Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor's Preface
- 1 The Embodied Will in Julius Caesar: An Introduction to Shakespeare's Fugitive Politics
- 2 Friendship, Sovereignty and Political Discord in Coriolanus
- 3 Touching Sovereignty in Henry V
- 4 Sovereignty's Scribbled Form in King John
- 5 Body Politics and the Non-Sovereign Exception in Titus Andronicus and The Winter's Tale
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Body Politics and the Non-Sovereign Exception in Titus Andronicus and The Winter's Tale
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 July 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor's Preface
- 1 The Embodied Will in Julius Caesar: An Introduction to Shakespeare's Fugitive Politics
- 2 Friendship, Sovereignty and Political Discord in Coriolanus
- 3 Touching Sovereignty in Henry V
- 4 Sovereignty's Scribbled Form in King John
- 5 Body Politics and the Non-Sovereign Exception in Titus Andronicus and The Winter's Tale
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
What is needed are metaphors and models that implicate the subject in the object, that render mastery and exteriority undesirable.
Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile BodiesNon-sovereign freedom is plural freedom.
Sharon R. Krause, Freedom Beyond SovereigntyIn this final chapter exploring fugitive politics in Shakespeare, I want to extend the study's focus on the fractured power of the sovereign to include a discussion of divisible sovereignty at its most diffuse. Titus Andronicus and The Winter's Tale challenge the monitory function of the female docile body regulated by and reinforcing patriarchal desire. Indeed, these two plays hold much in common that commend them as dramatic set pieces bookending Shakespeare's dramatic career. If in 1594 with Lavinia in Titus Andronicus Shakespeare was interested in exploring the idea of the dangerous female body with a potency to kill, in 1611 he revisits this theme with Hermione in The Winter's Tale, exposing the affective claims of the female body as a volatile object and staging the phenomenon of what Sharon Krause calls non-sovereign agency that menaces the masculine fantasy of sovereign hegemony.
In staging the female body in both plays, Shakespeare explores what Emily Wilson describes as tragic overliving. According to Wilson, overliving involves
the desire to be invisible and unseen; images of torture, heaviness, and the body as a burden; the loss of selfhood, order, meaning, and understanding; the presence of multiple, competing ways to understand time; the conflict between human emotions and impersonal, historical responses to them; revenge as a possible solution to overliving; regret at birth and desire for death; depictions of life as living death.
The effects of tragic overliving in Titus Andronicus seem especially powerful with respect to Lavinia. She asks to be thrown into a ‘loathsome pit’ (2.3.176), ‘[w]here never man's eye may behold [her] body’ (177); her tortured body is a spectacle for others to interpret; Lucius, her uncle, calls her body an ‘object’ that ‘kills [him]’ (3.1.64), and she loses any sense of self as she becomes a property in Titus's culinary performance in act 5; Lavinia's fate precipitates the revenge narrative that brings an end to her tragic overliving.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Shakespeare's Fugitive Politics , pp. 139 - 192Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016