Little, Little Graves: Shakespeare's Photographs of Richard II

[T]he dead / Are but as pictures.

—Macbeth, 2.2.51–52¹

In The Climactic Moments of the Deposition Scene in Act 4 of Richard II, Northumberland presses Richard to sign articles declaring himself guilty of "grievous crimes … against the state" (4.1.223, 225).² In response, Richard initiates a pause in the transactional business of the scene to stage an interlude of self-reflection. He declines to turn his tearful eyes upon the proffered articles and instead asks to see a looking glass, proposing to "read" his sins in the image of his unkinged face (l. 273). What he sees in the mirror, however, is neither a document of sin nor the face he expects, one "bankrupt of his majesty" (l. 267). Rather, Richard discovers the face he had when he was king:

                Was this face the faceThat every day under his household roofDid keep ten thousand men? Was this the faceThat like the sun did make beholders wink?Was this the face which faced so many follies,That was at last outfaced by Bolingbroke?

(II. 281–86)³

In the famous speech from Marlowe's Doctor Faustus echoed here—in which Faustus admiringly wonders, "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships"—Faustus's verb tense consigns the face of Helen of Troy to the past, even as he seeks immortality by kissing it.⁴ Shakespeare repeats and amplifies this past tense verb and, through it, conjures for Richard a particular form of immortality. Looking at himself in the mirror, Richard the speaker describes the image of a bygone face—a face, marked by the past tense "Was," that registers a temporal discrepancy between the reflected Richard and the reflecting Richard. As a face fixed in a prior time, the image declares its archaic relationship to the speaker's present tense, documenting its own obsolescence. By simultaneously figuring himself as a thing past and as someone presently looking at that past thing—as the imaged face that "Was" and the speaking face that is—Richard multiplies himself to populate different moments in time. He pauses the action of the scene to generate a picture of his past self that encodes a Richard who postdates his own demise.

Shakespeare's mirror scene indexes at least four Richards: the speaking character; the past King Richard he sees in the mirror; the dead, has-been, or ex-king presaged by the image and eventually produced by the assassination in Act 5; and the historical corpse of Richard II that antecedes the play. These Richards do not legibly correspond to those described by the medieval political theology of the king's two bodies, which has been indelibly linked with Richard II since Ernst Kantorowicz's 1957 reading of the play. In Kantorowicz's account, the precept of the king's two bodies explains how the disruptive potential of a king's physical death is offset by reference to the abstract, immortal institution of kingship, which persists intact from one mortal king's reign to the next. Appropriated from theological distinctions between Christ's mortal human body (proprium et verum corpus) and the church (corpus mysticum), the juridical construct of the king's two bodies establishes a fiction of continuity to negate the material fact of human mortality.⁵ Kantorowicz's influential reading of Richard II describes the mirror scene as a pivotal moment in the play's representation of this concept, one that dramatizes the catastrophic splitting of Richard's body politic from his body natural. Because Richard lacks a legitimate heir to inherit the immutable properties of kingship, his royal soul ascends to be enthroned in heaven "Whilst [his] gross flesh sinks downward here to die" (5.5.112).

The historicist project of contextualizing Richard II in Ricardian and Elizabethan England has been heavily indebted to Kantorowicz, who declares the king's two bodies "not only the symbol but indeed the very substance and essence" of the play.⁶ This thesis summarizes how medieval political theology serves in his...