The Tears of Sovereignty – Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama examines the representation of sovereignty in canonical works of the Renaissance: Shakespeare's Richard II, Measure for Measure and The Winter's Tale, Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna, and Calderón de la Barca's Life is a Dream. Structured as a series of questions and answers regarding the concept of sovereignty, each chapter is organized around a key representational operation performed on a “body” of power increasingly spectacularized, sacralized, de-sacralized, and, above all, troped in various ways: from the analogical relat ... More

The Tears of Sovereignty – Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama examines the representation of sovereignty in canonical works of the Renaissance: Shakespeare's Richard II, Measure for Measure and The Winter's Tale, Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna, and Calderón de la Barca's Life is a Dream. Structured as a series of questions and answers regarding the concept of sovereignty, each chapter is organized around a key representational operation performed on a “body” of power increasingly spectacularized, sacralized, de-sacralized, and, above all, troped in various ways: from the analogical relations of Richard II, through the metaphorical transfers staged in Measure for Measure, to the autoimmune resistances and allegorical returns they give rise to in Lope's Fuenteovejuna, Calderón's Life is a Dream, and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. The book's method is comparative and conceptual, linking literary and religious discourse at the level of metaphor, and positing relations between English and Spanish drama, in terms of the “logics” each generates to negotiate the divided terrain of sovereignty. While its tropological approach will be familiar to readers of deconstruction, it also engages with biopolitical, psychoanalytic and feminist criticism, drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben, Pierre Legendre, Adriana Cavarero and Walter Benjamin, in order to examine the relationship between early modern theater and power from intersecting theoretical perspectives. The “tears” of sovereignty are the exegetical tropes produced and performed on the English stages and Spanish corrales of the seventeenth century through which we continue to view sovereignty.