The Majesty of Kingship: Spectacular and Sacred Sovereign Power

To analyse office in Lear, I begin with the most spectacular: kingship. Lear’s initial entrance, speech acts, and exclusions display his sovereign power. Yet he formally detaches those sovereign powers from the ‘name’ of ‘king’, relegating himself to merely nominal kingship (1.1.137). This ‘gift’ is criticised not just on technical, pragmatic grounds but as a moral ‘evil’ (1.1.165, 167). This reflects the sacred quality of sovereign kingship. European intellectual discourse posited an analogy between the king and Christ, which produced the iconic Tudor doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies. Both this and proto-republican contractualism demonstrate kingship’s cipher-like, instrumental quality. The jurisprudential concept of majesty binds together law, religion, metaphysics, and physiognomy into a spectacular sovereign sanctity. Yet, ‘majesty’ is precisely one of the qualities that Lear conveys to Cornwall and Albany. Troubling questions—given treason’s legal definition as crimen lesae majestatis (lit. the crime of injuring majesty)—therefore emerge about Gloucester’s blinding. Dispensing with every duty, power, and right of his office, Lear’s title of ‘king’ becomes a vestigial term of address that advertises his negation. From this perspective, Agamben’s hidden affinity between the banished and the ex-sovereign becomes legible.