York's Paper Crown: "Bare Life" and Shakespeare's First Tragedy.

The article discusses several less bounded forms of literary and generic history, forms that escape constraints previously accepted as rules of the literary history game. William Shakespeare's histories and tragedies repeatedly centralize the body in mutilation and pain, the isolated and suffering victim, the moment when the hunted human quarry is run to ground and done to death like that of royal claimant Richard Duke of York at the hands of his Lancastrian adversaries after the battle of Wakefield in 1461. Suffolk's comments represent an attempt to escape the debased condition of "bare life," but to escape from it to another register entirely to the external circumstance of a great man undone by lesser assailants rather than by seeking to alter its essential or inner meaning.