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

Philip Lorenz’s The Tears of Sovereignty offers a comparative framework of sovereignty by focusing on this concept as represented on the English and Spanish stages in the works of William Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and Calderón de la Barca. Throughout his consideration, Lorenz amalgamates and deploys various theories of sovereignty, including those by Francisco Suárez, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, and Jacques Derrida, in an effort to more fully grasp this elusive concept. The Tears of Sovereignty is an impressive study not only for its comprehensive range and lucid arguments but also for the structure of those arguments. Sovereignty poses a number of theoretical and methodological problems, for, as Lorenz notes, the concept “is nothing” in itself, yet at the same time, “works” and “continues to work itself out through its tropes” (200, 239, 162). Lorenz’s five chapters between the introduction and concluding “After-Image” proceed to consider five manifestations of these tropes: “Each chapter pursues the staging of a different sovereignty ‘event,’ from the concept’s collapse (‘tears’), through its reanimation (‘transplant’), resistance, transformation (cifras y estampas), and return (‘wrinkles’)” (25). As Lorenz argues, “Sovereignty is troped, or it is not at all,” and in his study he aims to follow its tropic movements (25).

Lorenz’s opening chapter, “Breakdown: Analogy and Ontotheology in Richard II,” begins on what is perhaps the most familiar ground. Lorenz inaugurates his approach by engaging Ernst Kantorowicz’s foundational study of sovereignty, The King’s Two Bodies, and its example par excellence of Richard II. Rather than repeat Kantorowicz, however, Lorenz prefaces his reading of Richard II with a lengthy theoretical frame centered on the relation between analogy and ontology, especially in the context of medieval philosophy, in which analogy was understood “as a structure for conceiving of being itself” (36). Typical theorists of sovereignty and analogy emerge in this chapter, but Lorenz returns to Francisco Suárez’s work, a return that recurs throughout the study in what becomes one of the most compelling and productive engagements of Lorenz’s project. Suárez, prefiguring modern theorists such as Giorgio Agamben, “attempts to read sovereignty from its ontological base […] up. Analogy is one of the most important of these grounding structures” (41). Lorenz reads Richard II as a staging of the fall and reinterpretation of sovereignty by considering the play’s staging of the fall of analogy (41–58). By the play’s close, “Sovereignty […] is no longer located in one place or one body. Rather, it is dispersed – in mediation itself” (57). In other words, sovereignty ceases to be understood according to a vertical logic of analogy in which the king’s body draws its power and justification from its link with God. Instead, sovereignty is understood as radiating along horizontal lines, which in Lorenz’s reading implies that this concept gains its power “from an immanent source within creatures themselves” rather than a transcendental or divine source (58).

As suggested by the following chapter, “Reanimation: The Logic of Transfer in Measure for Measure,” Lorenz’s arguments throughout the book are substantially interrelated. Measure for Measure provides Lorenz an example by which to see sovereignty’s logic of transfer, or “transplant,” in place of analogy. Without the transcendental, vertical organization of analogy, power emerges in Measure for Measure through metaphoric transfer, or substitution, of a body for the “absent sovereign” of the play (67). For Lorenz, the problem of Measure for Measure is one of embodiment, the lack of a sovereign body: “The body is always sovereignty’s pre-condition” (84). Sovereignty “desires to have the body that it is not” and realizes a sense of embodiment through the movement of metaphoric substitution of a body in place of its lack (90).

In chapter three, “Resistance: Waiting for Power in Fuenteovejuna,” Lorenz offers a reading of Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna and its representation of collective resistance to sovereign power that challenges the “transplant” solution elaborated by Measure for...