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Jane Freeman
Performing the Bodies
of King Lear
Fictional characters may break
the laws of the land with complete abandon.
In the first scene of King
Lear, the title character gives
away land and power that are not his to
give, and in so doing he separates his body
politic from his body natural, thereby
indulging in a freedom that was not available
to King
James I. King James himself had alluded
to the theory of the king’s two bodies
in his first speech to Parliament,
[1] and as he watched King Lear
at Whitehall in 1606, he did so with the
culturally constructed belief that the body
politic and the body natural of a king are
indivisible.
The theory of the king’s
two bodies appears often in the jurisprudence,
the iconography, and the drama of Tudor
and Stuart England. Although the significance
of this theory to King Lear is evident
from Lear’s opening lines, the implications
of being ‘Twin-born with greatness’
(Henry
V 4.1.254) have received less scholarly
attention in King Lear than in Henry
V or Richard II. [2] As we consider the history of King
Lear in performance, however, the theory
of the king’s two bodies provides a
focusing lens through which we can see significant
cultural shifts in attitudes toward both
kingship and the human body.
The relationship between the
body politic and the body natural may seem
to be a simple dichotomy equated with dichotomies
such as the head and the heart, or the public
and private parts of one's life. But, of
course, none of these pairings is simple;
the head does not exist discrete from the
heart, and our public and private selves
are interconnected. In a similar way, a
monarch's bodies are inseparable and the
precise relationship between the two varies,
for the body politic and the body natural
are not fixed realities but social constructs
that change with time and point of view.
Just as ‘what is called gender identity
is a performative accomplishment compelled
by social sanction and taboo’, so too
the bodies politic and natural are ‘historical
ideas’ that gain their meaning ‘through
a concrete and historically mediated expression
in the world’. [3]
Shifts in the historical ideas
of the bodies politic and natural are evident
in the stage history of King Lear.
Productions have presented the conflict
between Lear's bodies in a variety of ways,
but in recent years there has been a marked
movement away from emphasis on the body
politic in performance and toward an emphasis
on the body natural. In this paper I consider
several factors that influence this shift
in emphasis including fundamental changes
that have taken place between the seventeenth
and twenty-first centuries in attitudes
toward kings, in attitudes toward the human
body, and in the medium through which Lear's
body is presented. Since the role of Lear
is performed by actors, whose instrument
of artistry is the human body, I pay particular
attention to the ways in which shifting
attitudes to the body natural have influenced
acting training, thereby indirectly affecting
actors’ approaches to the task of embodying
a king. Finally, since the role of Lear
is often played by famous actors whose celebrity
status and filmed permanence gives them
a kind of corporate perpetuity,
I also consider the ways in which the concept
of the king's body politic can and cannot
be replaced by a new form of embodied power:
the star's body famous.
The Theory of the King’s
Two Bodies
In The King's Two Bodies:
A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology,
Ernst H. Kantorowicz places the concept
of the king's two bodies ‘in its proper
setting of medieval thought and political
theory’. [4] He begins his analysis with reference
to Edmund Plowden: a sixteenth-century lawyer
whose Reports (1571) has been described
as ‘the chief Elizabethan source for
the metaphor of the king's two bodies’. [5] Plowden writes:
For the King has in him
two Bodies, viz., a Body natural,
and a Body politic. His Body natural
(if it be considered in itself) is a Body
mortal, subject to all Infirmities that
come by Nature or Accident, to the Imbecility
of Infancy or old Age, and to the like
Defects that happen to the natural Bodies
of other People. But his Body politic
is a Body that cannot be seen or handled,
consisting of Policy and Government, and
constituted for the Direction of the People,
and the Management of the public weal,
and this Body is utterly void of Infancy,
and old Age, [...] So that [the King]
has a Body natural, adorned and invested
with the Estate and Dignity royal; and
he has not a Body natural distinct and
divided by itself from the Office and
Dignity royal, but a Body natural and
a Body politic together indivisible.
[6]
Plowden's Reports was
written as part of a legal controversy regarding
a monarch's right to own land. Queen
Elizabeth had asked for clarification
regarding her right to lease the Duchy of
Lancaster – a piece of land owned by
the Lancastrian Kings as private property
and not as property of the Crown.
[7] According to Plowden and his fellow
lawyers, a king (the monarch was always
referred to as a King is these documents
even though she was a Queen)
[8] did not share a subject’s
freedom to own or dispose of property by
giving it to his children in his will: the
monarch could not own land in his body natural
because his body natural was indivisible
from his body politic, and the body politic
never died. At the ‘demise’ of
a king’s body natural, the body politic
migrated to the body natural of the succeeding
king. Lawyers used the metaphor of the
king's two bodies in order to deal with
the paradox that individual monarchs died
but the crown survived. As Marie Axton
explains, ‘the lawyers were formulating
an idea of the state as a perpetual corporation’
and when they spoke of the body politic
‘they referred to a specific quality:
the essence of corporate perpetuity’.
[9]
In referring to both this
‘metaphysical’ concept of the
king’s two bodies and to the older
‘collective’ metaphor of the realm
as a political body with the king as its
head, Plowden and his fellow lawyers combined
two distinct but related medieval theories
of monarchy, and thereby facilitated a distinction
between the king who ‘was the realm
and so above the law’ and the king
who ‘was a subject under the law’.
[10] Both of these concepts of the
body politic were current in the early seventeenth
century. While succession anxieties brought
on by Elizabeth's advancing age led to an
emphasis on the state as a perpetual corporation,
the ambitions of James I to unify England
and Scotland brought numerous allusions
to Britain as a single body with James as
its head.
The Two Bodies of King
Lear
Jacobean audience members
may well have noticed the direct relevance
of the theory of the king's two bodies to
King Lear. In the first scene of
the play, Lear does an unthinkable, impossible
thing: he gives away a kingdom that is not
his to give, and thus ‘creates a self-division,
a split between the body natural and body
politic, that leads to his madness’,
but, as R.A. Foakes explains, ‘it is
in his madness that, ironically, he realizes
that he is still the king he always was,
‘every inch a king.’ [...] Once
a king, always a king; this is what the
play is about’. [11]
In the story of a powerful
king who becomes a homeless wanderer there
are ample opportunities to reflect on the
nature of the relationship between the two
bodies of a king. In the opening scene
his ‘most royal majesty’ (1.1.194)
exercises the muscles of his body politic
as he delegates responsibilities and banishes
offenders. Later he experiences the vulnerabilities
of his body natural as he endures the cold,
poverty and madness to which ‘unaccommodated
man’ (3.4.105) is susceptible. In
the last act, we see a more balanced union
of Lear's two bodies as the respected king
acknowledges his frailties.
The shifting emphasis between
Lear's body politic and body natural is
evident not only in the events of the play
but also in the play's language. The specific
titles used by various characters to refer
to Lear reveal whether or not those characters
still regard Lear as the embodiment of the
body politic. Goneril refers to Lear as
father and later as ‘idle old man’
(1.3.17) but never as King, and her servant
Oswald perpetuates her ‘weary negligence’
(1.3.13) by referring to Lear as his ‘lady's
father’ (1.4.77). Albany, on the other
hand, fully acknowledges Lear's unalterable
status as king when he resigns ‘During
the life of this old majesty/ To him our
absolute power’ (5.3.297-8). While
Gloucester refers to Lear as the King throughout
the play, he is temporarily blind in his
allegiance just as he is blind in the judging
of his sons. In act two he refers to Cornwall
as ‘The noble Duke, my master,/ My
worthy arch and patron’ (2.1.58-9),
but on realizing how unworthy Cornwall is
of such loyalty, he takes sides against
Cornwall saying, ‘the King my old master
must be relieved’ (3.3.18). He acknowledges
that Lear embodies the body politic when
he refers to Lear's ‘anointed flesh’
(3.7.57) and again in a later exchange that
perfectly presents the twinned body of King
Lear:
Gloucester: O, let me kiss
that hand!
Lear: Let me wipe it first, it smells of
mortality. (4.6.129-30)
Albany and Gloucester's allegiance
intensifies as the play progresses, but
Kent's is unshakable from the start. In
the first scene he expresses both his reverence
for the body politic and his recognition
of the body natural in Lear:
Royal
Lear,
Whom I have ever honoured as my king,
Loved as my father, as my master followed
[...] (1.1.140-2)
Lear interrupts him with a
threat, to which Kent responds:
[...]
What wouldst thou do, old man?
Think'st thou that duty shall have dread
to speak,
When power to flattery bows? To plainness
[honour's
bound
When majesty falls to
folly. (1.1.147-52)
Kent advises Lear as man to
remember the responsibilities of Lear as
King. His advice is compatible with that
given by Edward Forset, the Lord Chief Justice
of London at the beginning of James I’s
reign, in his 1606 treatise A Comparative
Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique.
Forset explains that a king who acknowledges
the limitations of his body natural will
be better prepared to bear the responsibilities
of his body politic:
[...]sith it will not be
gainsaid, but that Soueraignes through
their naturall frailties, are subject
as well to the imbecillitie of iugdement,
as also to sensuall and irrationall mocions,
rising out of the infectious mudd of flesh
and bloud, . . . How both prudently and
louingly do those Soueraignes gouerne,
who . . . [do] assemble for consultation
and consent, a full assistance of the
noblest and choicest aduisours that the
State affourdeth: thereby drawing supplies
out of their politicall bodie, to make
good what wanteth in their natural?
[12]
Kent shows his allegiance
by bravely advising the wayward King, and
Lear rejects the advice ‘Which nor
[his] nature, nor [his] place can bear (1.1.172)’.
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