The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama by Philip Lorenz (review)

In The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama, Philip Lorenz analyses tropes used to figure sovereignty in Shakespeare’s Richard II, Measure for Measure, and The Winter’s Tale; Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna; and Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño. The study is informed by the theoretical writings of Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, and Carl Schmitt, among others. As a study of early modern political theology, Lorenz’s work is aligned with that of Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton; in its heavily theoretical treatment of “Golden Age” Spanish texts within a comparative framework, it is also akin to the projects of scholars like Jacques Lezra and William Egginton. Much more than an analysis of the five plays, Tears seeks to participate in the theoretical dialogue surrounding sovereignty. Lorenz ambitiously claims that these works show “how baroque drama continues to inform our thinking about the problems of sovereignty and political theology today” (16).

In the first chapter, Francisco Suárez’s theology frames a discussion of Richard II. Suárez’s reconceptualization of the analogia entis undermines previous scholastics’ manner of representing the relationship between God and humanity, and thus erodes the ontology of sovereignty, previously understood via the analogical linking of God and the king. This development is staged in Richard II: revising Kantorowicz’s influential discussion of the play in The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton, 1957), Lorenz holds that the work dramatizes the breakdown of the analogical model of kingship. The author argues that the figure of the “tear” (the meanings of both homonyms are at play) captures how “fragmentation and distortion might be the condition through which one always views a ‘maximal abstraction’ such as sovereignty” (50). The collapse of the analogical concept of sovereignty allows for the emergence of “horizontal” concepts such as that present in Measure for Measure. Having noted, like other scholars, the various exchanges and substitutions in the play, Lorenz concludes that the absence of a sovereign body is the “conceptual precondition” of sovereignty, which requires metaphorical substitution because of its essential nothingness. That is, the substitution of representatives satisfies sovereignty’s need for a “body” and thus maintains order, while this deferral keeps sovereignty alive or real.

Lorenz moves from Shakespeare to the two giants of the early modern Spanish stage, Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca. Fuenteovejuna, according to Lorenz, exemplifies not only sovereignty’s attempt to write itself on its body politic but also the body’s refusal of this inscription. Lorenz reflects at length on the inconclusive transfer of power at the end of the play, when the villagers demand that the overlordship of the Catholic monarchs replace that of the anarchic authorities of the Order of Calatrava. The author proposes that this “state of suspension” at the end of Fuenteovejuna anticipates Derrida’s reflections on “democracy á-venir [sic]” (150), hinting, as it does, at a political community constructed around the postponement of sovereignty. In La vida es sueño, sovereignty departs entirely from the king’s body and assumes fragmented and abstract forms in the “kaleidoscopic figures of movement” (186) that Basilio reads in the heavens. Lorenz draws on Benjamin’s concept of allegory in explaining how the allegorical movement of La vida es sueño represents sovereignty while simultaneously showing it to be nothing. Rather than waiting its time or being transferred, sovereignty here takes the form of “moving pictures in space” (202).

The tropes analyzed in the first four chapters figure the movement of sovereignty away from the king’s physical person. The final chapter, on The Winter’s Tale, proposes that sovereignty does not evolve in uniform fashion. Lorenz argues that the final scene of Hermione’s quickening reveals the means by which the stage’s “machinery of wonder” (233) makes sovereignty possible. Lorenz finds in this theatrical romance the notion...