Royal Bodies in Shakespearean Adaptations on Screen
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Royal Bodies in Shakespearean Adaptations on Screen ANNA BLACKWELL De Montfort University MARINA GERZIC The University of Western Australia From Kantorowicz to the Windsors In her controversial essay “Royal Bodies” (2013), Hilary Mantel focuses on the intersection between the monarchy and bodies, and particularly the bodies of royal women. The essay, largely a critique of the current British royal family, argues that the concept of monarchy is constructed in such a way that the public tends to see royals as superior and untouchable, as something to be admired and looked at. Entitled “Royal Bodies in Shakespearean Adaptations on Screen,” this special issue considers the ways Shakespeare and adaptations of his plays on screen engage with the early modern royal body. The special issue seeks to move beyond Mantel’s limited analysis of the appearance of royal bodies by discussing the acts that these royal bodies undertake; political machinations, deception, murder, and conquest; as well as acts of love, heroism, and creation. The special issue also considers the political significance of the royal body in pre/post Brexit-Britain and the construction and consolidation of on-screen royalty through the processes of adaptation and remediation in digital media. The articles collected in this special issue duly build upon Ernst Kantorowicz’s landmark work The King’s Two Bodies, which analyses the political duality that English law 1 attributed to kingship; a duality predicated on the idea that a monarch possessed two bodies, a body natural and a body politic (79). This meant that while the former was mortal, the latter quality was artificial, mystical, eternal, and divine: an embodiment of both the nation and the authority of sovereignty. Kantorowicz’s work remains significant as, to understand the political motivations within many of Shakespeare’s plays, one must also understand the nature of monarchical power. It is because of this that critics such as Stephen Greenblatt (Renaissance; “Introduction”) have utilized Kantorowicz’s doctrine of the king’s two bodies as the foundation for an understanding of the theatricality of power. Stephanie Elsky proposes that because Kantorowicz analyzed “the ceremonial expression of the king’s two bodies in medieval funeral processions and monuments, effigies, and coins, critics like Greenblatt were drawn to its theatrical and performative potential” (9). As David Norbrook notes, the analysis of the king’s two bodies by New Historicist critics was done in the context of work on Elizabeth I, and is often seen as the “keystone of Elizabethan theories of language and representation” (329).1 In Elizabeth I’s much imitated and frequently reproduced Golden Speech, her last speech to members of Parliament (delivered on 30 November 1601), for example, Elizabeth calls herself a prince, a queen, and a king.2 This speech highlights the importance of the idea of the king’s two bodies to the Tudor politics that inspired Shakespeare and others working on the early modern stage. The connection between Elizabethan representation and Shakespearean studies is furthered by Elizabeth’s own reference to herself as Richard II, a reference pursued by Norbrook in his analysis of Richard II using Kantororowicz’s work. Both Richard and Elizabeth were the subject of depositions; although, of course, the Earl of Essex’s attempt to oust Elizabeth was less successful than Henry Bolingbroke’s had been (Norbrook). Reflecting on the Essex rebellion of February 1601, Elizabeth was reported as saying to William Lambarde (newly appointed keeper of the records in the Tower of London), “I am Richard II 2 know ye not that?” (Chambers 326–7). These were not idle musings and, seemingly, Elizabeth was not alone in noting the comparison between the monarchs. Shakespeare’s dramatization of Richard II was performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in advance of the treacherous Essex rebellion. According to the dominant narratives, the plotters hoped to convince the audience of the need to get rid of their ruler, such that they would support the Earl of Essex when, the following day, he marched on the city. Elizabeth’s assertion “I am Richard” thus suggests not only a shared vulnerability but also an example of the idea of the king’s two bodies in practice, matching Elizabeth’s image of herself as a woman with “the heart and stomach of a king” in her Tilbury speech in July 1588. As Elisabeth Bronfen and Barbara Straumann convincingly argue, Elizabeth I is distinguished from other female monarchs by the (seemingly) “contradictory positions she brought together by gendering the symbolic body of the king and emphasising that she was a queen” (134), playing freely with her roles as warrior, virgin, mother, and lover—“unreachable for all, except as a representation” (134)—and with her status as a public figure, caught between her symbolic and natural bodies. Shakespearean critics (and directors and performers) have also turned to the monarchs featured in Shakespeare’s plays (and the histories in particular) as examples of the simultaneously double and divided nature of the king’s body. Perhaps the greatest argument for the influence of Kantorowicz’s doctrine is that, as Peter Holland observes, it “made the comparatively rare transition from academy to theatre” (37), having strongly influenced John Barton’s 1973 stage production of Richard II. Barton’s production indicated the potential duality of the royal body by emphasizing Richard and Bolingbroke as reflected, opposing versions of one another. This was made manifest not only in key scenes such as 4.1 in which Richard and Bolingbroke held a broken mirror between them, but in the decision to nightly alternate Ian Richardson and Richard Pasco in the roles of Richard and Bolingbroke. 3 Kantorowicz’s insights perhaps also explain why there remains a cultural interest in the royal body that has not abated since Shakespeare’s time, even as the actual power of the monarchy has waned to a largely symbolic function in the United Kingdom. The popularity of series like The Crown (Netflix, 2016–present), as well as the tabloids’ compulsive coverage of new royals like Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle, speaks to a fascination with divining and questioning the distinctions between the “natural” and the performed; the personal and the political; the individual and the state. By focusing on the performance of royalty and the royal body in Shakespeare’s plays and subsequent adaptations thereof, this special issue both reflects on and advances Kantorowicz’s proposal into the realm of new media. Royal bodies in 2020 and beyond Writing this introduction in mid-2020, such a task is perhaps inevitably influenced by at least four significant events: “Megxit,” the decision of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, to step back from their senior roles in the British royal family;3 the release of Hilary Mantel’s long-awaited conclusion to her trilogy about Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell, The Mirror and the Light (2020); the Black Lives Matter protests, sparked by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and the continued and widespread police brutality targeting people of color; and the outbreak of coronavirus, more commonly referred to as the global COVID-19 outbreak. Royalty world-wide have certainly not been spared from the virus. Prince Charles, the heir apparent to the British throne, and Prince Albert of Monaco both succumbed to, but survived, the infection, and Spain’s Princess Maria Teresa was the first royal to die of the coronavirus; Kantorowicz’s conceptualization of the monarch may very well have two bodies, but one is mortal and thus subject to illness and death. But while Charles’s battle with COVID-19 may have illustrated the vulnerability of the 4 future King of England to illness, it wasn’t until UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson was hospitalized due to COVID-19 that connections were overtly made in the media between unwell bodies and the ill health of the states they represented. As well as extending sympathy to Johnson,, media outlets drew attention to the potential effect of his illness on, variously, the stability of the Conservative party, a potential leadership power vacuum, and the government’s ability to negotiate Britain’s exit from the European Union. The connectedness of Johnson’s body and the state he governs reached its rhetorical climax in Allison Pearson’s plea in the Telegraph, “We need you, Boris—your health is the health of the nation.” Such rhetoric has an undeniable appeal to conservative media outlets like the aforementioned Telegraph or The Sun, who marked the release of Johnson from intensive care with the headline, “Boris is out (Now that really is a Good Friday!)” (Dunn and McDermott). The Sun faced opposition for its celebratory tone, given the Prime Minister’s good health coincided with what was then the highest day of COVID-19 casualties in the UK (Shabi; “Sun Faces Huge Online Backlash”). Less commented on, however, was the headline’s audacious equivalence of Johnson’s recovery with the resurrection of Jesus Christ over Easter and the suggestion that there was, perhaps, a similarly sacrificial quality to his illness. While this configuration of Johnson, rather than Charles, as the embodiment of the body politic marks a distinction from the form of government imagined by Kantorowicz, it nevertheless possesses what Matthew Sweet describes as an “Elizabethan weight of symbolism” (@MatthewSweet). Our continued ability to recognize the symbolic potential of the king’s two bodies can be seen in Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light: The poor labourer owns his sleep and his stool, and can sell his piss to the fuller, whereas the king’s piss and stool is the property of all England, and every fantasy that 5 disturbs his night hours is recorded somewhere in a book of dreams, which is written in the clouds massing over the fields and forests of his realm: every stir of lust, every frightful waking.