Ernst Kantorowicz,Shakespeare,and the Humanities’ Two Bodies

I. From the Literal to the Fictional, the Absolutist to the Constitutional

Hutson’s and Kahn’s discussions of the king’s two bodies participate in multiple conversations, responding both to work in Renaissance studies during the new historicist moment of the 1980s through the early aughts, and to an even earlier debate among mid-twentieth-century German scholars that recently has been revived. While these two groups of scholars wrote in very different contexts with different goals, they interpret the theory of the king’s two bodies in similar ways. In this section, I begin by tracing the surprising resemblances that are brought into relief by Kahn’s and Hutson’s essays, but am ultimately interested in these critics’ relationship to a new historicist past that allows them to reconceive of the king’s two bodies in terms of the fictional and the constitutional.

When new historicist critics introduced (or re-introduced) Kantorowicz to Renaissance literary studies in the 1980s and 1990s, they did so in the context of Elizabeth I. Perhaps most famously, in Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) Stephen Greenblatt turned to the doctrine of the king’s two bodies in order to propose that it “heightened Elizabeth’s sense of her identity as at least in part a persona ficta and her world as theater. She believed deeply . . . in the whole theatrical apparatus of royal power.” ⁴ In other words, the king’s two bodies laid the groundwork for making an argument for the theatricality of power. Greenblatt invokes the term persona ficta, but in a very different register than Hutson would go on to do, associating it specifically with spectacle. Perhaps because Kantorowicz analyzed the ceremonial expression of the king’s two bodies in medieval funeral processions and monuments, effigies, and coins, critics like Greenblatt were drawn to its theatrical and performative potential. ⁵

Indeed, Hutson points out that these critics had a tendency to transform Kantorowicz’s attempt to trace the emergence of an abstract state or polity into a reading practice by which a monarch within an early modern stage drama personified the body politic. ⁶ As a result, Greenblatt and new historicists tended to emphasize the absolutist potential of the king’s two bodies – the “theatrical apparatus of royal power” – and to overlook its constitutionalist dimension. ⁷ The spectacle enabled by the doctrine of the king’s two bodies, according to this reading, served to cement monarchical authority and construct autocratic or absolutist rule. ⁸ In other words, the way in which Greenblatt conceived of the king’s two bodies in terms of embodied theatricality shaped the way in which he understood the political meaning of the legal doctrine. Hutson’s reading of Shakespeare’s Richard II locates the cause of the doomed monarch’s downfall in his overly literal understanding of his position as a vicarius dei. New historicist critics might be said to be akin to Richard II, as least in Hutson’s reckoning, because they themselves treat the king’s two bodies on the Shakespearean stage as a personified abstraction or a literalized metaphor. ⁹

Kahn frames her relationship to what she calls one of New Historicism’s “founding texts” by returning not to the sixteenth but to the mid-twentieth century. More specifically, she views Kantorowicz’s book as a response to Schmitt’s version of political theology, or “decisionism.” It is in some ways perverse to compare Schmitt to new historicists because the latter were committed to a leftist politics. Yet Schmitt too propounded a literalist reading of the person of the sovereign. Unlike Kantorowicz, he “distinguish[ed] between the juristic person and the fiction of a corporation.” As Kahn explains, for Schmitt, the juristic person must be embodied by a real person; the sovereign cannot be a legal fiction because fictions cannot make decisions. ¹⁰ Fictionality presents yet another problem for Schmitt: because he understands art to give rise to “free play,” it thus is merely part and parcel of a “liberal notion of culture, according to which individuals form themselves just as they artificially create the state.” ¹¹ While Schmitt’s refusal of the aesthetic is in many senses a long way from Greenblatt’s notion of literal theatricality (so to speak), they both proceed from an embodied understanding of political theology, one with similar political ramifications. In the sixteenth century, according to new historicists, the king’s two bodies enabled autocratic monarchical rule; in Schmitt’s case, political theology underwrote his support of fascism and Nazi Germany. In both cases, the literary reading and the political one are bound up with one another: the literalist or embodied understanding of political theology leads to its absolutist or fascist expression.

By contrast, both Hutson and Kahn argue in different ways for the fictional status of the king’s two bodies. Hutson locates it in the shared rhetorical projects of lawyers and playwrights in the mid- to late-sixteenth century. In the legal arena, Kantorowicz demonstrates, common lawyers increasingly assumed interpretive creativity and autonomy with regard to Roman maxims and metaphors. ¹² In order to exercise this autonomy, they had to invent or discover facts and circumstances pertaining to the individual cases. ¹³ To take an example from Hutson’s monograph The Invention of Suspicion, they used the rhetorical technique of narratio in order to organize these facts in a persuasive way that, for instance, could impute a motive. ¹⁴ At the same time, as English drama moved away from religious and allegorical depictions of justice toward a secular, non-allegorical one, dramatists made recourse to rhetorical procedures in order to create “circumstantial, densely plotted characterlogical drama” that audiences would find probable and therefore realistic. ¹⁵ Hutson here understands fiction, specifically dramatic fiction, as a “new naturalism,” as opposed to spectacular theatricality, rooted in legal, forensic rhetoric. ¹⁶

Kahn similarly argues that, in contradistinction to Schmitt, Kantorowicz read Roman law as allowing for the juristic person to be a fiction. Kantorowicz’s understanding of fiction, which Kahn demonstrates drew upon the work of the German-Jewish philosopher and great scholar of the Renaissance Ernst Cassirer, can be summarized as “an exemplary self-consciousness about the symbolic dimension of human experience, about the human capacity to make or unmake symbolic forms.” ¹⁷ In The Future of Illusion, Kahn refers to this as poeisis.18 Legal fiction, Kantorowicz believed, can be understood as a version of artistic fiction since both begin by imitating nature but eventually create “new laws ex nihilo.” ¹⁹ While Cassirer saw reason and science as the greatest expression of how self-conscious thought can shape, or make, the world, Kantorowicz rooted it in “literature, juristic fiction, and myth.” ²⁰ Attending to the readings of Shakespeare’s Richard II and Dante’s Divine Comedy that bookend The King’s Two Bodies, Kahn illustrates the importance of the literary to the development of Kantorowicz’s thought.

And just as the literal conception of the king’s two bodies has political ramifications, so too does the fictional. Fiction, Hutson argues, fostered an interest in the meaning of the common good and the commonwealth in both the legal and dramatic realms. Jurists’ interpretive autonomy engendered a degree of political autonomy, as Kantorowicz shows over and again. They could “adapt fictions designed to assert the legal perpetuity and agency of the church” to “the agency and perpetuity [of] a nebulous, secular ‘public good’,” transforming “theological expressions and ideas into ways of conceptualizing abstract ideas of a perpetual good.” ²¹ This transformation in turn engendered a separation between the common good and the monarch. The former was attached to the people instead, culminating in a “participatory legal culture.” ²² Early modern drama, with its rhetorical emphasis, became an opportunity to display those skills and instruct the audience in the arts of judgment, thus requiring them to participate in constructing the public good. Fiction, defined in this way, becomes aligned with the formation of the common good. Through attention to this literary category, then, Hutson emphasizes and builds upon the constitutionalist strain of Kantorowicz’s analysis.

Kahn similarly emphasizes the constitutionalist potential of the king’s two bodies in Kantorowicz’s argument, focusing on a range of distinctions that emerged in political and legal writings of the medieval and early modern period. The distinctions between the king’s person and his office or dignitas as well as between the king and the crown played an especially important role in the development of their constitutionalist thinking. Because the king was not identical with his office or with the crown, the crown especially could be identified instead with body politic. Understanding the crown as a persona ficta was what paved the way for its separation from the king. This eventually undermined the crown’s divinity and enabled constitutionalist arguments about the state. ²³ With this analysis, Kahn sees the potential for political theology to be something other than the “problem” of modern constitutionalism, that is, the grounding of the state in “religious claims.” ²⁴ In effect, for both critics, fiction ultimately rescues political theology from itself.

II. The Humanities’ Two Bodies

What accounts for the shifts I have traced, from literal to fictional, the absolutist to constitutionalist? One answer is simply the desire to move beyond New Historicism’s dominance in literary studies, which, although it has waned, has yet to be replaced. Another is the resurgence of interest in mid-century scholars of the Renaissance largely due to the work of Giorgio Agamben. But I would like to argue that Hutson’s and Kahn’s essays implicitly offer a response to the current debate about the methods and aims of literary criticism and those of humanist criticism more broadly. This is a perennial question, to be sure, but it has gained more urgency after 2008 when humanists have had to articulate their value at a time of reduced investment in humanistic studies. The response on the part of some literary critics has been to distance literary study from ideology critique (or, alternately, “the hermeneutics of suspicion”) and to search for a different methodology in its stead. I term this division within literary studies, and I would argue, other fields in the humanities as well, “the humanities’ two bodies.” Like the early modern legal and political doctrine, “the humanities’ two bodies” centers on a tension between the relative value of the literal and the figurative.

In an influential essay published in Representations in the same year as the King’s Two Bodies forum, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus voiced their dissatisfaction with the tools of their literary training, namely, deconstruction, ideology critique, and the hermeneutics of suspicion – all associated with new historicist criticism – and suggested that this dissatisfaction was shared by many others in the field. Even the spatial metaphor these methodologies had employed, the depth or hidden meaning of a text, had become unsatisfactory. ²⁵ At the same time, other disciplines were re-examining their interpretive methodologies in similar terms. ²⁶ In art history, for example, Michael Ann Holly claimed that the tendency of a disproportionate emphasis on the art historical object’s “production of meaning” had repressed other modes of engagement. Although Holly does not use the term “ideology critique,” the types of meaning enumerated suggests that this is to what she alludes, at least partially: “social contexts, stylistic developments, iconographic precedents, artistic genealogies, traces of gendered identities, psychoanalytic symptoms.” ²⁷ In a similar vein, the art historian James D. Herbert argues against the long-standing interpretations of Gustav Courbet’s brushstroke or subject matter as political allegory, or against the critic as one who “pierces through material traces left by the artist to bring that concealed meaning forward to the light of day.” ²⁸ Again, the dynamics of concealing and revealing seem insufficient. In the history of science, where this dissatisfaction was articulated earlier in the aught’s, Bruno Latour gave a talk and then published an essay provocatively entitled “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” (2004), which criticized the scholarly tendency to focus only on the conditions that made “matters of fact” possible. The aims of ideology critique, at least as it had been practiced – to “attack,” “expose,” and “historicize” – had not gotten us any closer to a truth, and Latour issued a challenge: “Is it really too much to ask from our collective intellectual life to devise, at least once a century, some new critical tools?” ²⁹

These different disciplines have responded in a variety of ways. One of the approaches with which art historians have been experimenting has been an attention to the material presence of the object and its “obdurate physicality.” ³⁰ For example, the Material Collective, a group of medieval art historians and scholars of visual culture more broadly, have made the implicit argument that experiments in the conventions of scholarly writing are themselves experiments in methodology. ³¹ Herbert, working in the nineteenth century, proposes a similar focus on the material; instead of allegory, we should focus on the scene that “appears before [Courbet’s] eyes.” ³² While it may not constitute a new methodology per se, Hasok Chang has called for historians of science to “put the science back into the history of science” and focus on its internal development and not only its social construction in the vein of Thomas Kuhn. ³³

In literary studies, Best and Marcus introduced the term, or practice of, “surface reading,” which attends to that which is “neither hidden nor hiding,” preferring instead the “evident, perceptible, apprehensible,” or that which “insists on being looked at rather than . . . through.” ³⁴ They eschew a symptomatic reading practice that reveals “a latent meaning behind a manifest one,” in Frederic Jameson’s definition, or to make “lacunae perceptible” in Althusser’s. ³⁵ Focusing on the surface, they argue, enables critics to maintain a neutral stance that does not assume mastery over a text and thus describe without judging. ³⁶ Still other critics have proposed alternatives such as “distant,” “descriptive,” and, most recently, “literal reading.” ³⁷ This last alternative, proposed by Elaine Freedgood and Cannon Schmitt, attempts to isolate and examine those large portions of the text that remain “unread” – its literal or denotative aspects – in favor of those which more apparently require interpretation, the figurative. The category of the literal encompasses anything from the intricate, technical language of coal mining practices in Emile Zola’s Germinal to the pervasive nautical language in a group of nineteenth-century novels. ³⁸ Freedgood and Schmitt do not completely reject ideology critique, especially because they acknowledge that the literal is itself constructed. Rather they consider ideology a non-literal aspect of the text that they eventually want to understand in conjunction with the literal. ³⁹ Yet the very notion that one could identify the ideological as a separate strand from either the literal or other non-literal aspects of a text is itself incompatible with ideology critique.

Far from being fully embraced, these methodologies, especially surface reading, have been met with a fair amount of skepticism within literary studies. Insofar as ideology critique brought literature into the domain of the political – or at least made its latent political engagements explicit – surface reading, for example, has been criticized as an abdication of that realm. Best and Marcus’s relative lack of interest in how our own subjective positions shape what appears to be “obvious” can be taken as emblematic: “Sometimes our subjectivity will help us see a text more clearly, sometimes it won’t.” ⁴⁰ The idea of the surface or, to use the literary critic Rita Felski’s phrase, that which is “plain view,” has also been succinctly disputed by Lauren M.E. Goodlad and Andrew Sartori, who point out that “certain historical phenomena . . . are simply not ‘in plain view.’” ⁴¹ One of surface reading’s most articulate critics, Crystal Bartolovich, convincingly argues that this method of reading’s withdrawal from the political is shaped by the recent economic crisis. Best and Marcus have “internalize[d] the economic imperative to scale back” made by governmental and legislative bodies as well as universities themselves; they limit themselves to the text itself rather than opening it up to the “big questions” that the humanities should be confronting. ⁴²

These critics, however, see themselves as articulating a political vision, at least to some extent. Best and Marcus believe that “attentiveness to the artwork” engenders a “kind of freedom.” ⁴³ Freedgood and Schmitt point out that literal reading often returns us to the realm of work and labor, and possesses the potential to “make experience . . . countable, comprehensible, and shareable.” ⁴⁴ This movement away from ideology critique enables a new or renewed vision of the role of the humanities, one in which, as Latour put it, the critic is not “the one who debunks, but the one who assembles . . . the one who offers the participants an arena in which to gather.” ⁴⁵ They share in common, then, an interest in what might broadly be termed world making.

This (supposedly) new vision of the humanities depends upon a revaluation of the literal, and it is in this vein that I would like to compare it to the king’s two bodies, even if the debates going on in the humanities today do not directly concern embodiment. ⁴⁶ The king’s two bodies encompasses both the literal and the figurative, as the sixteenth-century jurist Edmund Plowden put it in one of the most evocative descriptions of the king’s two bodies, one that Kantorowicz uses to open his first chapter: “For the king has in him two bodies . . . His body natural is (if it be considered in itself) a Body mortal . . . But his Body politic is a body that cannot be seen or handled …” ⁴⁷ The debate in literary studies likewise depends upon a division between literal and figurative possibilities, in this case not of those of the body, but of language itself. In other words, while the content of the humanities’ and the king’s two bodies may be different, the form is remarkably similar. ⁴⁸ By recognizing this similarity, we can consider what law has to offer us in thinking through the debates I have been tracing.

III. The Emptiness of King’s Two Bodies

Perhaps because the theory of the king’s two bodies is ultimately both literal and fictional at once, critics have been able to read it in radically different ways, interpreting it as central to the construction of both monarchical and constitutionalist power. As such, one could dismiss the significance of its doubleness by claiming that The King’s Two Bodies functions as yet another blank canvas onto which critics project, from varying positions of power, their changing and shifting anxieties and desires. To the extent that this is true of any text whose relevance endures through multiple decades and generations of scholarship, it is true of The King’s Two Bodies. But the legal doctrine itself reconfigures the relative value of literal and figurative in ways that might help shape our critical practice in the humanities and in literary studies more particularly. It might do so because of its rootedness in two concepts that may seem like strange rallying cries for the future of the humanities: emptiness and irony.

Like Best, Marcus, and others, Hutson and Kahn seek a reconfiguration of the relationship between the humanistic critic and the political sphere. As we have seen, Hutson views literature as the arena in which the common good can be worked out. Kahn proclaims in a similar vein to Latour: “Literature reveals both its capacity for ideology critique [i.e., New Historicist criticism] and for enabling fictions of human community. It can serve as an antidote to political theology of the Schmittian sort, even as it authorizes a new vision . . . of human community.” ⁴⁹ With this sentiment, Kahn draws upon Kantorowicz’s final chapter on Dante and “man-centered kingship” in which the image of monarchy finally becomes fully human. In a familiar conception of the Renaissance, Kantorowicz claims that Dante makes mankind “the center and standard” of authority. He offers a specific definition of “man” that resonates with Kahn:

[Dante’s] humana universitas embraced not only Christians or members of the Roman Church, but was conceived of as the world community of all men, Christian and non-Christian alike. To be a ‘‘man’’ and not to be ‘‘Christian’’ was the criterion for being a member of the human community of this world . . . Dante’s humana civilitas included all men: the pagan (Greek and Roman) heroes and wise men, as well as the Muslim Sultan Saladin and the Muslim philosophers Avicenna and Avarroes. ⁵⁰

Kantorowicz believed that Dante offers us a transnational vision of mankind, one not bound by religious practice or cultural difference. Having spent the past four hundred pages painstakingly interpreting and deciphering the writings of legal and political thinkers who established what he calls, in turn, Christ-centered, law-centered, and polity-centered kingship, Kantorowicz opens his closing chapter with the striking claim: “It remained to the poet to establish” this man-centered kingship. Although he does gloss Dante’s political writings, Kantorowicz finds its most effective articulation in The Purgatorio, when Virgil tells Dante “Te sopra te corono mitrio,” or “I crown and mitre you over yourself.” ⁵¹ Thus fiction provides the most bracing and all-encompassing vision of world making, and Kahn seizes on this conception both of man and fiction in her essay’s conclusion. ⁵² It is the role of the literary critic, she implies, to illuminate these possibilities, and this requires a distancing from ideology critique, at least as it has been practiced by some in literary studies.

Yet there is a striking difference between Hutson and Kahn and their contemporaries, even as they share a political orientation. Whereas the other scholars I have discussed move away from the figurative and the fictional in order to re-articulate the role of literary or humanistic criticism, Hutson and Kahn move toward it. For Best, Marcus, and others, the former are aligned with ideology critique; for Hutson and Kahn, it is the literal that is most deeply associated with ideology critique. As we have seen, the literal was an important category for new historicist critics in Renaissance studies. Even though these critics focused on the theatrical and spectacular dimension of the king’s two bodies, they treated it as a literal, embodied spectacle. By claiming that the Renaissance had a literal conception of the king’s two bodies, they were able to argue for its absolutist underpinnings and yield. In their shared focus on the category of the literal, recent critics like Best and Marcus have more in common with new historicism than they might allow. This connection forces us to reconsider the alignment of figurative/ideology and the literal/world making. Hutson and Kahn remind us, albeit implicitly, of something that those who practice ideology critique have long recognized: that the literal can be ideological just as surely as the figurative.

Through their analyses of Kantorowicz they also reveal the difficulty of reconfiguring the relationship between the humanistic critic and the political realm. By looking even more closely at their understanding of fiction via Kantorowicz, I argue that they offer a third possibility drawn from the legal arena that has the potential to dismantle the binary that has been posited between ideology critique and its others. The specific way in which they define fiction makes available an alternative to the alignment of the surface or literal with world making, on the one hand, and depth with critique on the other. Paradoxically, while their Kantorovician notion of fiction is productive because it creates a space for constitutionalist politics, its productivity is figured in terms of absence and emptiness. Kahn makes this explicit at the end of her essay, when she argues for The King’s Two Bodies’ relevance for modern discussions of political theology by invoking Claude Lefort, a near-contemporary of Kantorowicz, who argues that democracy requires its citizens to reach beyond the empirical, to develop their imaginative capacity. In Kahn’s account, Kantorowicz reveals how this capacity can emerge not from religion, as Lefort asserts, but from fiction itself. If, according to Lefort again, democracy is the “only [regime] to have represented power in such a way as to show that power is an empty place” by revealing that “power belongs to no one,” then, according to Kahn, fiction is the form that best expresses that empty place. ⁵³ It “complicates any attempt to locate power in one particular place or body.” ⁵⁴ Here Kahn draws a direct line between the constitutionalist impulse of the early modern period and modern liberal democracy, which political theology can either support or tragically destroy.

Although fiction-as-absence features less prominently in Hutson’s work, its subtle presence in Kantorowicz’s discussion of the medieval “fisc” is crucial to her argument about early modern drama. The “fisc” functions as one of the fictions that first had to be imagined in order for the fiction of the king’s two bodies to be efficacious later on. At first referring to the king’s private property, the fisc developed during the medieval period into a complex of inalienable rights and lands that were separate and distinct from an individual king. This development enabled jurists to distinguish between, in Kantorowicz’s terms, a “king feudal” and a “king fiscal.” ⁵⁵ The fisc became an important step in the formulation of the common good: its inalienability from itself inaugurated the beginning of a “cleavage between [monarchs] and the things public,” transforming the king from a “vicarius Christi to a vicarius fisci,” or the administrator of the public sphere. ⁵⁶ In order to gain clarity on the exact nature of the fisc, twelfth-century jurists compared it to Christ both because of its perpetual nature (it “never died”) and its omnipresence. Yet the metaphor of the fisc as Christ, Kantorowicz asserts, did not deify it. Instead, he contends, “‘God’ or ‘Christ’ took the place of symbols or ciphers of fictitiousness serving to expound the fictitious nature of the fisc.” ⁵⁷ That is, Christ or God became empty fictions that could encompass the fisc and in turn explain its status as fiction. This unusual formulation compels Hutson in part because it refutes scholars who continue to read the king’s two bodies in a literal fashion in order to claim that the sacred nature of the monarch persevered even after the Reformation.

The characterization of fiction as a “cipher,” something that is empty, is crucial to her analysis of the common good. ⁵⁸ Kantorowicz’s brief gesture toward metaphor’s operations is striking. Instead of one thing standing in for the other, the vehicle is emptied out and filled up by its tenor. Christ becomes the empty vessel that contains the fisc. The cipher is particularly appropriate for the constitutionalist aspect of Kantorowicz’s argument as well as for Hutson’s extension of it into early modern drama. It is an apt metaphor for the common good or public interest because it is not only un-filled but it also has no predetermined content. Similarly, a common good that is not determined by a monarch but debated and discussed by the public itself is neither static nor stable. It cannot be described as an entity in the same way that Christ might be.

Hutson reformulates Kantorowicz slightly in a way that emphasizes this point: the transformation of the fisc resides in the change from “the representation of Christ to that of the fictitious perpetuity of the public good.” ⁵⁹ Whereas to be a representative of Christ is to be something, to be a representative of the perpetuity of the public good is to become an empty category. Hutson argues that early modern drama engages the public in the process of filling this cipher. She ultimately argues that “administering law and deciding exceptions in early modern England . . . was modeled less on the notion of vicarious representation . . . than on a notion of equitable fiction-making.” ⁶⁰ This form of fiction-making not only engendered but also required an absence at its heart, the absence of the “lawmaker-king-parliament” who had to be “hypothetical[ly] resurrected” in order to determine both the original intent of the public good and how it “might now be best served.” ⁶¹ In other words, jurors and justices had to exercise an imaginative capacity to fill the “empty” cipher of the public good.

Kahn and Hutson thus develop a theory of fiction-as-emptiness through their engagement with the legal realm. The kind of emptiness that interests them can help us reconsider the dynamics between surface and depth. Critics of the hermeneutics of suspicion contend that earlier scholars projected onto texts an already existing depth that awaited revelation. Emptiness, by contrast, suggests a depth that does not require revelation. Instead, an empty fiction, so to speak, can be understood as an expansive vessel that can be filled and refilled by the critic. This process, too, can be a kind of world making. Understood in this way, Kahn and Hutson’s concept of emptiness illuminates the insufficiency of the binaries that have been constructed in some of these literary-critical disputes. The effects of fictionality and critique are not necessarily at odds with those of literality and neutrality towards which recent critics have been striving. Kahn and Hutson’s engagement with the legal realm thus can help, if not change the terms of the current debate in the humanities, then at least reveal the contingency of their alignments. They begin to suggest that the binary of the humanities’ two bodies may be as illusory as the one between surface and depth.

IV. The Irony of the King’s Two Bodies

Yet Kantorowicz’s account of the king’s two bodies accomplishes even more than these two critics allow, especially if we attend to it as a particular kind of fiction or figurative language: irony. I would like to argue that we consider the king’s two bodies an ironic legal structure because it requires two opposites to exist simultaneously, the king’s natural and political bodies. Unlike other figurative language, which relies upon similarity, irony uniquely requires opposition. Its most basic definition as a rhetorical figure is to say the opposite of what one meant. ⁶² In this case, the king’s natural body and his political body are fundamentally opposed to one another: the former is mortal, inevitably marked by disabilities and the deterioration of age, the latter immortal and perpetually perfect. Jurists were careful to acknowledge the two bodies’ difference in “capacity,” and of course employed a language of duality when describing this doctrine. ⁶³ The existence of an ironic legal doctrine is unusual; most laws must state exactly what they mean in order to be efficacious. While irony may be a central rhetorical figure in judicial oratory, it usually does not inhere in the law itself. The doctrine of the king’s two bodies, however, relies upon a productive doubleness.

One might object that irony differs from the king’s two bodies in substantial ways. The former requires that one meaning (the literal) be false or at least be intended falsely, while the other (the figurative, which, unlike in other rhetorical figures, remains unspoken) be true, whereas in the case of the king’s two bodies, both the literal and figurative meanings were equally valid. In other words, the two contradict one another, but do not cancel each other out. Instead, for medieval and early modern jurists, the king’s natural and its opposing figurative body were “incorporated into one person.” To function as a sovereign, the two bodies of the king had to be recognized as a single being, that paradoxical entity, the “corporation sole.” ⁶⁴ Thus they were merged into one while still remaining multiple. This may depart from what is often called “verbal irony,” or the replacing of one word with its opposite. There are other strands of irony, however, such as Socratic irony, in which the literal and figurative relate to one another in more subtle and complex ways, including the inability to settle upon a single meaning. These would align more comfortably with the king’s two bodies because in order to sustain it, both bodies had to be thought present at once. ⁶⁵

Irony has a particularly freighted history in relationship to politics that might make it an unpromising candidate for thinking about the future of the humanities. Not only does it seem to return us to the New Criticism of the 1940s and 1950s, which eschewed the political engagements of literature, but it also is often associated with a withdrawal from the political because it encourages the cultivation of cynicism. The ironies of history, that is, its repetitions and essential irrationality, tend to “dissolve all belief in the possibility of political action.” ⁶⁶ Applying the term “irony” to the king’s two bodies and by extension the humanities’ also runs the risk of further entrenching the terms of the debate within the latter realm. As Claire Colebrook points out, irony seems to require that a text have more than a surface. ⁶⁷ Hayden White, for example, argues that all historians must employ irony, whether as a tactical tool or a pervasive methodology: “He must treat the historical record ironically . . . must assume the documents mean something other than what they say or that they are saying something other than what they mean . . . or there would be no point in writing a history. He [sic] could simply compile a collection of documents and let them figure forth their own truth . . .” ⁶⁸ Modern historians do not take the past “at its word.” ⁶⁹ If irony indicates that there is some meaning other than what is said, then, it seems to be aligned only with ideology critique.

Similarly, the duality at the center of the king’s two bodies might simply provide further evidence for what Carlo Galli called the “tragicity” of modern politics. In his introduction to the political theorist Carlo Galli’s essay on Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet, or Hecuba (1956), Adam Sitze argues that Schmitt, like Kantorowicz, was interested in the doubleness of modern political thought. According to Galli, Schmitt believed that all modern political forms originated in moments of crisis that engendered a “distinctive doubleness,” one that indelibly marked these forms with what Galli calls “tragicity,” or the recognition of their simultaneous “impossibility and necessity.” ⁷⁰ For Schmitt, as Galli understands him, this crisis or origin results in an inescapable contradiction that ends up destroying what it creates, sustaining peace by perpetually preparing for war, and “disordering the very systems of thought it demands.” ⁷¹ Sitze describes the juridical person that emerges from this contradiction: an “unhappy consciousness . . . capable of peace, reconciliation, and order only at the cost of a ceaseless reflection on division and disorder.” ⁷²

Despite all this, one of the advantages of recognizing the irony of the king’s two bodies is the lack of a need to synthesize the literal and the figurative, to call for a sovereign decision on the part of the critic, as it were. In this way, the ironic structure of the king’s two bodies highlighted by Kantorowicz could provide a model for accommodating the humanities’ two bodies. It allows two opposing beliefs about the king’s body to co-exist without requiring a binary to be constructed or a choice to be made. It thus provides an alternative template to the dichotomy that has been constructed between ideology critique and surface or literal reading. We usually turn to the literary realm to remind us of the inherent multiplicity of meaning in the legal one, but in this case, it is the reverse. The legal realm reminds us of the capacity of language to be at once literal and figurative.

V. The King’s Many Bodies

I would like to conclude with a brief reading of Laertes’ rebellion in Hamlet, a play that offers a multiplicity of king’s bodies – would-be kings, false kings, and player kings crowd the stage – with the hope of illuminating how this attention to irony might move the humanities forward. After the murder and unceremonious burial of his father Polonius, Laertes returns from France with the people’s support to overthrow the corrupt king Claudius. Moments after Claudius complains to Gertrude that the “people are muddied / Thick and unwholesome in their thoughts and whispers / For Polonius’s death,” a clamorous noise erupts and an anonymous messenger bursts onto the stage to report that the rebels are at the court’s gate. ⁷³ This startling, even frightening, moment has received little critical attention, even though it is in some ways even more radical than Hamlet’s election of Fortinbras at the play’s conclusion. ⁷⁴ Perhaps this is because Laertes’ rebellion is almost an embarrassment, easily defused and almost laughed offstage by Claudius. Yet, I would argue that even in its failure, it dramatizes how new political forms can emerge through the legal and literary technique of irony.

There are multiple ironies to this popular rebellion, not least of which that it is done in the service of aristocratic privilege: what troubles the people is the noble Polonius’s “hugger-mugger” burial. ⁷⁵ Here, though, I want to focus on the dramatic irony of the anonymous messenger’s description of the rebellion, which is never represented onstage:

Save yourself, my lord!

The ocean, overpeering of his list,

Eats not the flats with more impetuous haste

Than young Laertes, in a riotous head,

O’erbears your officers. The rabble call him lord,

And as the world were now but to begin,

Antiquity forgot, custom not known,

The ratifiers and props of every word,

[They] cry, “Choose we, Laertes shall be king!”

Caps, hands, and tongue applaud it to the clouds,

“Laertes shall be king, Laertes king.” ⁷⁶

It is tempting to celebrate, as Richard Halpern does, the speech’s metaphorical “consuming of a traditional order so as to produce a new political covenant.” ⁷⁷ Yet the threatening oceanic imagery, with its rashness and uncontainability, condemns the rebellion almost from the start. Equally damning is the messenger’s insistence that the rabble have broken from “custom” and “antiquity,” which would have been appalling in a period where political novelty was a deeply problematic proposition. The speech attests to the importance of custom in constructing political and linguistic meaning, as well as to the necessity of antiquity’s authority. In fact, one could argue that the effect of the claim that the rebels have forgotten custom and antiquity is to render the rabble’s words that conclude the speech – “Laertes shall be king, Laertes king” – nonsensical, since there is no custom that would support this new, hybrid political form. Indeed, Margreta de Grazia describes them as “constitutional nonsense” because they treat “anarchy, democracy, and monarchy” as “compatible forms.” ⁷⁸

In another sense, though, the messenger’s description of the rebellion might encapsulate the potential of a Kantorovician fiction, at least as Kahn and Hutson define it. The very absence of the rebellion onstage makes literal the figurative emptiness of the rebellion. Existing only in the form of reported speech (or, depending how it is performed, as noise as well), the rebellion opens up a productively empty fictional space. The failure of the rebels to appear onstage endows them with the status of a fiction within a fiction. The rebellion’s emptiness, then, might be a prerequisite for the potential that it momentarily possesses before its dissolution. Yet, at the same time, its failure points to the limits of understanding fiction in these terms. This scene points to the dangers of imagining liberal democracy’s precursors as empty space, since it opens up for the monarch and his court a space for the manipulation of power. Moreover, the rebellion presents the difficulty of identifying the common good: is the common good truly what the rabble desires and what their installation of Laertes as monarch would have achieved?

If, however, we consider this speech, especially its invocation of custom, in terms of irony, we might frame the problem a bit differently. In this case, I refer specifically to dramatic irony because while the messenger hails custom in support of monarchical authority, the audience would likely have been familiar with custom’s authority and power in a very different context, that is, voiced in support of popular protests, riots, and rebellions. Whether in local food and anti-enclosure riots or in more large-scale regional and urban rebellions such as Kett’s Rebellion (1549) and the Northern Rebellion (1569), the common people and their leaders most often justified their complaints in terms of the abrogation of custom rather than the necessity of change and innovation. ⁷⁹ We could read Hamlet’s instance of dramatic irony as a critique and demystification of monarchical power, which deals the commons a devastating blow by using custom to its own ends. But we could also read it as a way to imbue the rebellion with authority: after all, what could be more authoritative than custom other than that which precedes it? With the irony of invoking custom in a moment of rebellion, we can see how Shakespeare endows a fictive political form with authority even as it is disavowed, how he allows us to imagine it even as its impossibility is voiced. To read the speech in this way requires a dialectical relationship between ideology critique and its others, but one that does not seek resolution. This, then, is not a call then to reconcile the humanities’ two bodies. Rather it is one to recognize the impossibility of doing so – and to recognize that we might be better off for it.