Vacancies of Law in Shakespeare's Tragedies by Mauricio Martinez A

States of Mourning: Vacancies of Law in Shakespeare’s Tragedies by Mauricio Martinez A Thesis presented to the University of Guelph In partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Literary/Theatre Studies in English Guelph, Ontario, Canada © Mauricio Martinez, January, 2015 i ABSTRACT STATES OF MOURNING: VACANCIES OF LAW IN SHAKESPEARE’S TRAGEDIES Mauricio Martinez Advisor: University of Guelph, 2015 Mark Fortier This thesis is an investigation of various linguistic and thematic connections between Shakespeare’s tragedies and a popular religio-political undercurrent that emerged in England in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Shakespeare in his tragic mode mirrors his contemporaries in law, religion, and popular writing by blending vocabularies of Calvinist piety and mysteries of kingship into a focused concern with states in periods of mourning, so-called “vacancies of law” and a fundamental inadequacy at the core of human being. Contemporary continental philosophy uses the term “state of exception” to describe periods in which sovereign power suspends the law in whole or in part in the service of political order; various strains of literary, legal, and political thought in Shakespeare’s England conceived both the nation and individual as subject to a divine retribution echoing the Covenant Lawsuit of the Hebrew Bible, and in a Calvinist inflection this retribution takes the form of a state of permanent mourning, permanent exception. This study proceeds first through an elaboration of this sixteenth century system of signification that combines Calvinist understandings of Hebrew prophecy with the language of English law and government, and second with the most notable instance of this system in Shakespearean tragedy, biblical birds of warning. From there, this inquiry ii examines three tragic plays in depth: Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet, in order to show their deep engagement with contemporary religious and political thought that posited scripture as a model for governments of all types, but through a Calvinist lens that saw both the inner turmoil of the tragic figure and the catastrophes befalling nations as the outcome of a fundamental human inadequacy; a condition in which the exception has become the rule. iii Dedication and Acknowledgements A writing process beset by at least a few desperate crises alongside numerous obstacles and minor setbacks can scarcely be described as a singular achievement. What is presented here sits upon a tightly woven fabric of instutional and personal support, the threads of which are far too numerous and this space far too narrow for me to detail them all. With this sense of incompleteness I would like to offer the following thanks. I wish to extend my gratitude to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Province of Ontario, and the University of Guelph for generously funding my research and progress through this program of study. Thanks are also reserved for Alan Filewod, Chair of the School of English and Theatre Studies, for his open door and constant willingness to help. I would like to thank my advisory committee of Viviana Comensoli and Daniel Fischlin for their thoughtful challenges, encouragement, and advice throughout, and my internal examiner Michael Keefer, who introduced me to Nashe and Elizabethan Calvinism. My external examiner, Richard Weisberg, is to be thanked and praised for his insistence on argumentative precision and stimulating conversation during his visit. An extended kinship network that includes my parents, Gladys Marquez and Luis Martinez, and also Kim and Anna Larsen, has been instrumental to seeing this work come to completion, and I am ever grateful for their efforts. Nothing assisted in the process of developing the text in front of you more than the many patient readings and intellectual guidance of Mark Fortier, a terrific advisor and a good man. All faults, of course, are my own. This thesis is dedicated to my children, who carried me. We are tried and saved together. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Dedication and Acknowledgements .................................................................................. iv Table of Contents .................................................................................................................v Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 Chapter One .......................................................................................................................28 Chapter Two .......................................................................................................................71 Chapter Three ...................................................................................................................104 Chapter Four ....................................................................................................................141 Chapter Five .....................................................................................................................174 Coda .................................................................................................................................210 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................216 v Introduction This study examines the affective experience of mourning and its relationship to "vacancies of law" in Shakespeare's tragedies. Drawing upon a theme of divine retribution elaborated in legal and religious cultures of late sixteenth-century England, Shakespeare’s tragedies posit an inherent estrangement from divine law as the cause of inner turmoil and socio- political catastrophe, utilizing a Calvinist vocabulary of conscience and prophecy as well as the mystical language of sovereignty in English public law. Shakespeare works within and elaborates upon this system of signification, and in so doing absorbs its implications in tragic worlds where interior and exterior crisis continually suggest a universal human anomie framed in Calvinist terms: humanity's permanent outlaw status, or in the language of contemporary continental philosophy, humanity's state of permanent exception. “How is it with you,” Gertrude asks Hamlet, “That you do bend your eye on vacancy, / And with the incorporeal air hold discourse” (3.4.116-18)? It is a loaded question. The vacancy to which Gertrude refers could mean an empty part of the wall, but the word is also a technical term referring to the vacancy of office. It remarks on Hamlet’s apparent hallucinatory conversation with emptiness just as it shows Hamlet’s willingness to believe an office—in the context of the play, the kingship—to be vacant, even when filled by his uncle. Hamlet is in mourning. He remains attached to the previous holder of that office and thus finds himself looking towards—literally—a ghostly body in order to ground a sense of order in the universe, of what should be in spite of what is. This study argues that political tragedies such as Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet show Shakespeare using periods of mourning and vacancies of office as prompts to explore the relationship between law and human existence through the intersection of politics and theology in ideas of European kingship. 1 This study analyzes early modern understandings of mourning and vacancy to explicate a tendency in Shakespeare’s political tragedies, wherein vacancies of office provoke a crisis in the ability of characters to navigate a common and transcendent moral law. In these tragedies, law is expressed in two forms: human-made law executed through corporeal bodies of kings and magistrates, and an incorporeal divine or mystical law that affirms itself by withdrawing, and grounded in the metaphor of God withdrawing himself (and order and reason in the process) from the natural world. I use the term “vacancy of law” to describe the separation of these two forms of law; the experience and practice of mourning identifies this separation and aims at reconciliation. States of mourning in these plays are characterized by a crisis in ontology and practice, and Shakespeare asserts that a seemingly arbitrary turn by which nature becomes malevolent—signaled through signs of ill omen, failures of ceremony, and ritual—presuppose a flaw in human essence incompatible with law, and incapable of being mitigated through human intention or action. Breakdowns of law and order combine with crises of subjective experience, and all of these are signified through language and ideas that refer to the Calvinist biblical interpretations, legal fictions, and the mysteries of sovereignty. Shakespeare, when writing in this specific tragic mode, echoes a strain within the culture of his time in proposing that legal order and political stability function not through law but through a grace beyond human agency, since when humans are left to their own devices they and their laws prove repeatedly inadequate. These plays mourn a disjuncture between human essence and the envisioned possibility of a just and harmonious existence. To study vacancy in Shakespeare is not to study Shakespeare and the law strictly speaking, but rather Shakespeare and legal mysticism—the way in which some legal categories reference transcendent, theological

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