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In liberal democracies that were British colonies, law constructs the linkages and distinctions between individual and political bodies. Legality re-iterates the form of an ancient construct called the King's Two Bodies. The legal construction of these bodies ensures that their borders are continuously and perpetually contested and transgressed, and different modalities of power have arisen to take advantage of them. Additionally, in times of mass insecurity or crisis, we might believe that we need to fix our (personal or political) borders and construct them in more solid ways. However, because other modalities of power take advantage of these borders, even if legal reconstruction can momentarily assuage concerns, it is argued here that legal processes construct borders around individual and political bodies to ensure the (re)production of those contests and crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Kantorowicz acknowledged in his seminal work on the theological groundings of medieval political theory, the legal doctrine of the king’s two bodies was not a medieval legal doctrine but an Elizabethan one. It was developed by Plowden, an English jurist, in the second half of the sixteenth century. With Plowden’s theory of the king’s two bodies – one natural and the other politic – the medieval notion of the Crown as a corporation aggregate of many was progressively abandoned. The king’s body politic was instead confused with the concept of office of kingship, which could only vest in the king. Building on Plowden’s doctrine, Coke wrote of the king’s body politic in the early seventeenth century that it was a corporation sole. With time, the Crown conceived as a corporation sole and as a corporation aggregate understood as the government became an important feature of English legal thought. The Crown as a corporation aggregate – comprising the whole realm – is more apt to reflect the constitutional arrangement reached after the Glorious Revolution, characterised by the sovereignty of Parliament and, later, responsible government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The coronation ceremonies of Queen Elizabeth I in 1559, as all ceremonies regarding transfer of royal power, are an interesting example of what Victor Turner called “social drama.” Elizabeth was highly aware of the inextricable bond between statecraft and stagecraft. The entry progress through the city of London and the coronation were the first public occasions for the queen to present her public persona with theatrical means, through the use of decorations, attributes, gestures, and costumes. The intention behind the ceremonial entry was both to laud the ascending queen and to indicate her government’s policies in the wake of a political crisis following the death of Queen Mary. Allegorical spectacles accompanying the entry comprised a unified programme presenting Elizabeth as the opposite of her predecessor. The purpose of the coronation ceremonies, on the other hand, was quite the opposite: each of its features and rituals was meant to convey and emphasise the continuity and enduring nature of monarchy. The ruler ascending the throne took on a new identity and a new body. In line with the Tudor doctrine of “the king’s two bodies,” described by Ernst Kantorowicz, at coronation the monarch relinquished their individual identity to become a super-individual King who was immortal. Thus, the festivities and ceremonies inaugurating Elizabeth’s rule had a twofold nature, and the two main elements were complementary to each other: they presented the queen as a “new hope” of the Protestant England and as a rightful heir to the throne not just worthy of her predecessors but rather identical with them.

The purpose of the article is to show how the doctrine of the King's Two Bodies formulated by lawyer Edmund Plowden influenced political practice and its artistic representation. It is worth emphasising that the image of the king as a one-man corporation includes an immanent conflict resulting not only from the coexistence of conflicting identities in one person, but also from the need to constantly negotiate relations between them. Therefore, the concept of two bodies could simultaneously serve as a tool for legitimising and contesting power. Th is paradox is well illustrated by Queen Elizabeth I's famous declaration "Richard II is Me", which has been intriguing researchers for decades and receiving extensive comments. So far it has not been placed in the context of the doctrine of the King's Two Bodies, in which it sounds probably most fully. The perspective of abolished temporality inscribed in it sheds a new light on the queen's identification with Richard II: both the historical ruler and the hero of the Shakespearean chronicle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to Stuart Elden's article ''The Geopolitics of King Lear: Territory, Land, Earth,'' this article suggests that part of the reason for the comparative lack of critical attention paid to the politics of territory in King Lear is generic. The play has been depoliticized by its inclusion among the tragedies rather than the histories. Seeking to redress this, this response puts King Lear into dialogue with Shakespeare's earlier histories King John and Richard II, focusing on their geopolitical preoccupation with the relationships among land, sovereign, and polity. Drawing on recent scholarship on the relationship between sovereignty and the law in Richard II, this article suggests that both this play and King Lear respond with anxiety to the contemporary reappropriation of the language of the corpus mysticum into the service of absolute monarchy. They dramatize the threat of national tragedy if freedom of counsel should be silenced by tyranny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interaction between power and dissidence in representational culture is the focus of this article, which weaves together some of Pascal's reflections on power and imagination, the notion of the King's two bodies, and its representation in contemporary film, with the symbolism of the wounded body in French Protestant galley slave narratives. The galleys were a baroque theatre of power, which were intended to represent the King's glory. But Protestant galley slaves positioned themselves, by means of their narratives, as witnesses, whose wounded bodies spoke not of glory but of abuse of power, and in this way they subverted the representational function of the galleys. However, the role of the witness, which they ascribe to themselves, is problematic, because developments in the experimental sciences meant that the witness was perceived at the time as a dispassionate observer. Yet bearing witness to limit experiences requires affect. The article studies the way this problem is addressed in the interplay between the narrative construct of the first- and the second-degree witnesses in one Protestant galley slave narrative, which tells the story of Louis de Marolles. The body, whether the symbolic body of the King, the mystical body of Christ, or the wounded body of the galley slave, is a shifting sign, which gives insight into the competing political and religious discourses of the day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]