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

The field of politically oriented studies of early modern drama might usefully be ordered along the divide between work centered on sovereignty—a line that can be traced from Ernst Kantorowicz to Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg through Philip Lorenz’s ambitious book—and scholarship concerned with demotic traditions and structures—Annabel Patterson, Robert Weimann, and Julia Lupton, for instance. How to justify a book on sovereignty and theater, particularly in historical contexts of mixed governance and in relation to a medium whose politically heterogeneous character is undeniable? In part, by noting differences in methodological registers; a book such as Lorenz’s develops its claims less within an empirical than an ontological horizon, a perspective according to which the problem of sovereignty bears as much on a sovereign people as it does on kings. One might also note the ongoing pertinence of the problem of sovereignty for a “democratic” age—its relation, for instance, to globalization and empire. But for Lorenz, the strongest brief for an investigation of sovereignty and theater concerns the privileged relation between sovereignty and representation. The sovereign is an irreducibly theatrical phenomenon in Lorenz’s account. To engage sovereignty as a changing form is to engage the moments of crisis in the field of representation as such, including the representational frame by which we attempt to account for such transformations historically. In that sense, for Lorenz, the problem of sovereignty isn’t just a historical topic—it’s the problem of history.

The Tears of Sovereignty’s range of reference is formidable: dramatic literature of the English and Spanish Renaissance, absolutist theory, political theology, law, Baroque aesthetics, deconstruction, psychoanalytic theory. And Lorenz engages these domains in depth—he knows his stuff, and his stuff ranges from Jesuit Mariology and Eucharistic theory to Derrida on the politics of friendship. He is an impressive synthetic scholar. But he also has his own angle on the material, with a focus on the scholastic Renaissance and particularly Francisco Suárez, a figure Lorenz brings to center stage of political-theological studies of the era. The work bears perhaps the strongest kinship with that of Anselm Haverkamp, though Lorenz’s is distinguished by its sheer theoretical capaciousness.

Chapter 1, “Breakdown: Analogy and Ontotheology in Richard II,” focuses on what will amount to the Ur-scene of the project, Richard’s deposition. The claim that this “event” marks the dissolution of the specular or analogical structures that underwrite sovereign identity is not novel; in some sense, that’s Kantorowicz’s argument, and certainly the claim that informs the tide of critical writing that derives from him. What is more notable is Lorenz’s argument that that rupture constitutes even as it annuls sovereignty, instituting—or perhaps revealing—sovereignty as a force that is siteless and thus always in potentia. That turn intimates sovereignty’s translation from a transcendental to an immanent—and elusive—category. Suárez’s importance also becomes apparent here, for it is that theologian who first articulates, according to Lorenz, an immanent conception of sovereignty, which is to say, sovereignty (and Godhood) as a function of the field of representation within which it is inscribed.

That relation between sovereignty and representation is central to Measure for Measure, the focus of the second chapter. As Lorenz notes, the play’s preoccupation with structures of substitution has been explored before, as has the significance of the absent sovereign motif. But, whereas that fact of authority’s withdrawal in the play has been read thematically, Lorenz forwards the more radical claim that sovereignty inheres in the movement of substitution itself. Sovereignty is at once merely tropic and efficient, which is to say real in its effects. Suárez is reengaged, now by way of the relation between sovereignty and law; the purely figurative and yet effectual status of sovereign force crystallizes in the ambiguous definition of “lex” as “legendum,” a term that for Su...