God’s ambivalent stance on kingship and the New Testament Christ’s outright

condemnation of it. It is not so much that God’s stance is ambivalent but that God is not,

in Milton’s version of Christianity, a means through which the particular details of human

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political community can be justified or comprehended. Christ lies beyond the community

such that he can be usefully appealed to; God, lying beyond even Christ, is not useful in

this particular manner, except in that he is the transcendent principle to which Christ

appeals. However, as I will argue in the following sections, the two-level system is

especially important in that it casts humanity has having two layers of determinants

underlying its nature. This system is in fact what ties together Milton’s disillusionment

with political flexibility and his greater concern with Christ. The first layer, in the form

of God, sets up general parameters for sin and righteousness; the second, in the form of

Christ, sets up the particular, and much more limiting, parameters under which human

communities may organize to foster righteousness.

III

Paradise Lost tells the story of the origins of this two-level arrangement, with the characters’ choices at key moments performing work similar to the sovereign decisions described in the Gil-Agamben framework. These choices set up the nature of both the

Son/Christ and humanity. Putting these events in narrative form is, as the characters and the poetic voice repeatedly acknowledge, a complicated effort of translation: Milton apparently believes that these events truly happened, but in order to tell them, and especially to tell them in a literary format, he must often speak figuratively or approximately. Therefore, we must account for two additional levels of complication in understanding how the narrative explains the origins and limitations of human political community. The first is that, while Agamben and Gil frequently use the term “sovereign decision” in their theoretical framework, this term does not necessarily refer to a

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particular decision by an individual with sovereign power; rather, it refers to the division of different possibilities and types of life delineated in a given state of being (collectively creating a version of “human nature”), which are backed by an appeal to a transcendent sovereign power. Milton adds to this mix a specifically bidirectional notion of justification, meaning that these originary choices will in fact be made through the interaction of God with his creations. Therefore, what we see in Paradise Lost is not simply God laying down particular commands about what human life will be like.

Instead, the defining of possibilities comes about through the interaction of God laying out demands or requirements and his creations (the Son, Adam and Eve) choosing to be obedient or disobedient to these terms. I will refer to these choices as “originary moments,” that is, interactions which function similar to the Gil-Agamben sovereign decision and lay down definitional parameters for forms of human life. It is, as I will argue, two originary moments (the Son’s voluntary sacrifice, and Adam and Eve’s eating of the fruit) consisting of choices between states of obedience or disobedience which create the two levels of determination underlying human nature and thus human politics.

In order to explicate these choices, we must also contend with the temporal confusion inherent in Milton’s premise, which attempts to tell a linear story about a God who transcends time. While the Gil-Agamben framework is secular, and therefore bound to a more concrete notion of temporality, Milton is attempting to portray events quite literally beyond the boundaries of temporality as we know it. The first originary moment occurs when God asks for a voluntary sacrifice to redeem humanity, and the Son chooses to “attend the will / Of his great Father” (3.270-1). This occurs in Book III, well before

Adam and Even choose to eat the forbidden fruit, but is nevertheless made in direct

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response to that choice as predicted by God’s perfect foreknowledge. To add to this temporal confusion, immediately afterward, God narrates the entire future history of

Christ’s rule, the state of being now laid out for the Son as a consequence of his choice:

Because in thee

Love hath abounded more then Glory abounds,

Therefore thy Humiliation shall exalt

With thee thy Manhood also to this Throne;

Here shalt thou sit incarnate, here shalt Reign

Both God and Man, Son both of God and Man,

Anointed universal King, all Power

I give thee, reign for ever, and assume

Thy Merits. (3.311-19)

This ascension will eventually result in the second coming, the final judgment, and the ultimate recreation of the world recreation of the world. But despite his promise that the

Son will “reign for ever,” God finishes by saying:

Then thou they regal Scepter shalt lay by,

For regal Scepter then no more shall need,

God shall be All in All. (3.339-341)

The Son’s sacrifice -- which both precedes and is made in direct response to Adam and

Eve’s choice -- will lead him to reign forever, and yet, paradoxically, at the end of the world will also lead him to surrender his scepter and let God be (in a paraphrase of 1

Corinthians 15:28) all in all.

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These apparent temporal paradoxes can be resolved by showing how the Father and the Son relate differently to time, and thus how the Son’s choice actually has the effect of delineating the space of time in which that choice will be meaningful. God, being omniscient, looks and speaks “from his prospect high, / Wherein past, present and future he beholds” (3.77-8), and the wandering tenses of his dialogue reflect this. His narration of the fall of humanity switches from future (“So will fall, / Hee and his faithless Progenie” (3.95-6)) to past (“Ingrate, he had of mee / All he could have; I made him just and right, / Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall” (3.97-9)) and then to present (“They trespass, Authors to themselves in all / Both what they judge and what they choose” (3.122-3)), without note or hesitation. From God’s perspective, the Fall of humanity has at once not yet happened, has already happened, and is currently happening. What’s more, his speech here is clearly not directed just at Adam and Eve, who in a linear sense have yet to Fall, or to Satan and his angels, who have already

Fallen, but to the “now” of Milton’s readers, whose own sins and transgressions are being explained and condemned in this passage. God’s perspective collapses all time from Fall to redemption into one entity:

So Heav’nly love shall outdoo Hellish hate,

Giving to death, and dying to redeeme,

So dearly to redeem what Hellish hate

So easily destroy’d, and still destroyes

In those who, when they may, accept not grace. (3.298-302)

As Judith Scherer Herz has observed, “as God enters the poem he identifies a now that carries with it the meanwhile of all human time from a present that is not yet in time to

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the end of time,” in effect, “collapsing the first temporal event (the Fall) into the

messianic event.”31 As Herz points out, this perspective denotes something similar to

Agamben’s notion of messianic time, which flattens all history into a legible whole rather

a series of contingent events. 32 This process of making-legible is observable in the very

form of Paradise Lost, which -- besides being a physical text in which the reader can

move backwards or forwards at will -- also moves forwards and backwards with its

narration of events. The first event, if events are ordered in a chronological fashion, is

God’s creation of the Son when “as yet this World was not” (5.576), as related by

Raphael to Adam in Book V; the last, narrated to Adam by Michael in Book XII, is the

creation of “New Heav’ns [and] new Earth” (12.549) after the final judgment. However,

the linear story of the poem itself begins with Satan falling and ends with Adam and Eve

leaving Eden, a much shorter span of time, which nevertheless is made to both explain

and contain the wide scope of narrated events. Milton uses the conventional features of

the epic -- beginning in medias res, having events narrated in flashback -- to invite the

reader into this God’s-eye view of all human time, able to apprehend past, present and

future like a well-known book in which one may flip to any page in any order, or even

consider the whole in a single glance.

This viewpoint also shows why it is not paradox to say that Christ will both reign

forever and lay down his scepter: the Son volunteering to sacrifice himself to reverse the

upcoming Fall, which prompts God’s promotion of Christ to the Throne, marks the

threshold within which the rule of Christ is made possible. The final judgement, the final

31 Judith Scherer Herz, “Meanwhile: (un)making time in Paradise Lost,” in The New Milton Criticism, 88- 9. 32 See Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains, trans. Patricia Daly (Stanford CA: Stanford UP, 2005).

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undoing of the Fall, marks the other end of that threshold; the scepter is resigned because, as God says, it shall not be needed. Before the Son volunteers, and after the Judgement, the act of sacrifice which grounds the kind of sovereign rule embodied in Christ ceases to hold is definitional power; it is not so much that Christ’s reign is abolished but that it ceases to be conceptually possible. So, in this sense, Christ will rule “forever” within those boundaries which make his rule a viable concept. Importantly, this “forever” encompasses, and therefore can serve as the transcendent principle for, the form of community inaugurated in the second originary moment: Eve and Adam’s consumption of the fruit which God has forbidden, marking the Fall of humanity and thus the second

“level” which defines human nature. In other words, the first originary moment is enacted between God and Christ, and God acts as its transcendent principle; one of the consequences of this set of choices is to delineate a finite section of time, that is, the time between the Son’s volunteering and his final judgment of the world, which is in fact one ongoing and inevitable movement from Fall to redemption. That cordoning-off of human history becomes the arena in which the second originary moment occurs and takes effect.

The first originary moment is “first” most importantly in the sense of superseding or overpowering the second, regardless of the somewhat jumbled cause-and-effect relationship entailed in God’s foreknowledge.

In order to comprehend the significance of the second originary moment, we must also look more closely at what both unites and differentiates it from the first one: namely, the free choice to obey or disobey the requirements laid down by God. Indeed, the conditions of that choice are generally a sticking point for readerly discomfort with

Milton’s God, because the actions he demands of his creations are seemingly arbitrary.

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However, as Rogers has argued, that very arbitrariness may in fact be what makes the

choices of God’s creations truly free. Reformation Trinitarians, such as Calvin, generally

saw the entire relationship between the Father and the Son as defined by necessity:

despite the godhead as a whole being all-powerful, the inner workings of the Trinity were deterministically bound such that “the Father had no choice but to create the Son, the

Father has no choice but to demand judicial satisfaction for the crime of Adam’s fall, and the Son has no choice but to be sacrificed.”33 Milton’s non-Trinitarian theology, on the

other hand, not only subordinates the Son to the Father but also denies any necessity or

determinism in their relationship. In De Doctrina, he writes:

It is readily apparent that it is not by a necessity of nature, as is customarily

claimed, but by the Father’s decree and will that the Son had been in whatever

way begotten, just as much as he had been appointed high priest and king, and

raised from the dead.34

If Milton understood the Son’s priesthood, kingship, and resurrection (all of which are

rewards for his voluntary sacrifice) to be purely acts of God’s will -- that is, arbitrary, in

the sense of not being in some way required -- this implies that the demand for an

expiatory sacrifice may equally be an act of will. Indeed, although God explains that

“[Man] with his whole posteritie must dye, / Dye hee or justice must” (3.209-10), the poetic voice calls the asked-for sacrifice a “deadly forfeiture, and ransom set” (3.220-1),

implying that God has fixed the price of disobedience himself, rather than hearkening to a

standard of justice somehow superseding his own will. Regardless, the choice for the

Son to volunteer for the sacrifice is cast in unambiguous terms as a free act: God asks for

33 Rogers, 73. 34 De Doctrina, 133.

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the sacrifice to be “some other able, and as willing” (3.211) as humanity was in its

disobedience. Furthermore, the poet insists -- without apparent trace of irony -- that had

the Son not volunteered, “without redemption all mankind / Must have bin lost, adjug’d

to Death and Hell / By doom severe” (3.222-24), indicating that the Son’s refusal to volunteer was indeed a real possibility. Thus, when the poet later praises the Son for his

“filial Obedience” that “attends the will / Of his great Father” (3.269-71), these qualities should not be interpreted as predetermining or necessitating the Son’s decision, but rather as the qualities which render his free act so very meritorious. Rogers views this relationship as indicative of “a universe governed by a radically free, arbitrary God, whose commandments can only be obeyed freely . . . unbound or untethered by reason or any other faculty naturally predisposing the subject to the good.”35 In other words, only

an arbitrary commandment can truly be obeyed freely, because no overriding values

(such as reason, obligation, or natural law) are at play beyond the pure choice to be

obedient or disobedient. It is this factor that makes God’s demand and the Son’s

voluntary sacrifice add up to something like a sovereign decision: both choices are

originary and independent, and, beholden to no previous or overriding order, they can

therefore in themselves create a new order.

A similar concept is at work with God’s command that Adam and Eve not

consume the fruit of the tree of knowledge. This commandment is “the only sign of

[their] obedience left / Among so many signes of power and rule” (4.428-9), and God

calls it “the Pledge of [their] Obedience and [their] Faith” (8.325); in other words, the

only function of the prohibition against the fruit of the tree of knowledge is to be an

35 Rogers, 80.

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arbitrary but absolute command, a choice between obedience and disobedience in its purest form. The choice to lay down that prohibition, and corresponding choice to eat or not to eat, are also both originary, independent, and thus sovereign in the same way that the Son’s choice was. The Son chose obedience to God’s chosen demand, and while that choice did delineate the boundaries of historical time, it also uplifted and empowered the chooser. This is because, in Milton’s view, obedience to the will of God is a choice that, paradoxically, maintains freedom, possibility, and potentiality; disobedience limits all of these. Obedience is cast as an ongoing state: although the Son is given a single dramatic moment of volunteering, his entire reign will nevertheless be a continuous act of obedience. Similarly, as long as Adam and Even continued in not eating the fruit, they were in a state of continually choosing obedience, the one and only task required of them: they had “no other service then to keep / This one, this easie charge . . . not to taste that

onely Tree / Of knowledge” (4.420-4). But an act of disobedience, once chosen, seems to

destroy that state and erase all its privileges, including “free leave so large to all things

else, and choice / Unlimited of manifold delights” (4.434-5). Although some critics have interpreted Book III’s prediction that “God shall be all in all” (3.341) after the final judgment as indicating the imposition of more control and homogeneity, Diane McColley has pointed out that the original Greek and Latin Biblical passages which Milton is paraphrasing retain a clear sense of plurality and multiplicity.36 The phrase is mentioned

again in Book VI, when the Son takes on God’s power in order to defeat Satan’s army:

Scepter and Power, thy giving, I assume,

36 Diane Kelsey McColley, “The Individuality of Creatures in Paradise Lost,” in “All in All”: Unity, Diversity, and the Miltonic Perspective, ed. Charles W. Durham and Kristin A. Pruitt (Selinsgrove PA: Susquehanna UP, 1999), 24-5.

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And gladlier shall resign, when in the end

Thou shalt be All in All, and I in thee

For ever, and in mee all whom thou lov’st. (6.730-733)

These lines are spoken chronologically earlier than those in Book III, and refer to the

restored peace in Heaven once Satan and his rebel angels have been driven out. The relationship between the unfallen angels and God is thus revealed to be equivalent to the relationship that will eventually exist between the redeemed humanity and God. The angels are “in” the Son and the Son is “in” the father, a state of mutual intermingling analogous to that which Raphael narrates in Book VIII: “if Spirits embrace, / Total they mix” (8.626-7), without any apparent worry over loss of self. All of these unions

indicate, McColley argues, that the capacity for “interimmersibility without loss of

identity”37 is a defining trait of being reconciled with God. This is also the future that

Raphael promises Adam and Even in Book V, if they remain unfallen:

Time may come when men

With Angels may participate, and find

No inconvenient Diet, nor too light Fare:

And from these corporal nutriments perhaps

Your bodies may at last turn all to Spirit,

Improv’d by tract of time, and wingd ascend

Ethereal, as wee, or may at choice

Here of in Heav’nly Paradises dwell. (5.493-500)

37 Ibid, 27.

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This passage represents an ideal, unfallen human state, a version of humanity that exists purely under the sovereign rule of God, unencumbered by additional limits to its nature.

Gil rightly sees this passage as representative of the state which God desires for humanity.

It is not the freedom to do this or that but rather the somewhat paradoxical

freedom to -- on the one hand -- live within a sovereign order that defines human

nature and yet -- on the other hand -- to push against that definition of human

nature by cultivating different forms of being and different forms of life, to

engage in self-transformation in the direction of ever greater openness in the

definition of one’s nature (the state that angels already enjoy).38

However, this ideal state only appears in Paradise Lost as a missed opportunity, a future which may have happened had Adam and Eve not fallen. In such a future, the Son’s sacrifice would not have taken place either, and so in the sovereign order created by this different originary moment, the conditions under which humanity would have existed would have entailed a much more flexible vision of human nature and thus also of political community. But, as I have been arguing, the occurrence of the Fall and the

Son’s sacrifice in anticipation/reaction to it add additional layers of sovereign order, additional constraints on human nature. Essentially, the first originary moment exists to mitigate the negative effects of the second, but it is mitigation only: while still Fallen, humanity will never, for instance, eat angelic food and be able to freely wander between earth and Heaven as Raphael imagines.

38 Gil, 404.

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The two originary moments underlying human nature interact in complex ways, existing interdependently, and together explain both the origin and limitations of human political community. The Fall makes humans flawed and sinful, prompting them to dominate and mistreat one another; Christ’s salvific power allows them to mitigate these flaws, and thus find ways of political association which limit oppression and cruelty.

Human political community thus emerges as both an unfortunate consequence of the Fall and a reaction against it, leading the righteous to rely on the guidance of Christ to figure out which specific political order(s) will maximize its beneficial effects and minimize its tendency towards sin and tyranny. Milton’s depiction of Heaven functions to demonstrate how and why this came about, and -- on a more personal level -- to explain both the dire state in which Milton found himself at the end of his political career, and what possible course of action may be left to him in that state.

I argued at the beginning of this essay that Milton’s justificatory project was, at least in its political sense, about explaining the origin of human politics, giving context to disasters such as the collapse of the Commonwealth, and forecasting the way of out this perpetual cycle of failures. The two-level system delimiting human nature and therefore human politics does just that, by explaining God’s very much removed relationship to human politics, Christ’s more direct connection, and finally the consequences of the Fall and its changes to human nature. Humans are, as the poet says in Book IX, ruled by their passions:

. . . within

136

Began to rise high Passions, Anger, Hate,

Mistrust, Suspicion, Discord, and shook sore

Thir inward State of Mind . . .

For Understanding rul’d not, and the Will

Heard not her lore, both in subjection now

To sensual Appetite, who from beneathe

Usurping over sovran Reason claimd

Superior sway (9.1122-31)

They are left in a state similar to, though not as severe as, how Abdiel describes Satan:

“thy self not free, but to thy self enthrall’d” (6.181). That self-enthrallment leads inevitably to political discord (as in the waning years of the Commonwealth) and thence to tyranny (as in the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy). On a universal scale, the way out of this situation is Christ’s return and the final judgment of the world, but Milton is as much if not more concerned with how this final end must be waited out on a personal scale. The younger Milton of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates seems to have believed that humanity had the potential to create better, though far from perfect, forms of political order, while the more mature Milton The Readie and Easie Way insisted that the Commonwealth was the best available form and saw its incipient loss as a disaster.

The elderly Milton of Paradise Lost had already lived through that disaster, and had to make sense both of it and of the constrained role left to him in the Restoration.

Accordingly, in its final passages the epic departs from the God’s-eye view of time found in the earlier books and ends, in Books XI and XII, with a more detailed exploration of the patterns of human history and the options left to lone righteous men.

137

In The Readie and Easie Way, Milton explains one of the key criteria for beneficial human political community, namely, a prohibition against monarchy and other forms of absolutist government as inherently prone to corruption and oppression. Much of Milton’s opposition to the monarchy had always sprung from the belief that, as he argues in Eikonoklastes, “kings by generation no way [excel] others,” and as such were

“never the intent of God, whose ways are just and equal.”39 Paradise Lost takes this one step further by presenting the scourges of monarchy as the direct result of the Fall, tying the limitations of human political community to the change in human nature brought about by eating the fruit. This is made explicit in Book XII, as Michael explains to Adam the rise of oppressive rulers:

Since thy original lapse, true Libertie

Is lost, which alwayes with right Reason dwells

Twinn’d, and from her hath no dividual being:

Reason in man obscur’d, or not obeyd,

Immediately inordinate desires

And upstart Passions catch the Government

From Reason, and to servitude reduce

Man till then free. Therefore since hee permits

Within himself unworthie Powers to reign

Over free Reason, God in Judgment just

Subjects him from without to violent Lords;

Who oft as undeservedly enthrall

39 Eikonoklastes, 361.

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His outward freedom; Tyrannie must be,

Though to the Tyrant thereby no excuse. (12.83-96)

In other words, humanity’s Fall has made them prone to forget right reason, and be enslaved to their basest desires; God therefore allows such guilty humans to be subjected under tyranny and unjust rule. “Tyrannie must be” because it is the ultimate and inevitable result of the origins of human political community which have been set up elsewhere in the epic. The Readie and Easie Way attempts to tackle this issue with its plan for an ideal Commonwealth, whose operations could check the inevitable slide into tyranny to which humanity is prone. Milton concludes this plan by writing:

Ther can be no cause alleag'd why peace, justice, plentifull trade and all

prosperitie should not thereupon ensue throughout the whole land; with as much

assurance as can be of human things, that they shall so continue (if God favour us,

and our wilfull sins provoke him not) even to the coming of our true and rightfull

and only to be expected King, only worthie as he is our only Saviour, the

Messiah, the Christ, the only heir of his eternal father, the only by him anointed

and ordaind since the work of our redemption finishd, Universal Lord of all

mankinde. The way propounded is plane, easie and open before us.40

This passage shows that Milton’s ready and easy way is not just a plan of government,

but also the ready and easy way in which human political community may persist until

the day of judgment, when such communities will ultimately be rendered unnecessary.

However, The Readie and Easie Way was also written on a very slim hope of success,

and an almost certain assurance of failure. Thus, Laura Knoppers has argued that it is

40 Readie, 503.

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most properly read as a jeremiad, similar to the American Puritan jeremiads which were

roughly contemporaneous to much of Milton’s political career.41 English writers who

took up this genre in the name of the Good Old Cause of the Commonwealth echoed the

Old Testament prophet Jeremiah to “remind their audience of an ideal past from which

they have fallen, denounce present-day sins, call for repentance, and predict future judgment or blessing,” often with “the assumption that England is the new covenant nation, analogue of Old Testament Israel.”42 Knoppers argues that, unlike many other

jeremiads of the era, Milton wrote The Readie and Easie Way not as a true attempt to

change the public’s minds, but as a self-conscious performance in the face of inevitable defeat. She writes:

Milton’s jeremiad takes on a distinctively literary aim, to provide a myth of the

nation, a story by which the English under the restored monarchy can interpret

their tragedy. And he inscribes himself in that story as a prophet who is not only

disregarded but in great personal danger . . . [it is] this “failure” that legitimates

and authenticates his prophetic identity.43

Milton’s object in The Readie and Easie Way is not to convince an effective majority of his readers, as he has little hope of doing so outside of those already predisposed to agree with him. Instead, he is writing in anticipation of the tract being read after its cause has failed, as a way for himself, his political allies, and future generations to comprehend the causes and the results of that failure.

41 On Puritan jeremiads, see Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). 42 Laura Lunger Knoppers, “The Readie and Easie Way and the English Jeremiad,” in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990), 215. 43 Ibid, 224.

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Paradise Lost takes this jeremiad format and uses it to paint a comprehensible picture of human political history. In writing The Readie and Easie Way, Milton had already taken a more detached, mythologizing stance towards the immediate political crisis of his day. In doing the same operation for Fallen politics writ large, he creates a wider mythic structure which places his own situation into the context of a repeated and implicitly inevitable pattern of history. This pattern generally takes the form of one person who tries to persuade his community back from the brink of some terrible sin, fails to do so not from his own faults but from the hard-heartedness of his listeners, is scorned and rejected by his community, and is finally vindicated by divine retribution. It is common to read Milton’s angst at his own situation into the character of Satan, but these repeated Jeremiah figures represent a much more accurate picture of how Milton most likely saw himself. The first is Abdiel, the lone objector to Satan’s rebellion, who is defeated by Satan’s rhetorical trickery and fails to persuade anyone else to turn back with him. The poetic voice praises him effusively:

So spake the Seraph Abdiel faithful found,

Among the faithless, faithful only hee;

Among innumerable false, unmov’d,

Unshak’n, unseduce’d, unterrifi’d

His Loyaltie he kept, his Love, his Zeale;

Nor number, nor example with him wrought

To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind

Though single. (5.896-902)

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Abdiel is clearly set up as a figure for identification and emulation, a source of validation for those similarly isolated for speaking truth; he also receives a well-deserved and lovingly detailed vindication in his fight against Satan in Book VI. But this pattern repeats in a shortened form when Michael shows Adam the future history of the world in

Books XI and XII. First with Enoch:

. . . Til at last

Of middle Age one rising, eminent

In wise deport, spake much of Right and Wrong,

Of Justice, of Religion, Truth and Peace,

And Judgment from above: him old and young

Exploded, and had seiz’d with violent hands,

Hand not a Cloud descending snatch’d him thence (11.664-70)

And then with Noah:

At length a Reverend Sire among them came,

And of thir doings great dislike declar’d,

And testified’d against thir wayes; hee oft

Frequented thir Assemblies, whereso met,

Triumphs or Festivals, and to them preachd

Conversion and Repentence, as to Souls

In prison under Judgments imminent:

But all in vain: which when he saw, he ceas’d

Contending, and remov’d his Tents farr off. (11.719-27)

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In both cases, the community is punished (with violent oppression and total destruction,

respectively) while the lone dissenter is shunned but ultimately vindicated. This repeats

again in Book XII with Christ:

For this he shall live hated, be blasphem’d

Seis’d on by force, judg’d, and to death condemned

A shameful and accurst, naild to the Cross

By his own Nation, slaine for bringing Life (12.411-14)

The post-Crucifixion history of the world is truncated into a broad narrative about the rise

of the Catholic Church and the suppression of true believers; instead of highlighting the

Reformation, however, the story ends by dispensing with particulars and fusing together

all forms of oppression and persecution into one general arc:

. . . So shall the World goe on,

To good malignant, to bad men benigne,

Under her own waight groaning till the day

Appeer of respiration to the just,

And vengeance to the wicked, at return

Of him so lately promiss’d to thy aid (12.537-42)

This last, and seemingly rushed narrative of history is in fact merely the summation and underlying truth to all the individual events which Michael has already foretold. Douglas

Chambers has compared these last books to the synoptic visual art of the Renaissance, which depicts multiple sequential events in the same image. The purpose of these renderings was to prompt readers to look beyond the individual details of each event and instead see the larger truths that united each scene, truths which also united the meaning

143

of the art with the individual lives of the spectators.44 This particular style of jeremiad is,

I argue, meant to be read in a similar way: as an illustration of a fundamental and perhaps inevitable tendency in human political communities, a way for Milton to comprehend both his own thwarted political career and to pass on that comprehension to future readers who might find themselves in the same place.

In the end, Milton’s ambition to “justify the wayes of God to men” is of both

greater and lesser scope than it might initially seem. In its political sense, it aims not to

convert or convince the reader to a cause, but to instead to explain the present state of

human political community. That explanation involves demonstrating how the ways of

God create an origin point, but not necessarily a model, for the operations of sovereign

power in the politics of Fallen humanity. Nevertheless, that origin point can be used to

show how the decisions of God’s creations have led to the present and lamentable state of

affairs, and give context to the broader pattern of history in which Milton finds himself

caught. The way out becomes at last not any plan of specific political action, but rather

the expression of that history. As the poet laments to his Muse:

More safe I Sing with mortal voice, unchang’d

To hoarce or mute, though fall’n on evil dayes,

On evil dayes though fall’n, and evil tongues;

In darkness, and with dangers compast round,

And solitude; yet not alone, while thou

Visit’st my slumbers Nightly, or when Morn

44 Douglas Chambers, “‘Improv’d by tract of time’: Art’s synopticon in Paradise Lost Book 12,” in Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World, ed. P. G. Stanwood (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1995), 79-80.

144

Purples the East: still govern thou my Song,

Urania, and fit audience find, though few. (7.23-31)

The poet still sings, though fallen onto these evil days, and will still sing truth about those days, though he himself is Fallen. He is, in other words, trying to preach against the evils of a fallen world while surrounded by one, and must do this though he himself is fallen, and must try to reach his audience despite their own fallen fallibilities. The determination to find “fit audience . . . though few” is thus not an undercutting of the justificatory project, but its ultimate expression: Paradise Lost culminates in both an acceptance of how small its fit audience may be, and the necessity of finding and reaching them anyway.

Chapter Four:

Dismembering the Sovereign in Oroonoko1

The final scene of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave, has long been

recognized as the most powerful moment in the text. Grueling yet abrupt, luridly violent yet curiously removed, agonized over by critics yet frequently omitted by adaptors,

Behn’s depiction of the torture and execution of the story's title character is a subject of

intense controversy. Cynthia Richards has aptly called this scene both "unsettled and

deeply unsettling,"2 and it seems designed to be so: not only does it serve for a gruesome

climax, but it occurs on almost the last page of the text. We receive very little in the way

of denouement; the narrative is cut off very soon after its main character is cut apart.

Although the buildup -- concerning Oroonoko's failed rebellion and incomplete murder-

suicide with his wife, Imoinda -- takes a while, the execution scene itself is as stark as it

is brutal:

[Banister] forcibly took Caesar, and had him carried to the same post where he

was Whip'd; and causing him to be ty'd to it, and a great Fire made before him,

[Banister] told him, he shou’d Dye like a Dog, as he was . . . He had learn’d to

take Tobaco; and when he was assur’d he should Dye, he desir’d they would give

him a Pipe in his Mouth, ready Lighted, which they did; and the Executioner

came, and first cut off his Members, and threw them into the Fire; after that, with

an ill-favoured Knife, they cut his Ears, and his Nose, and burn'd them; he still

1 A version of this chapter is forthcoming as an article in ELH. Copyright © 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press. This article will appear in ELH in 2019 (volume and issue not yet determined). 2 Cynthia Richards, “Interrogating Oroonoko: Torture in a New World and a New Fiction of Power,” Eighteenth Century Fiction 25, no. 4 (Summer 2013), 648. 146

Smoak'd on, as if nothing had touch'd him; then they hacked off one of his Arms,

and still he bore up, and held his Pipe; but at the cutting of his other Arm, his

Head Sunk, and his Pipe drop'd; and he gave up the Ghost, without a Groan, or a

Reproach. (99) 3

Critics have found it difficult to reconcile this scene with both Behn's royalist politics and

the narrative's ambiguous discomfort with colonialism and the slave trade. Richards

argues that the central question about this scene, given the fact that both author and

audience are clearly meant to sympathize with Oroonoko rather than the colonists who kill him, is: "Why [does Behn] risk reproducing this violence by representing it in her story?"4 In other words, we must ask: since this scene is meant to be horrifying, to what

end does Behn invoke that horror? What, exactly, is the reader being warned against, that

merits such an unsettling spectacle?

The answer is far from obvious. Although the narrative is sympathetic to

Oroonoko (and by extension Imoinda), that sympathy is not extended to the other slaves

in Suriname; the text cannot be read as (unambiguously) abolitionist. And, although

Oroonoko's situation invokes several parallels to the Stuart monarchy and the recent

English Civil War, these connections are often confused or contradictory; the text cannot

be read as a (straightforward) royalist allegory. Both themes are undoubtedly at work,

however, and so critical disagreement has often hinged on where to strike the balance.

Some critics, such as Catherine Mollineux and Richard Frohock, have argued that

Oroonoko uses its royalist politics to comment on or justify the violent dystopias of early

3 All Oroonoko quotations taken from Aphra Behn, Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave, ed. Catherine Gallagher (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000). 4 Richards, 648. 147

English colonialism.5 Others, like Richard Kroll and Elliott Visconsi, see the colonial setting of the text as largely a vehicle for political commentary on the English monarchy -

- a warning of the consequences that might ensue when either kings or subjects forget their rightful places.6

These interpretations are somewhat compatible, but there is a division which seems to center, broadly, on where to place the emphasis: either the text is using its royalist politics to reflect upon early colonialism and slavery, or it is using its colonial setting and characters as a lens through which to establish a certain view of English monarchy. But one thing most critics seem to agree on is that Oroonoko’s death is depicted in the service of some cause or ideal, if not within the text, then certainly outside of it. Yet reading Oroonoko as any kind of martyr at all is, as Richards argues, more dubious than most interpretations acknowledge.7 Within the text, Oroonoko's death does nothing for his wife and child, who are already dead; he provides no inspiring figure to the other slaves, whom he has abandoned in disgust; and he has no influence on the

English colonists themselves, who, despite being either glad or mournful of his death, do not change their behavior in the slightest. On a thematic level, he is certainly no martyr for abolitionism nor an exemplar against slavery as an institution -- not only because of the unflattering depiction of the other slaves in Suriname, but also because of the text's inability to formulate a coherent picture of colonial slavery as an institution. And finally,

5 See Catherine Mollineux, “False Gifts/Exotic Fictions: Epistemologies of Sovereignty and Assent in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” ELH 80, no. 2 (Summer 2013), 460-1; and Richard Frohock, “Violence and Awe: The Foundations of Government in Aphra Behn’s New World Settings,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 8, no. 4 (1996), 452. 6 See Richard Kroll, “Tales of Love and Gallantry: The Politics of Oroonoko,” Huntington Library Quarterly 67, no. 4 (December 2004), 573; and Elliott Visconsi, “A Degenerate Race: English Barbarism in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter,” ELH 69, no. 3 (Fall 2002), 677-691. 7 Richards, 652-4. 148

he is no martyr for absolute sovereignty or royal prerogative -- not only does he come

from a somewhat dubious position as a sovereign (being the uncrowned heir to the

corrupt old king of Coromantien) but his death heralds no restoration of order either in

Africa or in the English monarchy. His death only, as Richards says, "serves to remind

the reader that already one king has been mangled" in the long-dead Charles I, and offers

no comfort or resolution to this old wound.8

We are thus left with two interpretive conundra when trying to understand the

significance of Oroonoko’s death scene. The first is, as I have said, an issue of

reconciling how the discourses of colonial slavery and royalist sovereignty interact in the

text. The second is the problem of how the death scene, with all its brutal finality, seems

to actively resist any attempts to project onto it a political significance. In fact, the final

scene seems to insist upon an inherent level of meaninglessness in the death of this one

man, however spectacular that death is. I would like to suggest here that these two

problems are in fact deeply interrelated. Oroonoko’s death scene, as the climax of the story, marks the point at which differentiation between issues of monarchy and issues of colonial slavery becomes essentially impossible.9 This disturbing correspondence

between the discourses of power through violence in both English politics and colonial

enslavement, between the sovereign’s power to kill and the slaver’s power to objectify

and commoditize, is the root of the death scene’s resistance to political signification.

What the reader is being warned against is, in so many words, the potential erasure of

8 Ibid, 654. 9 Catherine Gallagher makes a similar argument about the confluence of sovereignty and ownership of other people, but she presents this as a given paradox of combining absolutist sovereignty with a market economy. While I largely agree with her argument, I am contending here that the death scene moves beyond a troublesome paradox and into a total collapse of coherent meaning, at least from the point of view of Oroonoko and arguably the narrator. 149

civil life itself. Understanding the climax of Oroonoko in this way helps us to gain not only a more nuanced understanding of Behn’s political imagination, but also renewed insight into the breakdowns of political meaning endemic to the late seventeenth century.

The correspondence between slavery and absolutist sovereignty is not outlandish

today, and indeed, may have not been entirely shocking to the reader of the seventeenth

century, especially if that reader had Whiggish tendencies. After all, the more radical

discourse of the English Civil War made many such comparisons in support of the

Parliamentarian cause.10 Placed back into its original context, however, the collision of

these two discourses in Oroonoko is more unexpected and destructive than it may

initially seem, for a few key reasons. First, we must remember that Behn’s politics were

distinctly, insistently, Tory – even if a connection between rule by monarch and rule by

slave-owner was considered a standby in other political circles, the admission of such by

a royalist is in itself quite an event.

Second, we must be careful to distinguish between political discourse which

draws a comparison between enslavement and monarchical rule (such as that favored by

the Parliamentarians) and the discourse surrounding the actual institution of chattel

slavery itself. As recent work by Mary Nyquist shows, these two are separate entities.

The former, which is more properly called “antityrannicism,” although it acknowledges

slavery to be a shameful and wretched state, is not necessarily opposed to slavery as a

10 A basic search of the British Library’s Thomason Collection of Civil War Tracts turns up almost a hundred examples of political pamphlets using “slavery” in the title or subtitle alone (search performed using Early English Books Online, eebo.chadwyck.com) 150

concept; rather, it objects to slavery-like conditions being illegitimately applied to certain

groups of people. Antityrannicism also conceives of this political quasi-slavery as a

collective state, inflicted by a ruler on entire societies and populations, using public

institutions as a means of control. In contrast, actual chattel slavery in the seventeenth

century was, under the influence of Classical models, usually conceived of as an

individual state, often the result of defeat in battle, whose operations and loci of power

were confined to the household and the domestic sphere.11 The fact that this latter model

did not actually match the operations of the colonial slave trade caused a great deal of contradiction in the discourse of the time, and it is this dissonance with which Oroonoko engages. I will return later to this conflict between the Classical model of “legitimate” slavery and the events of the narrative, but what matters here is that the depiction slavery in Oroonoko is not simply an outgrowth of the antityrannical discourse that bloomed

during the English Civil War.12 In other words, the relationship between enslavement

and sovereignty in Behn’s story is not analogical – the text does not invite comparisons

between sovereign rule and enslavement with the aim of highlighting the negative

features of one or the other institution. Nor does it – as a Whiggish concept of history

would suggest – try to invoke the revelation of a longstanding secretive oppression

already at work in English politics. Instead, what the text attempts to depict is a

disastrous merger, or more properly a collapse, of both states (slave and sovereign), a

process that culminates with Oroonoko’s death.

11 Mary Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 2-13. 12 This thread of antityrannicism would, as Nyquist notes, eventually come to have a profound influence on modern conceptions of political freedom. By extension, then, it is to the later coalescence of abolitionism as a political movement. However, Behn’s work predates many of these developments. 151

Third, and most significantly, Oroonoko’s death is important because it involves a

sovereign (or, at least, someone whom the narrative treats as equivalent to a sovereign)

being subjected to a kind of violence and death normally reserved only for those who

have killed a sovereign. As many have noted,13 the manner of Oroonoko’s death comes

alarmingly close to the traditional English execution for regicide or high treason – that of

being hanged, drawn, and quartered. Although the procedure is not followed exactly –

Oroonoko is sentenced to hang but never does, and he disembowels himself – the

correspondences are striking, particularly in the employment of castration as part of the

ritual and the fact that Oroonoko’s limbs, like those of English traitors, were scattered

throughout the colony and put on display as a warning to others.

It is this fact which may have provoked the greatest discomfort among

Oroonoko’s original audience. A few years after publication, the story was successfully

adapted into a play by Thomas Southerne which radically revised the timeline and nature

of Oroonoko’s death. Instead of the extended ordeal depicted in the published version,

Southerne’s play has Oroonoko stab Imoinda, his nemesis the lieutenant governor, and

then himself in short order, maintaining the dignity and attaining the revenge that were

both lost to him in the original.14 Successive adaptations throughout the 18th and 19th

centuries would, without fail, retain some variation on Southerne’s death scene rather

than return to the original material. Even the most recent stage production by ‘Biyi

Bandele, debuting in 1999, rewrites Oroonoko’s death in a similar manner. To this day,

the final scene of the story as it was originally written has never been staged, even in a

13 See, for example, Richards 661 and Visconsi 687. 14 Thomas Southerne, Oroonoko: A Tragedy (1696), in Oroonoko: Adaptations and Offshoots, ed. Susan B. Iwanisziw (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 8-78. 152

sanitized form.15 Although Southerne himself never comments directly on the changes he made to Oroonoko’s death scene, he does acknowledge them indirectly in his dedication to the first printed edition of his play:

[Behn] had a great Command of the Stage; and I have often wonder'd that she

would bury her Favourite Hero in a Novel, when she might have reviv'd him in

the Scene. She thought either that no Actor could represent him; or she could not

bear to see him represented: And I believe the last, when I remember what I have

heard from a Friend of hers, That she always told his Story, more feelingly, than

she writ it. Whatever happen'd to him at Surinam, he has mended his Condition

in England. 16

Gesturing with deliberate vagueness towards “whatever happen’d” to Oroonoko in

Surinam, he makes a series of oblique allusions to the ending scene. Describing

Oroonoko as metaphorically “buried” in the novel genre recalls the fact that Oroonoko

himself was dismembered and displayed, never buried. But, we are reassured,

Southerne’s adaptation will “revive” and “mend” him – the former perhaps only

generically and metaphorically, but the latter literally by doing away with any hint of the

dismemberment scene. Southerne also suggests that Behn herself never adapted the story

to the stage because she “could not bear” to see her protagonist (and especially her

protagonist’s death) represented live in the theater, evidenced by the fact that her oral

version was told “more feelingly” than the written one. This implies that – since Behn

definitively opted for the written version – the feelings aroused by verbally recounting

the story must not have been especially pleasant ones.

15 See Oroonoko: Adaptations and Offshoots, ed. Susan B. Iwanisziw (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006). 16 Southerne, 8. 153

This discomfort is not simply attributable to the violence of the scene in and of

itself. Ramesh Mallipeddi points out that, while “for a modern reader, Oroonoko's

dismemberment may seem horrifying . . . contemporaries witnessed the drawing and

quartering of condemned bodies (in England and the Caribbean) with a certain

detachment, even bordering on indifference.”17 For an example he points to Samuel

Pepys’ rather blasé account of the execution of Major-General Thomas Harrison by hanging, drawing, and quartering in 1660, which is casually sandwiched between Pepys’ recollections of walks in the park and plays attended – and even set off with a deadpan joke about how Harrison was “looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition.”18 What is initially shocking about Oroonoko’s death is not the method, but to

whom that method is applied. Executions of the kind that Oroonoko faced were

historically reserved for traitors to the throne – regicides (as was the case with Major-

General Harrison) and attempted regicides, or those whose crimes against the nation were

such that they were considered regicidal. Although this method of execution can rightly

be called a form of torture, we must be careful to distinguish between juridical torture,

which was performed to extract information, punitive mutilations, such as cutting off ears

for sedition, and the highly ritualized retributive torture performed during the executions

of regicides. In English legal practice, many forms of torture and mutilation were

authorized, explicitly or implicitly, via the doctrine of sovereign immunity, giving them a special and exceptional character. Unlike on the continent, juridical torture was never a routine part of the legal system, and was only performed under special authorization by

17 Ramesh Mallipeddi, “Spectacle, Spectatorship, and Sympathy in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” Eighteenth Century Studies 45, no. 4 (Summer 2012), 488. 18 Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Project Gutenberg, last modified Oct. 18, 2012, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4200/4200-h/4200-h.htm 154

the king. Similarly, the retributive torture of hanging, drawing, and quartering was the

kind of punishment that only the sovereign was able to inflict, and only in response to

threats against his sovereignty.19 The manner of Oroonoko’s death is disquieting not just

because of a similarity to certain forms of execution, but because it inverts a very

distinctive and singular type of ritualized punishment.

This unsettling role-reversal that plays out with Oroonoko’s death seems to have

been a preoccupation of Behn’s, and no wonder, given that she was a high Tory living in

the shadow of the once and future downfall of the Stuart dynasty. The fact that

Oroonoko is not technically a king at the time of his death does little to undercut this

particular connection. His circumstances call to mind the deaths of at least two

prominent Stuarts. The text refers to Charles I explicitly, when the narrator notes that

Oroonoko was aware of “the late Civil Wars in England, and the deplorable Death of our

great Monarch; and wou’d discourse of it with all the Sense, and Abhorrence of the

Injustice imaginable” (43). Oroonoko is also associated thematically with the Duke of

Monmouth, Charles II’s illegitimate son and the failed usurper of James II, who had been

executed by botched beheading only three years prior to the text’s publication.20 Thus,

Catherine Gallagher argues, Oroonoko should be read as a stand-in not only for the

Stuarts in general, but also the abstract notion of the sovereign: “although [Oroonoko] may indeed bring to mind certain Stuarts, [he] is the symbol of an entity that is itself

19 John H. Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Regime (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 130. See the rest of Langbein’s work for more detail on English judicial torture and the differences between English and continental systems. 20 See Richards 658-59 for a more complete treatment of the connections between Oroonoko and Monmouth. Behn seems to have been particularly affected by the Duke of Monmouth’s death, since the executions of pseudo and aspiring monarchs are significant plot points in two other contemporaneous publications: The Fair Jilt (1688) and the final segment of Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister (1687) 155

symbolic, kingship, and represents a seventeenth-century revision of that entity.”21 In

other words, the fact that Oroonoko is similar, but not analogous, to multiple Stuarts, is a

product of how he often stands in for Behn’s notion of kingship in general – deeply

influenced by the Stuart dynasty, but non synonymous with it. Regardless, Oroonoko’s

death still is worse than those of Charles I and Monmouth, who were at least beheaded in

recognition of their rank.

The sheer, definitively violent inversion of the sovereign’s role, which plays out

more explicitly in Oroonoko than in any of Behn’s other works, seems to belie any

expectation of restored order and instead forecasts nothing but confusion and chaos.

Even though the narrator notes that Oroonoko’s killers “after paid dearly enough for their

Insolence” (99) when the Dutch invaded Suriname in 1667 and slaughtered the English

colonists, she can only close with the hope that her narrative will make Oroonoko’s story

famous, although he was “worthy of a better Fate, and a more sublime Wit than mine to

write his Praise” (100). It is this pessimism, this lack of clear resolution, which moves the

ending scene beyond the initial shock of a king being executed in a manner reserved for

regicides. Rather, it invokes the more disturbing possibility of collapsing the distinction

between sovereign, subject, and slave entirely, a collapse which threatens to erase the

carefully-held distinctions between English civilization and colonial barbarism.

This categorical erasure is set up, at least partially, by the ways in which Behn

constructs the body politic of her African characters. Although the sections of the story

21 Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670- 1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 73. 156

set in Coromantien dwell heavily on exoticism and the tropes of amatory fiction, the

behaviors of Oroonoko and his compatriots, especially once they reach Suriname, also

evoke and subvert two important and interrelated discourses of sovereignty in the

seventeenth century. The first is the theory of the king’s two bodies.

Although Ernst Kantorowicz’ The King’s Two Bodies is considered a foundational

work on the legal and theo-political theories of kingship in Tudor and Stuart England, it

is not often applied to works written after the execution of Charles I in 1649. This is

largely because Kantorowicz paints Charles I’s execution as the natural climax of the

notion of the two-bodied king, arguing that without a well-established legal fiction of the

king’s two bodies:

. . . it would have been next to impossible for Parliament to resort to a similar

fiction and summon, in the name and by the authority of Charles I, king body

politic, the armies which were to fight the same Charles I, king body natural . . .

Nor can the fiction of the King’s Two Bodies be thought of apart from the later

events when Parliament succeeded in trying [Charles I] for high treason, and

finally in executing solely the king’s body natural without affecting seriously or

doing irreparable harm to the King’s body politic.22

Kantorowicz marshals plenty of evidence to support the former claim – that the idea of

the king’s two bodies enabled the Civil War – but leaves the latter – that the execution

did not “affect seriously” or do “irreparable harm” to the body politic of the king –

largely unsubstantiated. In fact, the separation was not nearly as clean as Kantorowicz

suggests in either historical or theoretical terms. Historically, of course, we know that the

22 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1957), 20-23. 157

Commonwealth, which purported to rule solely in the name of the king’s body politic, crumbled soon after the death of Oliver Cromwell, and England saw a quick and for many subjects very much welcome return to kings with bodies natural. And yet this return was hardly smooth either, and eventually led to a firm rejection of kingly authority and reassertion of Parliamentary power during the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The people of England appear to have experienced neither a quick and clean separation from a reliance on the power of the individual monarch, nor a steadfast, unshakeable connection to it – instead, the decoupling of the political existence of the nation from the political and actual existence of the king was an unsteady, jagged, and painful process that only started with the Civil War and did not arguably finish until well into the 18th century.

Kantorowicz’ theories shed some light on Oroonoko’s vision of kingship.

Gallagher’s reading, following along these lines, sees in Oroonoko’s death a kind of abstract triumph. She suggests that if the king’s two bodies were, as Kantorowicz argues, ultimately separable, then Oroonoko’s stoic disregard for and refusal to defend his own physical body allows him to reject the commodification and enslavement forced upon him by the colonists. Via his dismemberment, she argues, “Oroonoko undergoes an extraordinary self-division, only to become all the more singularly immortal, for ‘he’ is now unlocatable. The mystical body of kingship and the actual body of Oroonoko again become identical when the latter is fragmented and scattered.”23 However, viewing

Oroonoko’s death as a kind of transcendence or martyrdom, as Gallagher does, ignores some of the inherent tensions in Kantorowicz’ theory that complicate the relationship between the king’s natural and political bodies – tensions which, ironically, undercut

23 Gallagher, 84-5. 158

Kantorowicz’ own narrative about the effect of Charles I’s execution, but do shed important light on the fraught nature of English kinghood in the Restoration.

Kantorowicz argues that by the time of the late Tudors, the idea of English kinghood had undergone a process of “gemination,” or twinning, whereby the king was understood to unite in one person both an “immaterial and immortal body politic” and a

“material and mortal body natural.”24 The latter body aged, died, and was vulnerable to human flaws; the former was undying and perpetual, handed off instantaneously from one king to the next upon death. The king’s body politic had two aspects (or, perhaps more accurately, one aspect viewed from two different “angles”): the Crown, which represented the united body politic of king and subjects, and the royal Dignity, which was the special character and function of the “head” of the body politic.25 All these (the body natural and the two aspects of the body politic) were thought to unite and reside in the person of the king himself. In England, however, the physical corpus of the king was also joined with the physical corpus of Parliament. Unlike in continental examples,

“Parliament was, by representation, the living ‘body politic’ of the realm,” giving the

English body politic a “uniquely concrete meaning.”26 The role of Parliament therefore creates a kind of paradox: the immaterial body politic is repeatedly manifested physically, and that manifestation takes the form of a collective rather than an individual body.

If today this sounds confusing and troubling, it was arguably no less so during the early modern period. The important thing, for our purposes here, is that the metaphor of

24 Kantorowicz, 21. 25 Ibid, 316-7 26 Ibid, 447. 159

the king’s two bodies becomes more and more fragile the more closely one looks at it,

because, ironically, it is too close to being literalized. The king has immortal Dignity,

and yet has a real mortal body – that much is relatively sustainable. But the king’s

immortal Dignity is also part of an immortal body politic, one which is comprised of his

immaterial unity with his subjects and yet also manifested in the real mortal bodies of his

Parliament, with whom “unity” or agreement is a complicated political process. And

somehow all of these components are on a metaphorical level once again incorporated

back into the “person” of the king, so that the king’s singularity stands in for the political

unity of the whole nation. The king’s person becomes the lynchpin that secures the

metaphor and prevents its component parts from dissolving back into their literal status of

physical, mortal bodies by turns fighting and cooperating with other physical, mortal

bodies. The legal fiction of the king’s two bodies therefore both depended on and was in

perpetual danger from its own real-world manifestations.27 Thus, the body of the king

and its interaction with the bodies of his subjects always has the potential to sustain or

undo the notion of the king’s two bodies.

In the context of the Restoration – especially on the eve of the Glorious

Revolution, when Oroonoko was published – this tension surrounding the physical

manifestations of the king’s two bodies was even more fraught. The neat separation

promoted by the Parliamentarians in the 1650s had obviously not come to pass, and yet

the restored monarchy did little to heal the internal divisions left over from the Civil

War.28 In previous times, the notion of the king’s body politic had, at least in theory,

27 Ibid, 436-7 28 For a more detailed discussion of these divisions and royal attempts to manage them, see Kevin Sharpe, Rebranding Rule: The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy 1660-1714 (New Haven: Yale UP, 2013), 194-222. 160

functioned to smooth over internal divisions and ensure a basic level of political unity.

The fact that the Commonwealth did not fall prey to divine retribution or complete

dissolution of the social order showed that the removal of the king’s body natural was not

in itself disastrous, and so the succeeding Stuart monarchs could not present themselves

as synonymous with the political existence of the nation. Despite the continued existence

of the monarchy, l’etat cest moi would never be a practical or believable formula to the

English public.29 Oroonoko, with its Tory sympathies, engages that tension between

bodies natural and political by using its protagonist to grant a physical and biological

reality to the status of the king as a way of compensating for political attacks which tried

to reduce the notion of the body politic to a separable, fully immaterial formality. And

yet in doing so, Behn inevitably collides with the flaw at the heart of the entire system of

the king’s two bodies, the same flaw exposed in the death of Charles I: bringing the theo-

political metaphor so close to its literal manifestation leaves it open to destruction.

Oroonoko himself is the most prominent case of kingly status granted biological

reality in the narrative, but it actually appears first in the opening description of

Suriname’s native population. The narrator opens the story by describing the wonders of

the newly acquired territory of Suriname, dwelling on the natives who “indeed are finely

shap’d, as almost all are, and who have pretty Features, are very charming and novel; for

they have all that is called Beauty, except the Colour, which is a reddish Yellow . . . They

are extream modest and bashful, very shy, and nice of being touch’d” (39). Because of

this, the narrator says, “these People represented to me an absolute Idea of the first State

of Innocence, before Man knew how to sin” (40). Throughout these opening passages,

29 See Visconsi, 644-5; and David Underdown, A Freeborn People: Politics and the Nation in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 112-132. 161

Behn emphasizes how the physical attributes of the natives back up the moral and social

conclusions that the narrator draws from them, almost as if she fears that she would not

be believed if the picture she painted were not vivid enough. And yet, this attempt to

elevate physical description to greater metaphorical significance is very quickly undercut

in the next passage, when she explains the relationship between the natives and the

English settlers:

With these People, as I said, we live in perfect Tranquility, and good

Understanding, as it behooves us to do; they knowing all the places where to seek

the best Food in the country, and the Means of getting it . . . So that they being, on

all Occasions, very useful to us, we find it absolutely necessary to caress ‘em as

Friends, and not to treat ‘em as Slaves; nor dare we do other, their Numbers so far

surpassing ours in that Continent. (40-1)

Even though the narrator has taken pains to make her physical description of the natives square with her characterization of them as being an “idea” of the state of innocence, that very physicality forces her to acknowledge the practical forces at work in their political relations: the need for food, the fact of being outnumbered, the cold calculation of whether the natives are more useful as friends or slaves. These opening struggles are something of a microcosm for the overall pattern the narrative: trying to compensate for metaphorical or ideological uncertainty with a physical or biological bulwark in fact just brings the entire metaphorical system that much closer to collapse.

Oroonoko’s royal status is likewise presented not just as a matter of political maneuvering or happenstance, but as an inborn biological trait. The narrator is effusive about his physical excellence: 162

The most famous Statuary cou’d not form the Figure of a Man more admirably

turn’d from Head to Foot. His face was not of that brown, rusty Black which

most of that Nation are, but a perfect Ebony, or polish’d Jett. His eyes were the

most awful that cou’d be seen, and very piercing; the White of ‘em being like

Snow, as were his Teeth. His Nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and

flat. His Mouth, the finest shap’d that cou’d be seen; far from those great turn’d

Lips, which are so natural to the rest of the Negroes. (43-4)

This physical description is followed up by an equally glowing description or Oroonoko’s mind, which “was as capable even of reigning well and of governing as wisely . . . as any

Prince civiliz’d in the most refin’d Schools of Humanity and Learning” (44). This contrast between Oroonoko (and to a lesser degree Imoinda), whose beauty and blackness

are so extraordinary as to be almost supernatural, and the non-royal Africans in the text,

who are presented as brown, simple, and mundane, justifies his rule over them.

Gallagher argues that Oroonoko’s body represents an “abstracted essence” of the other

Africans, “as if his blackness were the sum and intensification of their lesser darkness.”

In this way, “the mystical body of kingship continues to represent even that against which it is defined, the physical bodies that constitute the realm, and the physical bodies are incorporated into the mystic body.”30 It is not simply that Oroonoko’s royalty transcends

race; rather, he and the other Africans function as an exaggerated, idealized version of the

body politic that a Tory like Behn would only dream of seeing in England. This is so

much the case that when the other slaves recognize Oroonoko as the general that initially

captured and sold them, “they all cast themselves at his Feet, crying out, in their

30 Gallagher, 75. 163

Language, Live, O King! Long live, O King! And kissing his feet, paid him even divine

homage” (70). The political and social metaphor which undergirds the idea of the king’s

two bodies, and thus the political unity of a nation, is here confirmed and guaranteed in

the physical bodies and dispositions of the head (Oroonoko) and members (the other

slaves), who can act together with the sort of natural unity unheard of even in pre-Civil

War England.

Yet it is the overdetermined, highly physical nature of this fantasy body politic that leaves it vulnerable. When Oroonoko leads his fellow slaves in an escape attempt, the English counterattack causes most of Oroonoko’s new subjects to surrender or flee, and Oroonoko afterwards laments “that he was asham’d of what he had done, in endeavoring to make those Free, who were by Nature Slaves, poor wretched Rogues, fit to be us’d as Christians Tools; Dogs, treacherous and cowardly, fit for such Masters”

(90). Oroonoko, on the other hand, is brought down by what Trefry sees as an excess of greatness, “a heat of Youth, and of a too forward Courage, and an unconsider’d

impatience of Liberty” (90). The collapse of the Africans’ body politic comes about in

part because the head is too much disposed, by his physical nature, to leadership and

action, and the members too much reliant, by their physical nature, on servility and

complacency. Oroonoko’s rebellion fails not because the metaphor behind the body

politic is a sham, but because it is too true, too literal, and therefore subject to all the

vagaries of physical frailty and conflict.

It is also this physicality which prevents Oroonoko’s death from being easily read as either an abstract triumph or a martyrdom. The symbolic, mystical dimension of the body politic is useless without its physical manifestations, but trying to ground the body 164

politic firmly in the physical makes it all to easily destructible; being dependent on

practicalities and pragmatism, it is capable of being undermined by sheer, brute force.

Similarly, guaranteeing Oroonoko’s kingly status through his body means that this status

can be undermined with the dismemberment of that body. After all, a king’s body can be

dismembered just as easily as anyone else’s body – including a regicide’s. And if all the

prospective subjects of that king are too inherently servile to do anything about it, then

whatever abstract sovereign apotheosis Oroonoko may reach – such as the one posited by

Gallagher – is meaningless without a physical reality to manifest it.31

III

The second discourse played with through Behn’s depiction of the African characters is the supposedly war-based origins of slavery. The Classical model of slavery, still very much in circulation during the seventeenth century, asserts that the institution of slavery derives from the rights of victors over those whom they have defeated. The victorious warrior has, in this model, the option to either kill his opponent or to spare that opponent and make him a slave. In other words, “the war slavery doctrine . . . indicates that victors hold the power to determine whether the vanquished

31 Gallagher and Richards both ultimately read Oroonoko’s death as, at least partially, a commentary on Behn’s status as an author. Gallagher argues that Oroonoko’s dismemberment represents “the point at which kingship has achieved a combined dispersion and incorporeality resembling that of the text itself,” as part of an exploration of the author’s alienation from her text (85); Richards believes the Behn intends to “expose . . . the brutal illusion of her own power as narrator and in the process expose the instability of all fictions of power, both European and colonial,” fictions of power which have enabled Behn’s own writing career (675). These approaches have a great deal of merit, but viewing Oroonoko’s death as a form of metacommentary on authorship (even though it may very well be so) sidesteps the question of the political “dead end” that Oroonoko’s dismemberment represents. It is the significance of this dead end, in and of itself, that I wish to explore in this essay. 165

live the social and political death of slaves or die the physical death of enemies.”32

Although this framework was expanded into a collective institution encompassing entire

populations even during the Classical era, the supposed legal and social basis for slavery

ultimately grounds itself in one-on-one interactions. Such an emphasis on the level of the individual has two main effects: one, it associates slavery with the vitae necisque potestas automatically held by family patriarchs in Roman practice, and so makes slavery an issue of the domestic, household realm. Secondly, it associates the state of enslavement with effeminacy and cowardice, since, “to live as a slave on the adversary’s turf is to reveal oneself as, in effect, a traitor to the cause, as someone who through cowardice gave his life not for his own people but to the enemy.”33 Absent the original

Roman legal framework, these assumptions still persisted into the early modern age. By the seventeenth century, being called slavish did not simply denote a comparison to slave status, but was also an insult implying servility, effeminacy, and unworthiness.34 This

connotation helped to legitimate chattel slavery to the early modern English, who were

themselves not generally a slave-owning culture: slavery could be made to seem

acceptable because it was being tied to well-established institutions and discourses such as patriarchal domestic authority and the value placed on martial bravery.

These associations were, of course, not accurate to the actual conditions transatlantic slave trade nor the institutions of the hereditary chattel slavery which became the economic engine of colonial empires. But they were important during the

32 Nyquist, 8-9. Nyquist also notes that the (inaccurate) etymological proof cited by Classical authors, who claimed that the Latin servire (to serve) was derived from servare (to save or spare), was seized upon and repeated by many early modern political writers, such as Hobbes and Grotius. 33 Ibid, 9. 34 “Slavish, adj.” OED Online. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/ 166

formative period of European colonialism, prior to the development of the racialized

discourses which would dominate popular conceptions of slavery by the nineteenth

century.35 Oroonoko plays into this notion of war-based slavery, but, as it did with the king’s two bodies, shows how the framework collapses under its own contradictions once brought to the colony in Suriname. During the Coromantien passages, we see that many of the African slaves bought for transport to Suriname came by their slavery

“legitimately” after being defeated in battle by none other than Oroonoko himself.

Coromantien slavery, though it does not precisely cleave to the Classical model, certainly hews close to it, particularly as practiced by Oroonoko (whom the English tellingly dub

Caesar once he arrives in Suriname). Oroonoko is presented to us as a magnificently gifted warrior, such that “he became, at the Age of Seventeen, of the most expert

Captains, and bravest Soldiers, that ever saw the Field of Mars” (42). Such is his prowess that even those whom he has captured and enslaved recognize him as their legitimate overlord – looking back at the scene where the other slaves in Suriname throw themselves at his feet and praise him as their king, we can see that it is not just from “a

Veneration that they pay to great Men, especially if they know ‘em,” but also the fact that

“he was that Prince who had, at several times, sold most of ‘em to these Parts” which specifically earns their love (70). Much as they acted out an exaggerated version of the

Royalist body politic, the Africans also act out an exaggerated version of Classical-style

35 See Nyquist for a more detailed explanation of this process. Nyquist’s work focuses on how antityrannical discourse, as a tool of political writers in the seventeenth century, enabled them to argue for the individual rights and political freedoms of Europeans while simultaneously occluding and trivializing the systematic dehumanization entailed by actual chattel slavery. Her work suggests the possibility that this disconnect may have played a part in the development of, or necessity for, the racialized hierarchies that attempted to justify slavery and colonial oppression in later centuries. 167

slavery: the conquered slaves enthusiastically accept their status as proper and deserved,

and demonstrate this in their behavior.

Oroonoko’s own behavior indicates a similar understanding of slavery. This is

most obviously demonstrated in his capture of the enemy prince Jamoan in Coromantien,

and serves as a model for his own actions once captured by the English. Oroonoko

spends most of the battle against Jamoan’s army shut in his own tent, believing Imoinda to be dead and consumed by despair. But with Jamoan’s forces on the verge of victory,

Oroonoko rejoins the battle, not in the hope of winning, but with a resolution to seek an honorable death:

Instant he leap’d from his Couch, and cry’d, -- Come, if we must die, let us meet

Death the noblest Way and ‘twill be more like Oroonoko to encounter him at the

Army’s Head, opposing the Torrent of a conquering Foe, than lazily, on a Couch .

. . or be tamely taken by an Enemy, and led a whining, Love-sick Slave, to adorn

the Triumphs of Jamoan. (61)

Although Oroonoko’s particular love-sickness comes from his grief over Imoinda, being taken captive is still cast as indicative of cowardice, effeminacy, and submissiveness. If

Oroonoko had simply waited for Jamoan to capture him, it is implied, he would have fully deserved his fate and been obligated to subservience. Instead, Oroonoko’s renewed bravery turns the tide of battle, and his victory is so complete that he “took [Jamoan]

Prisoner with his own Hand, having wounded him almost to death” (61). The circumstances of Jamoan’s capture are significant, because they make his enslavement less shameful – yes, Jamoan was defeated, but he did not surrender and he resisted to the point of near-death. Furthermore, Oroonoko finds him to be “a Man very gallant, and of 168

excellent Graces, and fine Parts” (61), that is, someone who demonstrates his noble

heritage in both appearance and behavior. These two factors lead Oroonoko to treat

Jamoan very differently from the other slaves:

He never put him amongst the Rank of Captives, as they us’d to do, without

distinction, for the common Sale, or Market; but kept him in his own Court,

where he retain’d nothing of the Prisoner, but the Name, and return’d no more to

his own Country, so great an Affection he took for Oroonoko. (61)

These events betray a certain level of nuance in Oroonoko’s own approach to slavery: while defeat merits captivity and enslavement, the circumstances of that defeat can affect how shamefully said enslavement must be borne; and, significantly, enslaved nobility who demonstrate their worthiness and honor may (perhaps should) be treated as slaves in name only. This is also the sort of slavery that the narrative itself seems to endorse – one based on Classical models, but which also ends up replicating many of the features of traditional aristocratic hierarchies. The bond between Oroonoko and Jamoan begins to look more and more like that between a beloved lord and a loyal vassal; the deference shown by the other slaves in Surinam reenacts that of adoring commoners to a ruling monarch. Chattel slavery is (at least temporarily) legitimated for the text’s early modern audience by an apparent correspondence to existing institutions and values of social order.

But this romanticized picture of slavery quickly begins to show cracks. Even in

Coromantien, the old king abuses the institution by faking Imoinda’s death and selling her to slavers; likewise, Oroonoko and his retainers are lured in by the courtly manners of the English captain and tricked into chains. Once captured, Oroonoko, being the paragon 169

of honorable behavior, and working from the model of enslavement which he has

heretofore followed, immediately tries to either escape or kill himself. Both of these ends

are thwarted by English, who “had so wisely manag’d his Fetters, that he cou’d not use a

Hand in his Defence, to quit himself of a Life that wou’d by no Means endure Slavery”

(64), so he resolves to starve himself to death during the voyage. Deceived again by the

captain, who pretends to remorse and promises release, Oroonoko lives through the

journey but is promptly sold once they disembark. His reaction to this is telling:

“Desiring those that held him to forbear their pains, and telling ‘em he would make no

Resistance, he cry’d, Come, my Fellow-Slaves; let us descend, and see if we can meet with more Honour and Honesty in the next World we shall touch upon” (67). This

sudden acceptance of the slave state makes sense when viewed in light of the case of

Jamoan: Oroonoko has employed every manner of resistance available to him, up to and

including attempted suicide, but has nevertheless been deceived into captivity. As he

remarks to Trefry, he is “a Slave, as long as he wou’d suffer himself to remain so” (67) –

in other words, as long as he refuses suicide or rebellion unto death, despite having the

means of either one, his demotion to slave is a deserved state. So he will do as Jamoan

did, and demonstrate his nobility and honor to the English in the hopes of receiving better

treatment, or even release. His polite submission to Trefry as his master, and insistence

on wearing slave clothes, can be read as part of this demonstration, a performance of

grace in defeat, which should be recognized and rewarded by any right-thinking people.

He more-or-less says as much when remarking upon the case of “Clemene,” and applauds

Trefry’s refusal to assault her on the basis of her modest behavior since “that Slave might

be Noble, or what was better, have true Notions of Honour and Vertue in her” (71). At 170

first, these expectations seem to bear out: Oroonoko, and later Imoinda, “endur’d no

more of the Slave but the Name” (69), exactly as Jamoan had, and are received more as guests by Trefry, with the promise of eventual freedom.

Imoinda’s pregnancy is the catalyst that gives the lie to this temporarily cordial state of affairs. Because slavery is an inherited state, Oroonoko is no longer content to wait for his promised liberation, and eventually stops playing the part of the dutiful captive. While inspiring the other slaves to revolt, he at first reverts back to his previous sentiment that dying with honor is preferable to living enslaved. But his rebellion is also animated by a specific condemnation of slavery as it is practiced by the English. He challenges the other slaves:

And why, said he, my dear Friends and Fellow-sufferers, shou’d we be Slaves to

an unknown People? Have they vanquish’d us Nobly in Fight? Have they Won

us in Honourable Battel? Are we, by the chance of War, become their Slaves?

This wou’d not anger a Noble Heart, this wou’d not animate a Soldiers Soul; no,

but we are Bought and Sold like Apes, or Monkeys, to be the Sport of Women,

Fools, and Cowards. (86)

It has become clear to Oroonoko that the colonial form of slavery is nothing like what he knew in Coromantien, even if that is not yet apparent to the narrator herself. In the events leading up to the rebellion, the narrator repeatedly implies that Oroonoko is being rash; that his fears about his and Imoinda’s child are unfounded, and that the delay of freedom caused by the Lord Governor’s deferred arrival is merely an accident. But after the rebellion fails, the narrator appears to become unsure of this assessment. Trefry is the one who calls Oroonoko’s rebellion a manifestation of youthful impatience, but the 171

narrator does not explicitly endorse this statement. Despite her repeated attempts to

blame all bad behavior by the English on Deputy Governor Byam and his allies, who are

painted as men of low breeding and even lower moral character, she at several points

acknowledges that their actions are driven by concerns of profit and survival. The

higher-class English settlers may have refused to pursue Oroonoko because of their

personal regard for him, but under normal circumstances putting down slave revolts is

“almost the common Cause; for such Revoltings are very ill Examples, and have very

fatal Consequences oftentimes in many Colonies” (88). After the slaves are recaptured,

Imoinda is prevented from witnessing her husband’s whipping “not in kindness to her,

but for fear she shou’d Dye with the Sight, or Miscarry; and then they shou’d loose a

young Slave, and perhaps the Mother” (91-2). For the rest of the story, however much

the narrator protests that she and her friends objected to Oroonoko’s mistreatment, they

are completely ineffectual in stopping any of it.

It is these events which finally give the lie to the notion that the chattel slavery of

the colonies is at all equivalent to the war-based slavery with which Behn and her

contemporaries might have been more comfortable. And that disconnect is not necessarily the result of unusually dishonorable individuals or groups. This is what

Oroonoko seems to have assumed at the outset – that the English captain who enslaved him was a bad person, and that many of the English were likewise bad people; but that if he demonstrated his honor and nobility, he would eventually manage to find honorable

English who would treat him as he deserved. He apparently found honor in Trefry and the narrator, and yet it made no real difference in his status: whatever privileges they granted him out of friendship or kindness, he was still perpetual chattel, as were his wife 172 and future child. The discourse of war-based slavery fails to hold up in Suriname not because of individual bad actors, but because the system is not set up to honor it. The

Suriname colony exists to provide England with wealth (as the narrator admits when lovingly detailing its natural resources at the beginning of the text); the African slaves have been brought to the colony to provide labor on the sugar plantations in pursuit of that wealth. They are, in the narrator’s own words, “made use of” because the English lack the power to enslave the natives, and colonists are frequently annoyed when lots of purchased slaves contain fewer men because less labor can be extracted from women and children (41). Far from being merely captive, the Africans are enslaved in perpetuity, as are their children, because (unlike the white indentured servants) they are property, not people. War-based slavery, which is wrapped up in notions of battlefield honor and patriarchal domesticity, is incompatible with the economic drives of chattel slavery, which are here – long before complicated discourses of racial hierarchy would calcify to cover them – laid out in almost naked practicality. Oroonoko’s journey in this section of the narrative is one towards realizing this fact – that slaves in the colonies are truly

“bought and sold like apes.”

So far, I have demonstrated why Oroonoko’s manner of death would have been shocking in its original context, and how the narrative leading up to that death has dramatized the collapse of two important discourses which would have otherwise granted

Oroonoko’s death a redeeming political meaning. First, the theory of the king’s two bodies, having been made too reliant on its own physical manifestation, has been 173 destroyed by physical means with the English defeat of the slave rebellion. Second, the discourse of war-based slavery, which would have slotted Oroonoko’s downfall into a possible moral tale about martial bravery, honor, and patriarchal social hierarchies, has been shown to be systemically incompatible with chattel slavery as it is practiced in the colony of Suriname. Both of the above cases revolve around the dissolution of higher ideals into a mere contest of bodies, bodies defined either by their vulnerability to force or their potential for economic exploitation. The scene of Oroonoko’s death is the final instance where these two discourses collapse into one another. That is to say, the death scene dramatizes a merger between the exercise of sovereign power (as it existed in contemporary English politics) and the emerging mechanisms of colonial exploitation, which enact a collapse of any redeeming metaphors that might legitimize the use of raw physical violence.

This collapse is one origin point of the biopolitical, that is, it is one of the sites where we may see the breakdowns of meaning that would later necessitate the rise of biopolitics. In order to understand how, we must first explore the connections between the scaffold, the sovereign, and the concept of civil life. Foucault has famously argued, in Discipline and Punish, that the medieval and early modern “spectacle of the scaffold”

– of which hanging, drawing, and quartering was one particularly spectacular form – was a political strategy by which the power of the monarch was established and reconstituted.

On the scaffold, the bodies of the monarch and of the condemned man become like two opposites on the same pole: the sovereign has excessive power, has -- and here Foucault references Kantorowicz -- such an excess of power that he has two bodies to contain it, whereas the condemned man is positioned as having a complete lack of power, such a 174

lack that even his body is not truly his own and becomes a mere object upon which the

sovereign's power will be exercised. The condemned man becomes the “symmetrical,

inverted figure of the king,”36 and this inversion functions as a way to publically

reconstitute the sovereign power which was violated in the condemned man’s crime.37

Foucault also identifies these scaffold spectacles as a point of vulnerability in sovereign

power, since their success depended on the acceptance of the audience; the public “must

be made to be afraid, but also . . . they must be the witness, the guarantors, of the

punishment, and because they must to a certain extent take part in it.”38 In other words,

the open display of sovereign power on the scaffold leaves it vulnerable because of the

audience’s potential to read and resist that power rather than acquiesce to it.

However, neither eventuality appears to be the case in Oroonoko’s death.

Richards argues that Behn’s narrator is working to bring the reader to such a moment of

recognition and resistance, contending that the contrasts between the brutality of

Oroonoko’s death, the narrator’s lack of direct witness to it, and the narrator’s

paradoxical claims to authority, “expose instead the brutal illusion of [Behn’s] own

power as a narrator and in the process expose the instability of all fictions of power, both

colonial and European.”39 And yet, as I have explored previously, there is no perceptible turn towards empowerment or real resistance as an effect of this exposure,

either within the text or without it. Inside the narrative, no one prevents, avenges, or

appears to even learn from Oroonoko’s death. Outside, audiences and adaptors have long

36 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 29. 37 Ibid, 47-8. 38 Ibid, 58. 39 Richards, 675 175

shied away from the original ending and its “brutal illusions,” transforming the narrative to fit the tropes of either heroic tragedy or sentimental abolitionism, both of which depended upon and reproduced power structures that, while not the same as sovereign power, still retained a level of stability and traditionalism. The original ending of

Oroonoko invites both distress and disempowerment, a sort of philosophical dead end from which many have felt compelled to divert.

This disempowerment is explicable when viewed through the additional lens of

Giorgio Agamben’s work, which seeks to re-frame the theories of Kantorowicz and

Foucault by going back to the Classical sources upon which medieval and early modern concepts of sovereignty depended. In Homo sacer, Agamben argues that the fundamental basis of sovereignty is revealed through the figure of the homo sacer, or sacred life, a kind of life which is subject to neither divine nor human law and is defined solely by its ability to be killed (but not sacrificed or murdered). This sacred life is synonymous with bare life, a state similar (though not identical) to the Hobbesian state of nature, and is in fact the foundation of political life: it is the originary “inclusive exclusion,” a mode of existence which civil life must define itself in opposition to. Bare life “is the exception and the threshold that constitutes and dwells within” civil society40; in other words, the

denial of bare life is what makes human society possible. A person in civil society,

subject to law and politics, is a person explicitly not defined solely by his or her ability to

be killed, but instead defined by various social and civil relationships not based on

immediate violent confrontation. Though a person with civil life does have the ability to

be killed, if he or she is deliberately killed by another civil person, an elaborate apparatus

40 Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazan, (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1998),106. 176

exists to socially define that killing as a either a crime or a justified act41; the sheer

physical fact of vulnerability to killing is never the sole factor at work in civil life. But

in order for civil life and civilization to maintain this definition of itself, the specter of bare life must always somehow be present, at least in potential, at the edges and extreme points of society. Thus, despite bare life being explicitly excluded from civil life, the

necessity of that exclusion paradoxically requires that the idea of bare life is always

already included within civil society.

For the medieval and early modern period, sovereign power functions to help

maintain this paradox. Sovereign power was also the product of a double exception,

being neither subject to human law nor quite equivalent to divine law. Revising

Foucault’s picture of the sovereign and the condemned man (in Agamben’s terms, the

homo sacer) as opposite poles of empowerment and disempowerment, Agamben

emphasizes their essential similarities and mutual interdependence. Since “the sovereign

sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and

without celebrating a sacrifice,” then “the sovereign and homo sacer present two

symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative: the sovereign is the

one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the

one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns.”42 Therefore, "the life caught in the

sovereign ban in the life that is originally sacred -- that is, that may be killed but not

sacrificed -- and, in this sense, the production of bare life is the originary activity of

41 In the Classical sources which Agamben draws upon, there is also the possibility of religious human sacrifice, which would place the sacrificed person under the auspices of divine law. This is less of a factor in later, more Christian contexts. 42 Agamben, 83-4. 177 sovereignty.”43 The sovereign and the homo sacer are in fact created at the same time, by the same mechanism, and are, working in concert, the foundation of civil society. We may look at it in this way: on one end, at the top, is life defined solely by its ability to kill (the sovereign), and therefore above the law. At the other end, the bottom, is life defined solely by its ability to be killed (the homo sacer), and therefore below the law.

In between these two -- bounded and therefore created by the two exceptional states -- resides political or civil life, that which is not defined either by killing or being killed; this civil life cannot exist without the two extremes to open up a linguistic and social space for it.

This picture of civil life bounded by states of exception enables us to understand the relationships between Oroonoko’s death, the king’s two bodies, chattel slavery, and the narrative ending’s resistance to political signification. In an English context, the ritualized punishment for high treason (i.e., hanging, drawing and quartering) is the most obvious manifestation of the relationship between the sovereign and bare life, since it is a type of killing which can always only be done by a sovereign (or the proxy of a sovereign), and always only be done to those who have been drawn into the sovereign sphere by threatening a sovereign. For Agamben, this sovereign sphere is similar to, though not synonymous with, Kantorowicz’ formulation of the king’s body politic:

The king’s political body cannot simply represent (as Kantorowicz and Giesey

held) the continuity of sovereign power. The king’s body must also and above all

represent the very excess of the emperor’s sacred life . . . at the moment of the

sovereign’s death, it is the sacred life grounding sovereign authority that invests

43 Ibid, 83. 178

the person of the sovereign’s successor. The two formulas [le mort saisit le vif

and le roi ne meurt jamais] only signify sovereign power’s continuity to the extent

that they express, by means of the hidden tie to life that can be killed but not

sacrificed, sovereign power’s absoluteness.44

In other words, Agamben contends that the king’s body politic – the legal and theo-

political fiction that unites sovereign and subjects into a unified nation – is in fact a

metaphor for and mystification of the inclusion of bare life into civil society (and

especially English civil society, which is my focus here). The king’s authority over the

body politic is what structures the presence of the sovereign sphere above the law and the

sacred sphere below it, enabling the existence of civil life in between and therefore giving

the body politic its unifying power in day-to-day social life and politics. This theory

helps clarify why bringing the metaphor of the king’s two bodies too close to its own physical manifestation always threatens its collapse (as does indeed happen in

Oroonoko): if the king’s two bodies are a cipher for the fundamental relationship between sovereignty and bare life, and a framework for including bare life into English civil society, then any activity which too openly demonstrates the “hidden tie” between the sovereign and bare life has the possibly to overwhelm and erase the in-between space which allows for civil life.

Similarly, the state of exception underlying sovereignty and bare life plays an essential role in the operations of colonial chattel slavery, what Achille Mbembe has called “one of the very first instances of biopolitical experimentation.”45 Mbembe

44 Ibid, 101. 45 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” in Foucault in an Age of Terror: Essays on Biopolitics and the Defense of Society, ed. Stephen Morton and Stephen Bygrave (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 160. 179

argues that the historical formulation of European state sovereignty (a recent

development in Behn’s time, only a few decades removed from the Peace of Westphalia)

and its related “domestication” of war consequently created a fundamental global

divide. Those parts of the world organized into “civilized” states were considered part of the juridical order, subject to rules about legitimate ways of waging war. But those parts of the world not organized into recognized states lie outside of juridical order and are thus available for colonial exploitation, albeit with the theoretical end of “civilizing” them and admitting them, through subjugation, into the sphere of law. This means that

“the colonies are the location par excellence where the controls and guarantees of juridical order can be suspended -- the zone where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of ‘civilization.’”46 The state of exception is by

definition always in effect, and so:

The sovereign’s right to kill is not subject to any rule in the colonies. In the

colonies, the sovereign might kill at any time or in any manner. Colonial warfare

is not subject to legal and institutional rules. It is not a legally codified activity . .

. all manifestations of war and hostility that had been marginalized by a European

legal imaginary find a place to re-emerge in the colonies.47

Mbembe’s explanation of the colonial world can be seen as Agamben’s inclusive

exclusion write large -- in order for European states to define themselves as a civil form

of life, even and especially when at war with one another, they had to construct, or

project, the “colonizable” parts of the world as if pre- existing in a state of bare life.

Through this means, the European states discursively create the conditions for

46 Ibid, 163. 47 Ibid, 163. 180

colonization -- by assuming that certain segments of the world already perpetually exist

in a Hobbesian state of nature, they can obscure even from themselves the process by

which they reduce colonized people to a state of bare life. The instruments of colonial

authority thus become absolute sovereigns over the people caught in this state of bare

life, having by definition the ability to kill with impunity. As Mbembe puts it, “The

colony represents the site where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of

power outside the law (ab legibus solutus) and where ‘peace’ is more likely to take on the

face of a ‘war without end.’”48 The civil life of European juridical order exists by

defining itself over and against the unending war of the colonies. It is therefore no

wonder that the supposed “civilizing” mission of colonization is an unending maze of

moving goalposts: beyond merely being an after-the-fact justification, the “civilizing” mission exists to obscure the fact that the colonies have already been incorporated into civil life as the necessary site of bare life and unrestricted sovereign power, included into

“civilization” by the very act of their exclusion.

Thus, we can say that the scaffold and the slave-plantation are similar in that they are both sites where civil life is erased; but what Oroonoko’s death dramatizes is the addition of the monarch into this form of social death. The method by which the colonists kill Oroonoko inverts the normal position of the sovereign, the one who stands above the law and thus has the exceptional authority to maim and kill, and the regicide, who in attacking the sovereign has entered into an exceptional state below the law and exists only to be maimed and killed. Under the stable circumstances of an early modern

European kingdom, the killing and dismembering of the regicide would reinstate

48 Ibid, 162. 181

sovereign power and reaffirms the boundaries that allow for the existence of civil life.

The watching audience is defined and defines itself as not bare life, because unlike the

dying traitor or the monarch who kills him they have not been reduced solely to their

ability to kill or be killed. But this is impossible in Suriname for a few important reasons.

Because Oroonoko’s death inverts the normal order and has a king dying like a regicide,

it fails to reaffirm the boundaries of civil life and in fact nullifies them. If a sovereign can

be killed like a regicide, then the figure that stood above the law and took sole command

of the power to kill and maim has been lost. If a regicide’s death can be inflicted on a

sovereign, then the figure that stood below the law and was a key recipient of the killing

and maiming power of the sovereign has been lost. Meanwhile, this death is actually

being inflicted by English commoners, taking into their own hands the formerly

exclusively royal privilege to main and torture, and doing so with absolute impunity.

This inversion can only be fully enacted because of the colonial setting, because

Oroonoko is a slave in a system of chattel slavery where slaves are property and not

persons, and therefore ineligible for the protection of the law. Agamben defines the

sovereign as “the one to whom all men are potentially homines sacri” and the homo sacer

as “the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns.”49 This describes the

relationship between the colonizer and the colonized on an overall level, but also

describes the relationship between chattel slaves and their masters on an individual level.

By collapsing the scaffold drama of sovereign and condemned man, and combining it

with the normal order (or rather, the normalized lack-of-order) of chattel slavery, Behn presents us with a vision of colonial life which is barely controlled chaos. All people

49 Agamben, 84. 182

may act as both sovereign or homo sacer to one another, dependent only on who has the

physical advantage. In a succinct word: anarchy. And anarchy, in this case, is not an

enabling state -- it cannot call on the audience, in-story or out of it, to create new or

alternative structures, but precludes the possibility of legitimate power structures altogether.

Essentially, I am arguing that Behn is equating the dissolution of stable forms of

sovereign rule with the rising forces of colonialism, seeing in them both the same descent

into social chaos. In saying that Behn’s version of colonial life is basically anarchical

(with all the attendant horror that an ardent monarchist would bring to the concept of an-

archy), I am not denying the fact that the colonial order, despite its relative newness to

the English, was historically well on its way to establishing discourses and customary

power structures of its own, and also in the early stages of developing the elaborate racial

hierarchies with which we are now all too familiar. Rather, I am arguing that Behn’s

depiction shows a moment of rupture, or breakdown, between the new order and the old,

a place where the raw forces of violence and commodification can be fully recognized.

Behn, in presenting Oroonoko as having an inborn, quasi-biological claim to kingship, suggests that kingship is an equivalent state across races and civilizations. Because the narrative largely lacks the later discourses of racial hierarchy that would automatically place an African king below the level of even an English commoner, Oroonoko and the other slaves of Suriname can easily act as an exaggerated reflection of the sovereign structures that royalists like Behn saw playing out in English society. The fact that this presentation coincides with the reduction of the slaves into mere bodies, into the commodities of colonial expansion, means that the resulting anarchy, the collapse of 183

political meaning, is also potentially an equivalent state across races and civilizations.

The English have the physical and technological advantage over their slaves, but must

enforce it brutally to avoid a deadly reversal; the natives of Suriname have a (temporary)

advantage in numbers over the English, and so the English only survive by pretending at

friendliness. Later on, the Dutch will supplant the English and be slaughtered in turn by

aggrieved natives. Sovereignty in the colonies means, as Mbembe put it, war without

end; but Behn depicts it as hewing closer to the Hobbesian sense of the perpetual war of

all against all, a state that can only ever be destructive to all sides.

This inevitable self-destruction is signaled most clearly in the running subplot

about the natives’ method of choosing their war-captains. Shortly after arriving in

Suriname, Oroonoko is taken by the narrator to visit some of the local natives, who

describe to him how they choose their captains:

When he who is first asked, making no reply, cuts off his nose, and throws it

contemptibly on the ground; and the other does something to himself that he

thinks surpasses him, and perhaps deprives himself of lips and an eye: so they

slash on till one gives out, and many have died in this debate. And it’s by a

passive valor they show and prove their activity; a sort of courage too brutal to be

applauded by our black hero; nevertheless, he expressed his esteem of ‘em. (84)

At first, this contest of mutual self-mutilation is as baffling to Oroonoko as it is to the

English. But after his slave revolt fails, he decides that the only option for resistance is the suicide of his incipient family: he will kill Imoinda and their unborn child with his own hand, and then kill himself after, or in attempt of, bloody revenge against Governor

Byam. This plan is only half-completed, as Oroonoko is too crazed with grief after 184 killing Imoinda to do anything except lie beside her body for days. Upon being discovered by the English, who attempt to recapture him, he responds by mimicking the war-captains:

Look ye, ye faithless Crew, said he, tis not Life I seek, nor am I afraid of Dying;

and at that Word, cut a piece of Flesh from his own Throat, and threw it at ‘em,

yet still I would Live if I could, till I had perfected my Revenge. But oh! it cannot

be; I feel Life gliding from my Eyes and Heart; and if I make not haste, I shall fall

a Victim to the Shameful Whip. At that, he ripped up his own Belly, and took his

Bowels and pulled ‘em out, with what strength he could. (97)

The (narratively and literally) messy nature of these events prevents them from being read as the traditional components of heroic tragedy. They are, in one sense, yet another point on a long line of failed attempts to recoup some sense of tragic dignity on

Oroonoko’s part, since he survives long enough to be dragged back to the colony publically dismembered, without remotely revenging himself on any of this persecutors.

However, despite losing in that sense, he has accomplished one thing: he has deprived the English of valuable property in the form of Imoinda, who as a fertile woman could have been used to breed more slaves, the child, who could have provided a lifetime’s worth of slave labor, and even of himself as an entertaining curiosity or an object of ridicule. The native war-captains’ contest dispenses with pomp and pretense, and instead boils war down to its most basic, bare-life elements: the ability and the willingness to kill and be killed. In the perpetual war of the colony, the bodies of slaves are reduced to tools and commodities defined only by their ability to work and the susceptibility to punishment. Oroonoko’s killing of Imoinda, the child, and himself is done in recognition 185

of the true nature of his conflict with the English, a capitulation to fighting enslavement

on its own terms, which are always and only terms of mutual or self-annihilation.

If the endgame of colonial enslavement is the reduction of slaves solely to killable bodies, then that means that colonial slavery in Surinam operates within the realm of bare life. It is this new form of bare life which has made a sovereign like Oroonoko fall prey to a regicide’s gruesome death in the first place. What the ending scene finally demonstrates, then, is that the anarchy which results from the removal of the sovereign is the same anarchy that results from a colonial context of rapacious enslavement. The slavers act as sovereigns to their slaves, the slaves as homines sacri their owners, and civil life has no middle ground in which to exist. It is this culmination, this disturbing indictment of the state of English sovereignty both at home and abroad, which produces the aversiveness of Oroonoko original ending. One cannot derive workable political significance from a climax which posits the breakdown of civil life itself and thus also political life as we know it.

Conclusion

For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE

(in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man.

- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

Applying twentieth and twenty-first century theories on political theology to

works from the early modern era is a recursive process. Political theology was first

articulated in the early twentieth century via reference to early modern texts -- to

explicitly political writers like Machiavelli and Hobbes, yes, but also to Shakespeare, to

German trauerspiele, to Dante. Supposedly dwelling on the border between an older

theological worldview and newer secular one, these early modern texts, both political and

literary, were assumed by the likes of Schmitt, Kantorowicz, and Benjamin to contain the

key features that originated their present society, and thus also to contain the origins of its

fundamental flaws. Their particular concern was the rise of the Third Reich, and more

specifically the failures of the Weimar Republic that supposedly enabled the rise of the

Nazi party. For an early twenty-first century thinker, using the works of these modernists and their postwar successors as lenses to examine those same early modernists adds layers of additional complexity. One of the main aims of this dissertation has been to reexamine and revise some of the conclusions drawn about the early modern period, and early modern literature, by those modernist thinkers, particularly in light of later twentieth century theory. But in pursuing that aim, I am also on some level seeking to do

what they did: to discover the deeper origins of my political present, and to better

illuminate the problems that plague it. 187

In the preceding four chapters, I have examined the ways in which Shakespeare,

Milton, and Behn engage in the temporal displacement of sovereignty, a displacement rendered necessary by both the inherent paradoxes of sovereignty itself and by the particular needs and preoccupations of each author’s political context. But there is yet another commonality among these texts: namely, that each of the major works discussed in this document also constitutes a “fictionalization” of events that their authors believe, or claim to believe, “really” happened. I use scare-quotes around the terms “fictional” and “real” because the precision and implications of these concepts vary considerably.

Richard II and Henry V, as I have discussed, are history plays that deliberately interrogate their own genre; written at a time when history as a discipline was becoming more and more concerned with accuracy, they had to negotiate not only the borders of the history play versus history, but also the borders between so-called accurate history and the mythologies promoted in the service of political power. Paradise Lost is written in the tradition of epic poetry (and could rightly be considered the last meaningfully epic poem to be written in English), and is also a depiction of Biblical events that Milton believed had actually, literally happened. Its composition would have involved for its author a double artfulness: on the one hand translating events outside the realm of human understanding into human terms, but also the transformation of an existing Biblical narrative into a literary form above and beyond simple exegesis. Oroonoko is an especially complex case: in the tradition of the nouvelle, Behn claims to be narrating real events to which she herself was a witness, but large portions of the narrative are, to a contemporary scholar, obviously an invention. Yet other portions (for instance, much of the description of Suriname) are apparently accurate and suggest that Behn may have 188

indeed been writing partially from personal experience. Thus, it is still an open question

which parts of the text are taken directly from Behn’s memories, which parts are exaggerations or alterations based on real events, and which parts are completely made up -- all of which have interesting implications for the degree of artfulness contained in her claims to accuracy.

Each of these works deliberately straddles the line between what we call real and what we call fictional; and the more important factor in their relationship to sovereignty is not so much the straddling itself as the deliberateness with which it is done. In the early modern era, the categories of “real” and “fictional” were not as separable as we may like to think of them now, but they were in the process of becoming more separable.

These works, produced in such a context, are by design self-conscious of their

fictionalizations. This question of self-consciousness is relevant because, in exploring temporal displacements of sovereignty, I am at the core exploring the imaginative dimensions of authority and authoritarianism -- and especially the ways in which an emotional engagement with those imaginative dimensions is perhaps a necessary condition for authoritarian power structures to function. Each work examined in this dissertation is, as I hope I have shown, self-conscious in its engagement with the temporal displacements of authority, insofar that each work is enacting that displacement in service of its own particular ends in its own particular context. But the fact that each work is also self-conscious of its simultaneous playing with the lines between “real” and

“fictional” betrays an awareness of the imaginative qualities of its particular mode of temporal displacement. And that implies an explicit awareness of the necessarily imaginative dimensions of authoritarian power structures in and of themselves. In this 189

conclusion, I would like to brief unfold some of the implications of this self-

consciousness both in these texts themselves and in our own political moment. What, in

other words, are the implications of imaginative literary works about sovereignty, written with the self-conscious awareness that sovereignty itself is partially imaginative?

The Self-Consciousness of Illusion

The imaginative dimensions of sovereignty are sometimes equated with its having an irrational character, and also sometimes with its inherently theological foundation. As this dissertation argues, however, imaginative acts like the temporal displacement of the sovereign are not inherently irrational or miraculous, but are always enacted with a particular political and emotional logic of their own - even if they may appear in their final form to have an irrational or miraculous character. In the recursive relationship between the contemporary thought, modernist thought, and early modernist thought, this debate over the rational and irrational, the secular and the miraculous, becomes a debate about both our collective inheritance from the early modern period and how we should understand the operations of authority in our own day. Exploring the implications of self-consciousness in the imagination of authority may perhaps give us a way around some of these assumed dichotomies.

Victoria Kahn’s The Future of Illusion is written specifically to counter those critics who insist upon the theological and irrational character of sovereignty, including

Agamben and a few others cited in this dissertation. In doing so, however, she addresses directly the question of the self-consciousness of poetics. Seeking to understand 190 precisely what these modernists found so compelling in their early modern sources, she argues:

What the modern critics find in the early modern period is a break with an older

form of political theology construed as the theological legitimation of the state, a

new emphasis on a secular notion of human agency, and, most important, a new

preoccupation with the ways art and fiction reoccupy the territory of religion. In

so doing, they remind us that poiesis is the missing third term in both early

modern and contemporary debates about politics and religion.1

Poiesis, for Kahn, is a term that encompasses both literary and political fiction. She defines it as a key part of the “entirely human capacity to make at least part of the world we live in.”2 For Kahn, and for the modernists she is reading, poiesis is a concept of great political import specifically because it is a concept of entirely human capacities, that is, it is a purely secular concept. Kahn takes particular issue with the assumption made by some critics that, in the supposed grand narrative of secularization, a theological dimension of political thought was “really” always there all along -- the suppressed, hidden backbone to an outwardly secularized world. Instead, she argues, theological versions of political thought merely exist under the broader umbrella of the metaphors which enable human community, making them separate from so-called secular political thought in content but not in substance. Poiesis is the “missing” third term for Kahn because it represents a recognition of this fact, and foregrounds the human capacity to make and remake the fictions upon which our communities are built. It is this capacity which both the moderns and the early moderns found so crucial.

1 Victoria Kahn, The Future of Illusion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 2-3. 2 Ibid, 22. 191

In this dissertation I have agreed with some of the core parts of Kahn’s analysis:

my argument portrays the secularization of political concepts as simply further

adjustments in the workings of sovereign power --“theological” thinking about the

sovereign constitutes a hidden backbone of “secular” sovereignty only insofar that the

central paradox of sovereignty requires a displacement onto some sort of transcendent

warrant. The fact that Christian concepts are adapted to provide this transcendence is a

result of historical contingency, not a special quality inherent to Christianity itself.

Kahn’s notion of poiesis, however, nevertheless insists upon an actual, not merely

superficial or phantasmic, rupture between modern and premodern thinking. This rupture

does not consist in the transition from theological to secular, but in a new hyperawareness

of the enabling metaphors of human community as metaphors, as works of art and

artifice, which foreground a fundamental human agency to create and disseminate new

mythologies of political power. It is this awareness which leads Hobbes, as quoted in the

epigraph to this conclusion, to argue that the commonwealth is made by art; it is this

awareness which enabled Hobbes and those Enlightenment thinkers who came after him

to systematically analyze human politics in the first place. Hobbes meant his work not

merely to describe human society but to effect the politics of his day, to create new

mythologies -- to be a deliberate act of poiesis.

Poiesis and the Sovereign

To Kahn, the recognition of poiesis as a human capacity for creation is what takes the “theology” out of political theology, and with it, supposedly, the irrationality that leads to authoritarianism. The works analyzed in this dissertation are works of poiesis in 192

the sense championed by Kahn, but they also show that her conclusion -- that poiesis is in

some way antithetical to authoritarianism -- is far from a given. The four works

addressed in the preceding chapters are self-conscious of being fictionalizations of real events; they are self-conscious of the ends to which they temporally displace the sovereign; and they are self-conscious of that displacement being an act of

fictionalization. This does not mean that the authors in question did not “really” believe

in the monarchy, or did not “really” believe in their own political principles. It means

that they wrote with a recognition, on some level, that both literary and political fiction

depend upon acts of poiesis. And yet those acts of poiesis can still be turned to whatever

ends, pro- or anti-authoritarian, that author and audience may prefer.

Henry V answers the longing set up in Richard II for a “real” experience of sovereignty not with an attempt at depicting that ideal sovereign but with turn toward preemptive nostalgia. This belies a recognition that that such an experience is, if not impossible, then only achievable in an anticipatory, illusory form. Paradise Lost retells the origin myth of human political community in order to find out ways of persisting in the face of political disaster. The telling and retelling of origin myths is presented as a necessary part of doing so, and perhaps as the only reliable way of conceiving of one’s place in the full scope of human political history. Oroonoko dramatizes a breakdown in sovereignty, and in political power structures in general, compensated only barely by the narrator’s power to turn the title character’s downfall into a cautionary tale. And yet the very act of doing so acknowledges not only the role of such tales in sustaining existing power structures but also their potential to help create new ones. Art and artifice are not 193 only a possible way out of political dead ends, they are an essential component in the fabric of politics itself.

These works underline a fact which we in the early twenty-first century would do well to keep in mind: self-consciousness of the artificiality of sovereignty does not necessarily entail anti-authoritarianism. There is a tendency to assume that if people are made aware that sovereigns or other figures of such veneration are largely illusory -- are a calibrated result of poiesis -- then that veneration must necessarily cease. If we can just admit that the emperor has no clothes, the logic goes, then we should be able to easily dismiss the need or the desire for emperors. All authority has an imaginative dimension, all authority is in whole or in part an imaginative construct, but emotional attachment to that construct does not disappear when it is known or revealed to be a construct.

Likewise, it is entirely possible to acknowledge that an authoritarian figure, a sovereign, can by definition never fully manifest and must always be displaced; to acknowledge that the act of displacement is an artificial process is service of political ends; and yet to still fully believe in and participate in that process. This is of course not to say that self- consciousness of the imaginative qualities of authority is necessarily pro-authoritarian, either. It would be a mistake to conclude, as some might, that in order to escape authoritarianism we must make ourselves forget that politics is at its heart a purely human construct and instead insist upon the existence of essential truths. Even if that were possible in our current political climate -- which I believe is very much not the case -- it would be dodging the heart of the issue. What we must contend with is not the mere recognition of the poiesis of authoritarianism, but how to be self-consciously poetic in our attempts to counter it. 194

If I have accomplished nothing else in this dissertation, I hope to have at least shed some light upon how this task has been and may yet be done.

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