For I Must Nothing Be’ Kings, Idols, And the Double-Body

‘For I must nothing be’: Kings, Idols, and the Double-Body of the Sign in Early Modern England

Pa t r i c i a Cann ing

Abstract

The importance of the ‘word’ in sixteenth century theology cannot be overestimated in both its literal and literary manifestations. As the incarnation of divinity, it is given form and material substance through scripture. From a Reformed perspective, this presents a theological anomaly: God is both form (word) and meaning (Word). As a duplicated representation of divinity encoding both nominal and intrinsic properties I propose that the ‘W/word’ can be read idolatrously. This article considers the implications of such a reading in the theological arena of early modern England. It focuses on the ways in which a theory of duplicated representation, or what I call, the ‘double-body of the sign’, strengthens while it also problematises early modern conceptions of authority. To date, few scholars have examined and debated these ideas through a stylistic framework using contemporary linguistic models. Focusing on the unstable signification that underpins monarchical and divine authority, I offer an analysis of William Shakespeare’s Richard II which aims to address this critical lacuna. Reading Foucault and Kantorowicz, for example, alongside Fauconnier and Turner, I pay particular attention to the ways in which the relationship or bond of resemblance between signifier and signified animates the space in which tension, contradiction, and ultimately, schism can operate to disrupt the process of signification. It is this space within which representation can both exploit and be exploited politically, religiously, and culturally, having the power to destabilise monarchical authority and more devastatingly, the foundations of the Reformed argument.

Critical Survey Volume 24, Number 3, 2012: 1–22doi: 10.3167/cs.2012.240301 ISSN 0011–1570 (Print), ISSN 1752–2293 (Online)

2 Critical Survey, Volume 24, Number 3

Introduction

Early modern English theology was beset by problems of representation governing worship and allegiance. The logocentric concept of the ‘word’ in Reformed theology frequently stood in opposition to its Catholic-centred counterpart, the ‘image’. Based on Aristotelian logic,1 Reformers believed the worship of images and material objects to be an idolatrous practice principally because such acts substituted the (material) form for the (spiritual) entity it represented. As David Hawkes has observed (2001, 53), this effectively made the material sign, in teleological terms, both the means and the end. For the early modern Catholic, however, images both instructed and inflected divine meditation. Material objects could stand for the entities they signified figuring metonymically as physical representations of an invisible God. In contradistinction, for Reformers, the ‘Word’ was accessible only through the ‘word’ of scripture. As the sole incarnation of divinity it superseded all other forms of divine representation. Yet, conceiving of the Word simultaneously as both Christ and as a scriptural (material) object entails a teleological paradox that, in accordance with the Protestant polemic, also gives rise to idolatry. Therefore, as a spiritual and material entity – ‘Word’ and ‘word’ – the Protestant representation of Christ generates a configuration that I will call the double-body of the sign – the W/word – that mirrored what Reformers considered was the idolatrous – because doubled – signification of Catholic idols.

In general terms, the double-body of the sign focuses on the dualistic function of representation impelled by the relationship between signifier and signified. Put simply, the signifier has (primarily) a denotative function while the signified operates connotatively as the concept to which the signifier refers. I propose that the unity of the double-body of the sign derives from conceptually integrating, or ‘blending’, form and meaning. In Robert Weimann’s terms,2 the ‘wholeness of the sign’ involves ‘complete continuity – or rather, the ignoring of discontinuity – between what materially signifies and what is spiritually signified by it’ (1996, 72). This article develops Weimann’s contention in the context of early modern debates on idolatry and representation by looking more closely at how this semiotic ‘wholeness’ is achieved and its wider religious and political implications. In so doing it adopts an integrated literary-linguistic methodological approach that attends to the semiotic

Kings, Idols, and the Double-Body of the Sign in Early Modern England 3

tensions, the ‘continuities’ and ‘discontinuities’ engendered by the ‘wholeness of the sign’, and explores how these discordances can be cognitively, if not always ideologically, reconciled. Consequently, it focuses on the relationship between signifier and signified informed by my reading of Michel Foucault3 which, I argue, generates a site of contestation between conceptions of reality and representation, form and content, materiality and immateriality in the theological, political, and cultural arena of early modern England.

Situating the Sign

According to Foucault, representation is constituted through a process of signification and resemblance. In his groundbreaking study The Order of Things, Foucault argues that a sign must ‘manifest […] the relation that links it to what it signifies’, so that not only must it represent, but ‘that representation, in turn, must also be represented within it’ (2002, 71). Based on a theory of resemblance, for Foucault the sign is predicated upon analogy and similarity. Foucault proposes a theory of four ‘similitudes’ that ‘link the marks to the things designated by them’ (47). The first of these similitudes, ‘convenientia’, denotes the ‘adjacency of places’, things which ‘come sufficiently close to one another to be in juxtaposition’ (20). It is in the ‘hinge’ between these adjacent ‘things’ that a ‘resemblance appears […] that becomes double as soon as one attempts to unravel it’. Foucault’s second similitude, emulatio, ‘a sort of convenience that has been freed from the law of place’ provides the medium through which the ‘links of the chain, no longer connected’ are nonetheless enabled to imitate each other ‘without connection or proximity’, much like a mirrored reflection (21–22). Analogy, the third similitude, involves resemblances of relations, thus ‘superimpos[ing] convenientia and aemulatio’: ‘Its power is immense for the similitudes of which it treats are not the visible, substantial ones between things themselves; they need only be the more subtle resemblances of relations. Disencumbered thus, it can extend, from a single given point, to an endless number of relationships’ (24). Simultaneously uniting and transcending the physical, the proximal and the abstract, Foucault suggestively offers here a contentious way of conceiving of the political and theological relationship between thing and concept in the context of the Reformation. Reading Foucault alongside John Calvin,


for instance, offers insights into the function and salience of resemblance in early modern theology. As I argue here, the Reformed conception of the W/word, given its literal and literary properties, made the issue of resemblance and representation in early modern England a mutually problematic and potentially explosive one.

One such example of this semiotic problematic is typified in the debate over the issue of transubstantiation. Reformed theology, espoused principally by Luther and Calvin, offers a contrary interpretation of the Catholic doctrine of the ‘true presence’; that is, the change in substance of the sacramental wafer into the body of Christ. Catholics believed that the priest, through divinely appointed efficacy, literally transforms the wafer into the body of Christ. Contrarily, Calvin and Calvinists believed the relationship between the two to be one of representation and not simultaneity. Calvin4 writes, ‘The sacred mystery of the Supper consists of two things; the corporeal signs, which, thrust before our eyes, represent to us the invisible things according to the feebleness of our capacity; and the spiritual truth, which is at the same time figured and exhibited by the symbols themselves’ (Institutes, IV.xvii.1.1). Highlighting the semiotic basis upon which the theological argument is based, Christopher Elwood (1997, 7–8) argues that Calvin and Calvinists sought a ‘reorientation’ of the meaning of the Eucharist, a process that ‘reinterpret[ed] what is involved in the process of signification or semiosis’. Calvin’s ‘reorientation’ can be synthesised with a Foucauldian logic of representation in that it concords with the latter’s view on the representative capacity of signs; recall Foucault, [a sign] ‘must manifest […] the relation that links it to what it signifies’ (2002, 71). As such, manifesting form and content, the sacrament becomes both a sign and an end in itself, efficacious precisely because it simultaneously represents and contains that which is represented by it.

The efficacy of such signs is a manifestation of the teleological paradox that underpins Reformed conceptions of idolatry. Encoding both nominal and intrinsic value, such duplicated representations literally embody what are often arguably clashing signifying frames. I want to argue that this particular aspect of signification is part of a more general semiotic logic that guides our understanding of dynamic ‘double-bodied’ configurations such as the ‘W/word’, which necessitate the construction and mapping of networks of meaning in order to cohere conceptually and ideologically. Put simply, such signs (whether the sacramental wafer or the lexical construction ‘W/word’)


act metonymically as signifying triggers that invoke a more complex set of mental processes that structure and integrate information in order to make sense. Conceptual Integration Theory, a cognitive stylistic model first developed by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier5 and developed by, amongst others, Barbara Dancygier,6 provides the theoretical framework through which this coherence is achieved.

‘Making’ Sense: Blending Form and Content

In brief, Conceptual Integration Theory, or ‘blending’, aptly demonstrates the integral role of cognition in the generation and comprehension of meaning. As Fauconnier puts it, ‘thought and language […] depend among other things on our capacity to manipulate webs of mappings between mental spaces’ (2002, 149). Mental spaces are defined by Fauconnier and Turner as ‘small conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of local understanding and action’ (2002, 40) and by Barbara Dancygier as ‘temporary cognitive structures prompted by the use of linguistic forms’ (2006, 5). Fauconnier proposes that blending ‘operates on two Input mental spaces to yield a third space, the blend. The blend inherits partial structure from the input spaces and has emergent structure of its own’ (149). Applying this model to the double-bodied concept of the W/word, then, involves the projection of information from two distinct mental spaces into a third space, the ‘blend’ as can be seen diagrammatically below in Figure 1.

Input 1 Input 2

Blended space

Word Word

W/word

Spiritual entity Material thing

Figure 1 The ‘W/word’ blend


Input 1, the ‘Word’ space, contains intrinsic properties; that is, according to Reformed logic the Word is Christ. Input 2, the ‘word’ space, contains the nominal or formal properties in that it is the medium through which Christ is represented. As the two black arrows demonstrate, these elements are projected into the blended space where they coalesce. In other words, integration occurs within the new, dynamic third space, yielding a meaning that is not directly available from either input. More importantly, this blended information can project backwards to the two input spaces, creating new and theologically contentious ways of conceiving of the information contained therein.

In addition to this salient information, certain ‘vital relations’ (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 101) connect information within and across the input spaces that also participate in the blend, two of which are ‘identity’ (indicated by the broken lines) and ‘representation’ (indicated by the dotted lines).7 These relations or counterpart mappings are sustained across the inputs and compressed in the blended space.

To return briefly to Foucault, this blended network is predicated on resemblance; that is, the compression of the vital relations of ‘identity’ and ‘representation’ generates a similitude between form and meaning that permits the blended configuration to operate independently. Foucault writes:

The […] arrangement of signs […] requires the formal domain of marks, the content indicated by them, and the similitudes that link the marks to the things designated by them; but since resemblance is the form of the signs as well as their content, the three distinct elements of this articulation are resolved into a single form (2002, 46–7, my italics).

These ‘distinct elements’ – the input spaces in blending terms – are conceptually and doctrinally reconciled through their emergence as a ‘single form’ via a blended network in the first instance, and through Calvin’s integration of ‘corporeal things’ and ‘spiritual truth’ in the second.

However, the conceptual coherence of Calvin’s semiotic ‘reorientation’ to which I referred earlier does not automatically entail ideological coherence: if idolatry was, in Hawkes’ terms, a ‘disruption of natural teleology’ and thus a ‘fetishism of the sign’ (2001, 53), then the duplicated representation of form and content entailed by the blended configuration W/word, tacitly engages Reformers in the


same fetishistic consciousness as idolaters. More crucially, the divine Word, through its dual signification as both form and matter, may figure analogously with idols. It follows, therefore, that iconoclastic invectives risk losing their ideological credence and, by extension, their political force.

Gods and Kings: Reflections of the Double-Body

I now want to turn to the political implications of the double-body of the sign and its literal embodiment by looking at the ways in which the theological assumptions outlined above are played out in dramatic representation. Ernst Kantorowicz8 has skillfully dealt with the concept of the monarchical double-body; that is, the king as both a human body and a figurative ‘body’. Developing Kantorowicz’s (1957) distinction, I propose that the king’s ‘two bodies’, diagrammatically represented below in Figure 2, conceptually and semiotically parallel the double-body of divinity outlined above.

The ‘King’ metonymically signifies the office of monarch representing order and authority, whilst as ‘king’ he is the human vehicle in which the nominal signifier and the living incarnation or referent coexists. The (metonymic) relations ‘role’ and ‘value’ connect information in both input spaces, so that the figurative ‘King’ is conceptually linked to the physical ‘king’ through the respective identifying elements ‘title’ and ‘person’. Not only is this cross-space

Input 1 Input 2

‘King’ ‘king’

K/king

FigurativeBody

HumanBody

blend

Key of vital relations: Representation Identity Role Value

Figure 2 The ‘K/king’ blend


mapping imported to the blend, it is also compressed into ‘uniqueness’, as can be seen by the fused lines. Similarly, the contiguous relations of ‘identity’ and ‘representation’ that link the person of the king to the sign ‘King’ are also compressed into uniqueness. These compressions (of role and value and identity and representation) ultimately yield the ‘K/king’ formulation.

The above diagrams (Figures 1 and 2) enable us to read historically the analogy between the monarch and the divine in early modern England. Religious and political texts of the period perpetuated a sacral link between the divine and the earthly ruler that was ratified in monarchical writings. Being both form and matter the ‘K/king’ was widely believed to have been divinely instituted, cast as James I and VI9 would have it, in ‘the trew paterne of Diuinitie’ (Somerville 1994, 64). Cultivating a relationship of proximity and resemblance between the earthly and divine ruler, as many treatises did, redirected the seemingly paradoxical focus of the Reformed invective, rendering it untenable. If, as Reformers believed, idolatry was the teleological disruption of signs that in functioning as both means and end necessarily entailed the fragmentation of divinity, then the monarch, too, as an embodiment of signifier and referent, could be viewed idolatrously.

Extending the referential range of the sign by blending its figurative and literal significations in this way has a number of theological and political implications. If power and authority are attached to the sign itself, then that power is transferred to the ‘thing’ designated by it. Indeed, Calvin attests to this semiotic multiplicity in his biblical exegesis. Speaking of the Holy Spirit’s incarnation as a dove, he writes that:

Humanly devised symbols, being images of things absent rather than marks of things present (which they very often even falsely represent), are still sometimes graced with the titles of those things. Similarly, with much greater reason, those things ordained by God borrow the names of those things of which they always bear a definite and not misleading signification, and have the reality joined with them. So great, therefore, is their similarity and closeness that transition from one to the other is easy (IV.xxvii.21, my italics).

Translating this logic into political terms, the title ‘King’ (as opposed to some inherent ‘king-ness’) carries with it the authority and responsibility of office, which is then bestowed upon the person who


holds that title. Consequently, the natural telos of the sign is reversed, as it is the signifier itself which creates the resemblance between it and its signified, rather than to speak of some bond of resemblance antecedently existing.10 As such, the K/king figures holistically as a unique entity in which the self merges with the sign of the self. The political implications of this find expression in William Shakespeare’s Richard II, in which Richard’s reluctance to conceive of himself as ‘being’ other than the figurative King generates, among other things, a kind of nominal idolatry. Whether attributable to reluctance or inability, Richard’s refusal to acknowledge an analogical (and metonymic) relationship between the figurative and literal king makes his loss of the signifier ‘King’ at the close of the play as much of a human tragedy as it is a political one.

Shakespeare11 first introduces us to the political ramifications of resemblance when his protagonist, Richard, faces his successor, Bolingbroke, and gives physical form to the ‘double-body’ of the king. Adopting the role of pseudo-iconoclast, Richard condemns the irreverence of false worship as he addresses the ‘kneeling’ Bolingbroke:

RICHARD: ‘Fair cousin, you debase your princely kneeTo make the base earth proud with kissing it.Me rather had my heart might feel your loveThan my unpleased eye see your courtesy’ (III.iii.188–191).

As soon-to-be deposed king, Richard adds a third body to this literal and figurative mirror image, that of ‘monarchical subject’, or worse still, ‘condemned man’. Inverting power structures, Richard’s resignation and status as condemned man is impelled by his subjects. Yet, condemned man and king are not so far removed. Rather, they occupy in the dramatic space of the play a continuous unbroken chain of resemblance, markedly reducing the gulf between sovereign and subject proposed by Foucault in Discipline and Punish.12 He states:

At the opposite pole [to the king] one might imagine placing the body of the condemned man; he, too, has his legal status; he gives rise to his own ceremonial and he calls forth a whole theoretical discourse, not in order to ground the ‘surplus power’ possessed by the person of the sovereign, but in order to code the ‘lack of power’ with which those subjected to punishment are marked. In the darkest region of the political field the condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king (29).


However, in Shakespeare’s play, this chain of resemblance overlaps. Richard, in the following speech, embodies rather than polarises Foucault’s ‘inverted figure’, being both ‘condemned man’ (traitor) and monarch:

RICHARD: Nay, if I turn mine eyes upon myself,I find myself a traitor with the rest;For I have given here my soul’s consentT’undeck the pompous body of a king (IV.i.237–240, my italics).

This multi-layered (self-)representation of Richard extends the chain of emulation further, so that, evoking Calvin’s philosophy, ‘the name [is] transferred from something higher to something lower’. Embodying both referents, Richard’s status as both King and condemned man splits not only the sign but the person represented by it. Thus, Richard effectively causes his own political death through a self-directed semiotic schizophrenia that has wider implications for the theological doctrine that secured his subjects’ unfaltering belief, and by extension, imbued him with Christological power in the first place.

The dramaturgy of this scene is central to David Kastan’s13 analysis. He writes: ‘Richard comes to see that in agreeing to make his political subjection the subject of his dramatizing, he has become complicit in the political act’ (1986, 472). Literally ‘playing’ on the relations of analogy and disanalogy, Richard conceives of himself as a ‘traitor’ who has betrayed a ‘king’. At the same time, he is the ‘king’ who has been betrayed. As Travis Bogard14 observes: ‘He [Richard] is a divided being, a king, the anointed of God, but also a man, frail and doomed in his frailty. Indeed the opinion is repeatedly advanced that Richard is his own Judas, the man betraying the king’ (1955, 199). Scott McMillin15 argues that it is in the deposition scene that Richard asserts ‘a new self’, one that is ‘grounded in negativity (“for I must nothing be”)’ (1984, 44). While I agree with both Bogard and McMillin, that Richard is indeed ‘a divided being’ who attempts to create a ‘new self’, my own stylistic analysis attempts to go further than these previous studies by demonstrating how such ‘duplications’ can be cognitively construed and reconciled.

The schizophrenic split noted above is achieved through the use of the conditional ‘if’: Richard proposes a counterfactual reality in which he is able to look upon himself as two separate identities, two actors in his own staged world. Thus, I argue, Richard can be


understood separately and simultaneously through a ‘counterfactual’ blend informed by two input spaces, one in which Richard is a ‘traitor’ and one in which he is ‘king.’16 These mental spaces are connected by the vital relation of ‘identity’. The inputs project into a counterfactual blend, accounting for the contradictory ‘reality’ of Richard being two separate people.17 Within the counterfactual space, Richard the traitor is able to ‘undeck’ the ‘body of a king’. The new ‘reality’ requires not only the compression of certain relations but also the decompression of others, as can be seen in Figure 3 below.

Richard, through his resignation of the crown, causes himself to become a ‘traitor’, thus compressing the relations of cause/effect in the blended space in which he is both. In the inputs, the relation of ‘identity’ links the ‘traitor’ and the ‘king’ given that Richard is the ‘referent’ in each input. However, both concepts ‘traitor’ and ‘king’ are disanalogous in that there is no shared topology between them. Therefore, across the inputs, what Fauconnier and Turner (2002, 92–93) term ‘outer space’ relations, in this case, the relation of ‘disanalogy’, is compressed in the counterfactual blended space into the ‘inner space’ relation of ‘analogy’. Crucially, this compression, along with that of identity, is projected back to the input spaces, as can be seen from the direction of the black arrows.

By ‘undecking’ himself, Richard the ‘king’ is unavoidably responsible for resigning not only the name of king, but his sole ‘kingly’ identity, without which, he later admits, he is nothing: ‘I have no name, no title […] And know not now what name to call

Input 1 Input 2

Richard Richard

Richard

as traitor as king

blend

Representation Identity Role Value

==== Cause/effect

====

Key of vital relations:

Figure 3 The traitor/king blend (B2)


myself!’ (IV.i.245–249). He attempts to reconcile this anomaly by reconfiguring kingship as a property rather than a definitive identity: thus, he becomes in the blend, ‘a’ rather than ‘the’ king. In so doing, he decompresses his identity further (from the realm of the specific to the general) in a bid to avoid disintegration into nothingness at the loss of the name-identity ‘king’.18 The point of the blend, then, is that Richard cannot conceive of the reality that draws a distinction between inherent ‘king-ness’ and the ‘man’ that holds the office of king – in other words, the duality or double-body of kingship. For him, the role and the person are one and the same. Ultimately, then, he must construct an unrealisable counterfactual ‘reality’ in which he is at the outset two people, condemned ‘traitor’ and ‘king’. Crucially, it is only in Richard’s counterfactual reality that he is able to acknowledge the separateness of the signifier from the signified.

As ‘traitor’, Richard is a condemned man. As he is also a monarch, he singularly represents, in Foucauldian terms, ‘the symmetrical inverted figure of the king’. Becoming his own mirror image, Richard plays with the double-body of the king. As condemned ex-king and newly formed subject he inverts rather than deflects monarchical power. Reflecting the power of the subjects who (with him) wrought his fall, he contemplates the political implications of Bolingbroke’s address to him as ‘fair cousin’, stating:

RICHARD: Fair cousin? I am greater than a king;For when I was a king my flatterers Were then but subjects; being now a subjectI have a king here to my flatterer.Being so great I have no need to beg (IV.i.295–299).

The chiastic construction divided by the semicolon (in line 297) literalises the mirroring noted above – two ‘poles’ converge producing a superimposition, a kind of hybridised subject/king. As his own inversion Richard kaleidoscopically embodies the subdivision of power (just as the early modern idol infinitely subdivided the power of God) that through resemblance subdivides to infinity. The danger, here, is that as a composite of reflections that incorporate subject, king, and God, any worship offered to the figure of the king is also implicitly directed to the subject, arguably making subjects analogous to kings.


Double or Nothing: Distinguishing Form

Blurring the distinctions between prototype and copy creates a plethora of shadows, resemblances or simulacra that through emulation are accorded their own autonomous existence. As Jean Baudrillard19 puts it:

By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials […] It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real (1994, 2).

I will now argue that, in Richard II, these processes are seen more extremely. For instance, substituting the ‘signs of the real for the real’, a distinctly Calvinist line, is exactly what motivates Richard to focus simultaneously on the intrinsic and nominal value of the signifier ‘king’. As I suggested earlier, it could be argued that the sign itself creates the resemblance between signifier and signified, rather than to speak of some bond of resemblance (in its literal and figurative forms) antecedently existing. It is perhaps this focus on the sign, the ‘name’ of king that causes Richard to compress the relations of role and identity thus, collapsing the ‘double-body’ into a singular form. As Samuel Weingarten20 observes: ‘symbols, especially verbal symbols, are more important to him [Richard] than the things for which they stand’ (1966, 536). As he is about to be deposed, Richard clings to the name of king as he talks of himself in the third person: ‘Must he lose the name of king? A God’s name, let it go’ (III.iii.144–145). Later, desperate to maintain ‘title’ or be ‘king’ of something, Richard holds on to an abstraction in the form of his ‘griefs’. In response to Bolingbroke’s statement, ‘I thought you had been willing to resign’, Richard replies somewhat ambiguously: ‘My crown I am, but still my griefs are mine. / You may my glories and my state depose, / But not my griefs; still am I king of those’ (IV.i.180–183). When considered alongside Bushy’s earlier exposition of the nature of grief, quoted below, Richard’s statement is strangely prophetic:

BUSHY: Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadowsWhich shows like grief itself but is not so.For sorrow’s eye, glazed with blinding tears,Divides one thing entire to many objects–Like perspectives, which, rightly gazed upon,


Show nothing but confusion; eyed awry,Distinguish form (II.ii.14–20, my italics).

Richard is willing to resign his ‘crown’, but this token does not in itself constitute kingship. He cannot resign his kingship because it is who he is: without the name of king he has, and more importantly, is nothing. Therefore, for him, removing the trappings of monarchy (the visible ‘things’) does not entirely deprive him of his kingly status. Indeed, by clinging to the remnants of his authoritative power, albeit over ‘griefs’ – ‘still am I king of those’ – Richard attempts to assert some inherent ‘king-ness’. However, the properties of ‘each grief’ are merely a multitude of ‘shadows’ that even the queen cannot ‘name’: ‘what it is that is not yet known what. / I cannot name: ‘tis nameless woe, I wot’ (II.ii.39–40). The act of losing his ‘name’, then, places Richard alongside other ‘nameless’ phenomena, his ‘griefs’ or pseudo-subjects. Occupying a transitional ‘shadowy’ position, he is caught between ‘I’ and ‘nothing’. Richard realises this when he says: ‘why am I sent for to a king / Before I have shook off the regal thoughts / Wherewith I reign’d?’ (IV.i.162–164, my italics). Clinging to shapes without substance, as lord only of his ‘griefs’ and mere ‘thoughts’, Richard effectively ‘reigns’ over a plurality of no things. A king cannot be a king if he is king of nothing.

Richard as King, therefore, occupies a paradoxical position of prototypical shadow, which manifests itself most clearly in the mirror scene in Act Four, Scene One. Staring at his reflection in the ‘glass’, Richard remarks: ‘A brittle glory shineth in this face. / As brittle as the glory is the face’ (277–278). The latter clause unites the concepts ‘glory’ and ‘face’ through the property ‘brittleness’. That they are reconfigured as one and the same thing is interesting: given Richard’s inability to sever the name of King from the person of the king it is no surprise to find that his ‘face’ and the ‘glory’ of kingship are inextricable (the face being considered as metonymically standing for the entire person). Moreover, Richard aligns his ‘name’ with kingly ‘glory’ in Act Three, Scene Two when he remarks, ‘Is not the King’s name forty thousand names? / Arm, arm, my name! A puny subject strikes / At thy great glory’ (81–83). Thus, Richard’s remark, ‘you may my glories and my state depose’ (IV.i.182) is rather ominous because stripping him of the ‘glories’ of monarchy simultaneously strips him of his very identity.

Contemplating the transience both of the reflection and the real, and of the worship (the ‘glory’) and the object of that worship (his


‘face’), Richard, in a final effort to unite the nominal and the real, shatters the relation of resemblance between them – the mirror.21 Unfortunately, for Richard, this multiplies the already reflected reflections, creating an infinite chain of emulation: ‘there it is, cracked in an hundred shivers. Mark […] how soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face’ (IV.i.279–281). Bolingbroke’s reply, ‘the shadow of your sorrow hath destroyed / The shadow of your face’ (IV.i.280–283), wonderfully encapsulates the power of resemblance. Like a shadow without form, emulation provides the means of transcending place – it is the justification for analogy. Yet it is precisely because the reality is very different that Richard creates a counterfactual world in which the ‘unseen griefs’ of which he is still ‘king’ cast their own shadow in the form of visible ‘external manners’, ultimately reversing the real and the non-real. Responding to Bolingbroke’s reply, Richard says:

RICHARD: The shadow of my sorrow! Ha! Let’s see.’Tis very true, my grief lies all within;And these external manners of lamentsAre merely shadows to the unseen grief That swells with silence in the tortur’d soul.There lies the substance (IV.i.284–289, my italics).

Unable to acknowledge any separation of the K/king’s double-body, Richard internalises all that monarchy means, so that what is ‘real’ is the unseen. Richard reverses the iconoclastic invective by tacitly advocating an inherently Catholic position in which ‘substance’ is intangible, immaterial. Moreover, this ‘substance’ (of Richard’s ‘grief’) is itself kaleidoscopically emulative: consider Bushy’s interpretation of the self-generating nature of ‘griefs’ to the queen in Act Two, Scene Two, ‘each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows / Which shows like grief itself but is not so’ (14–15). In Richard’s counterfactual inverted world, ‘shadows’ simply cast more shadows. Thus, his visible sorrow, like his face and his subjects, are mere projections or images lost in a world of ‘aemulatio’ wherein the real and the resemblance, complicated by the ‘omnipotence of simulacra’, are difficult, if not impossible to discern.

Confounding this already complex world of shadows and reflections is its analogical position alongside the world of signs. Internalising the ‘double-body’ of the king, Richard collapses his status as transitory referent and nominal signifier into a single form. Reversing Aristotelian teleology, Richard moves from the signified to the


signifier through his interrogative in Act Three, Scene Two, ‘Is not the King’s name forty thousand names?’22 For Richard, the signified, his corporeality, is insignificant. In his world, the signifier is everything. Kingship, therefore, is subsumed within the ‘sign’ of King. Both role and title constitute Richard’s unique ‘identity’; his great ‘glory’ is his name. As Theodore Spencer23 puts it: ‘the traditional glorifications of his position have become the essence of his being, and he lives in an unreal world in which he thinks of these glorifications as the only reality’ (1961, 74). To that end, it is not the signified that Richard wants to ‘arm’ but the sign itself. Without the title of ‘King’ Richard cannot exist, literally becoming ‘nothing’: ‘I have no name, no title […] And know not now what name to call myself!’ (IV.i.245–249). For Richard, relinquishing his ‘name’ equates to the loss of subjectivity – ‘nothing’ is all that remains because for him ‘nothing’ is all there is.24

It is perhaps Richard’s obsession with becoming ‘nothing’ that best underscores the God/monarch analogy which most radically undermines the prototypicality of God. ‘Nothing’ in sixteenth century England was pronounced ‘noting’ when spoken aloud, as it would have been in the theatre. Such a pronunciation invokes the synonymous term ‘text’. I would argue that Richard’s gradual transformation into ‘nothing’ can be understood semiotically; Richard figures as a ‘textual’ entity. His statements about ‘nothing’, therefore, assume a much greater significance when considered alongside configurations of God-as-text, or the ‘Word’. Richard conceives of himself as ‘nothing’ when he responds to Bolingbroke’s question, ‘Are you contented to resign the crown?’ with, ‘Ay, no; no, ay; for I must nothing be’ (IV.i.90–91, my italics). The clash of (mirror) image and word in Richard’s response is engendered by the chiastic construction of ‘ay, no; no, ay’. This blend of the textual and imagistic undermines the Reformed theological argument as it plays on the early modern critique of idolatry. The word/image dichotomy is presented as an emblematic mirror, a picture derived from words so that both are put on display. As McMillin puts it: ‘His answer managed to set the word against the word in a perfect stalemate of signifiers. It was a balance of “I” against “nothing” and of “yes” against “no”’ (1984, 52). ‘I’ and ‘nothing’ are held in relation: Richard’s rejection of the double-body of the K/king compresses both into ‘Richard’, so that, as McMillin states with perhaps more irony than he intends, ‘at the heart of loss there is nothing for the eye to see, and “I” and “no” are one’ (52, my


italics). Cognisant of the caution offered by Corinthians 8.4 (‘An idol is nothing in the world’), it is politically and theologically devastating that what the world ‘sees’ when they look at Richard is, indeed, ‘nothing’.

The puns on ay/I and ‘nothing/noting’ create an-other textual authority – other, that is, than Christ.25 Recalling the divinely imbued status of the king, Richard, in order to signify, must become text, a nominal entity. Richard ensures his own semiotic transformation when he is asked to read a ‘paper’ while waiting on the mirror in Act Four, Scene One; ‘I’ll read enough / When I do see the very book indeed / Where all my sins are writ, and that’s myself’ (IV.i.263–265, my italics). This is doubly significant. Firstly, Richard has changed ‘form’, engaging in a kind of transubstantiation in reverse. Becoming a ‘book’, he has inverted the doctrine of the ‘Word-made-flesh’: as a mirror image of God, he is the Flesh-made-Word. Secondly, this is immediately followed by the presentation of a mirror in which Richard sees his newly reconfigured textual self. Gazing upon himself in this way creates an object from the subject. The problem with this in the context of the play’s production is that exposing the K/king-as-text to the (male) gaze implicates, by analogy, the ‘W/word’ rendering both as idolatrous creations. Ultimately, Richard not only literalises the ‘double-body’ of the word, but literally becomes the ‘word-as-image’.

Complicating Richard’s already problematic reconfiguration into ‘text’ is the king–subject transformation to which I referred earlier. Aligning subjects with kings as Richard does in his deposition, creates an-other ‘concentric circle of resemblance’ that also rivals God-as-text. Richard’s final contemplation of himself as ‘nothing’ not only reinforces his position as text, but also tacitly implies that of others, opening up the unbroken line of resemblance once again:

RICHARD: I am unkinged by Bolingbroke,And straight am nothing. But whate’er I be,Nor I, nor any man that but man is,With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased With being nothing (V.v.37–41, my italics).

Unkinged and nameless, Richard is at one and the same time ‘I’ and ‘nothing’. Perhaps acknowledging his fading status as prototypical ‘name’, the properties of which are shared by ‘forty thousand’, Richard is simultaneously investing ‘any man’ with the same status


as both himself and God – a position of ‘nothing/noting’, or ‘text.’ The implication of this subdivision of power is akin to the idolatrous practice of false worship – the dilution of divinity through reproduction and the objectification of God-as-text. Furthermore, it offers an alternative way of reading the Platonic conception of the relationship between prototype and image (whereby the latter participates in the former), by suggesting that the prototype – God – is contained within the image. As such, God is not as Baudrillard conceives of him, ‘nothing more than his own simulacrum’ (1994, 4), but rather, as simulacrum, God is little more than ‘nothing’.

Ironically, and perhaps most alarmingly, this reversal of prototype and image can be espoused through an examination of the etymology of the word ‘idol’. As Hawkes has already noted, the word ‘idol’ or ‘eidolon’ refers to the ‘false mental image that the idolator imposes upon the material icon’ (2001, 58). In the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, ‘eidolon’ translates the Hebrew ‘a ven’, which ‘literally designates various forms of non-existence’, the first of which is ‘nothing’.26 As a multiple signifier, ‘nothing’ is simultaneously ‘idol’ and, through its phonetic transcription, ‘noting’ or ‘word’. The transformation, then, of the word-as-‘nothing/noting’ into an image or idol entails the final inversion of the proper telos of signs. Exposing the irony in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians 8.4 (King James’s Bible), ‘we know that an idol is nothing in the world’, text has become a duplicated ‘end’ in itself, figuratively and literally, an ‘idol’ (‘an idol is nothing’). In a parallel of the Christ-as-Word formulation, the King-as-W/word has been reconstituted as both ‘thing’ and ‘no-thing’. As a phantasmic shadow that is neither real nor non-real, and through the reconfiguration as text, nothing throws the antagonistic relationship between spirit and matter, word and image, and prototype and copy into sharper focus more effectively than ‘nothing’.

Conclusion

If idolatry is the worship of false idols or, in semiotic terms, ‘empty signs’, then Richard’s conception of himself as ‘nothing’, with its attendant etymological derivations, significantly undermines the sacral analogy that James I and other political writers sought to establish between earthly and heavenly rulers. The fragmentation of


divinity further complicates this analogy. Nowhere is this more contentious than in the Reformed focus on Christ as the Word and His incarnation through the words of scripture. Reformed doctrine negates the intrinsic worth of any object of religious veneration. In essence, this means that matter and spirit cannot coexist in an earthly representation of Christ. To advocate a doctrine of Christ, then, that generates its own double-body (the W/word), and one that participates in the same processes of duplicated representation as the K/king’s double-body, inculcates a conception of both as fetishised signs. Indeed, this is the framework within which I have analysed Shakespeare’s play. I have shown that in its treatment of the circularity of emulation between hierarchies, it inculcates the Foucauldian idea of the world as ‘linked together like a chain’.

In political terms, the uncertainty and deep concern over Elizabeth’s succession must have made the thematic preoccupations of these plays seem less like theatrical escapism and more like plausible stories. Extending the chain of emulation, and in so doing traversing hierarchies would have significantly narrowed the gap between who would and perhaps more worryingly, who could be monarch. Writing and staging these plays at a time of political and monarchical uncertainty both extends and foregrounds their own status as duplicated representations. It is my view that they serve to undermine early modern perceptions not only of monarchy but also of divine omnipotence. At the same time, they unravel as they seek to redefine boundaries between characters, roles, and more importantly, concepts. In reconceiving signification in the ways in which I have outlined through my exposition of the double-body of the sign, Shakespeare’s play highlights the theological incongruities in iconoclastic Reformed doctrine. Rather than merely establishing the world as linked together like a chain, Protestants, I have argued, recreated the chain of being. By imbuing signs with the very power they disavowed, they showed that nothing was in fact something. In other words, my analysis of Richard II exposes a teleological paradox that posits the sign as both the means and the end – the ultimate act of idolatry. Indeed, the kingly figure in Shakespeare’s play is implicated in a web of idolatry and semiotic fetishism. His ‘double-body’ is itself reproducible as both idol/king and ultimately, Christ-as-text.

Finally, I have shown that the tension surrounding the double-body of the king parallels that of the sign itself: as a lexical item ‘made up of letters’ the sign is given physical form. In the context of an early


modern scriptural or logocentric epistemology the sign is also inherently meaningful. Given its various semantic and pragmatic applications, the sign both represents, and contains within it, each representation. In other words, it can be construed in the same manner as the king – as both the ‘self’ and the sign of the self. Having value both in and of itself, the sign, I argue, issues forth as the single most prolific idol of early modern England.

Notes

1. Scholars have previously drawn attention to the justification of iconoclasm on Aristotelian grounds. For the influence of semiotics on exegesis, see especially Carlos Eire, War Against The Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); David Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680 (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Christopher Elwood, The Body Broken: The Calvinist Doctrine of the Eucharist and the Symbolisation of Power in Sixteenth-Century France (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Michael O’Connell, ‘The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm, Anti-Theatricalism, and the Image of the Elizabethan Theatre’, English Literary History 52, 2 (1985), 279–310.

2. Robert Weimann, Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

3. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).

4. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T Mc Neill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960).

5. Gilles Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, ‘Conceptual Integration and Formal Expression’, Metaphor and Symbol 10, 3 (1995), 183–203; Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

6. Barbara Dancygier, ‘What Can Blending Do for You?’, Language and Literature 15, 1 (2006), 5–15; Patricia Canning, ‘“The Bodie and the Letters both”: “Blending” the Rules of Early Modern Religion’, Language and Literature 17, 3 (2006), 187–203.

7. Other key vital relations are ‘Identity, Cause-Effect, Time, Space, Change, Part-Whole, Role, Disanalogy, Property, Similarity, Category, Intentionality, and Uniqueness’, Fauconnier and Turner (2002), 101; see also 92–111.

8. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957).

9. James VI and I, ‘The Trew Law of Free Monarchies: Or The Reciprock And Mvtuall Dvetie Betwixt A Free King, And His naturall Subjects’, in King James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Somerville (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).


10. The ‘naturalness’ of this shared signification between kings and God is a feature of many treatises and tracts. In addition to those referenced, Thomas Fuller asserts a natural bond between divine and earthly ruler and writes of the divine investiture of the latter by the former; in The Holy State he observes that the power of the king ‘Is given him by God, who alone hath the originall propriety thereof’, and which ‘Is derived unto him by a prescription time out of mind in the Law of Nature, declared more especially in the Word of God’.

11. All references to Richard II will be from The Norton Shakespeare, eds, Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company Inc, 1997).

12. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. (London: Penguin, 1991).

13. David Scott Kastan, ‘Proud Majesty made a Subject: Shakespeare and the Spectacle of Rule’, Shakespeare Quarterly 3, 4 (1986), 459–75.

14. Travis Bogard, ‘Shakespeare’s Second Richard’, PMLA 70, 1 (1955), 192–209.15. Scott McMillin, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II: Eyes of Sorrow, Eyes of Desire’,

Shakespeare Quarterly 35, 1 (1984), 40–52.16. Developed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (1995; 1998; 2000; 2002)

Conceptual Integration Theory, or ‘blending’, describes meaning ‘by specifying the nature of operations on cognitive constructs called mental spaces’, which, in Barbara Dancygier’s terms, are ‘temporary cognitive structures prompted by the use of linguistic forms’. In a conceptual integration network, mental spaces act as input spaces from which we selectively project properties or elements into a blended space.

17. Barbara Dancygier and Eve Sweester define counterfactuality as pertaining to ‘specific interpretations involving a construed contradiction with “reality”’. Mental Spaces in Grammar: Conditional Constructions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 58. Fauconnier and Turner state that counterfactuality is ‘forced incompatibility between spaces […] that involve some of the same people and the same events’. Fauconnier and Turner (2002), 230.

18. As Fauconnier and Turner state: ‘integration and compression are one side of the coin; disintegration and decompression are the other […] In principle, a conceptual integration network contains its compressions and decompressions’ (2002), 119.

19. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994).

20. Samuel Weingarten, ‘The Name of King in Richard II’, College English 27, 7 (1966), 536–41.

21. Throughout his analysis of Richard’s double-body, Kantorowicz (1957) argues against the ‘fictional oneness’ (31) of this duality. For him, the ‘splintering mirror means, or is, the breaking apart of any possible duality. All those facets are reduced to one: to the banal face and insignificant physis of a miserable man’ (40). At this point, my argument departs from Kantorowicz’s. I argue instead that Richard attempts – albeit unsuccessfully – to unite the double-body of the king in the act of shattering the glass, as the mirror represents the relation of resemblance that links them. Richard strives to effect a literal superimposition of the nominal and the real, the Body politic and the Body natural, creating ‘oneness’. Without this superimposed singularity Richard cannot possibly be.

22. Richard, here, invokes Calvin’s exegesis of the relationship between the church and Christ. Calvin writes, ‘as Christ suffered once in himself, so he now suffers every day in his members; and the sufferings which the Father decreed and appointed for his body


are completed [in the church]’ (1958, Col. 1:24). For Calvin, the church is Christ and the signified deity is contained within the sign of the church. While Richard can gain biblical validation from this for his divinely instituted position as king, the analogy is politically suggestive in that it extends to the king’s subjects.

23. Theodore Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1961).

24. I agree with James A. McPeek (1958: 198) in his analysis of Richard’s obsession with the name of king, in which he argues for what amounts to the teleological disruption of the ‘sign’: ‘With him [Richard] the symbol is a substitute for the reality behind it – that is, the symbol has become the reality’. ‘Richard and His Shadow World’, American Imago 15, 195–203. On the theme of ‘nothing’, Howard Caygill (2000) debates the various equivocations of the concept and its relationship to ‘substance’ in Shakespearean drama, exploring the Hegelian concept of the ‘determinate relation between being and nothing’ (107). He argues for a wider understanding of these relations, for ‘ways of thinking the relation of nothing and not-nothing other than in terms of being and not-being’ (108), finding in Shakespeare’s work, an in-between state that is ‘neither being nor nothing’ (109). ‘Shakespeare’s Monster of Nothing’, Philosophical Shakespeares, ed. John J. Joughin (London and New York: Routledge), 105–114. Reconceptualising ‘nothing’, Leonard F. Dean (1952: 212) notes: ‘Death, like the end of the play, will show him [Richard] who he really is’. While this suggests a somewhat conventionally Christian reading, I regard Dean’s comment ironically. Richard’s ‘death’ will in fact show him who he really is, a no-thing. ‘Richard II: The State and the Image of the Theatre’, PMLA 67, 2, 211–18.

25. Caygill refers to this equivocation of the first person pronoun in ‘ay, no’ as a ‘definite refusal’ to resign and the following ‘no, ay’ as ‘resigned acquiescence’, so that ‘[Richard] acknowledges he must be nothing, but can neither affirm nor deny this nothing’. (2000: 112). This view is in keeping with Caygill’s consideration of an ‘in-between’ status that conceptualises ‘nothing’ as neither ‘being’ nor ‘not being.’

26. The Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, Vol. 1. ed. G. Johannes Botterwelk and Helmer Ringgren, trans. John T. Willis (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William Beerdmans Publishing Company, 1974), 147.

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For I Must Nothing Be’ Kings, Idols, And the Double-Body

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