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Uncovers the workings of sovereign power in Shakespeare's history plays
This book provides a sustained, formalist reading of the multiple body parts that litter the dialogue and action of Shakespeare's history plays, including Henry V, Richard III, Richard II, King John and the Henry IV plays. With a starting point in literary critical analyses of these dislocated bodies, the book tracks Shakespeare's relentless pursuit of a specific political question: how does human flesh, blood and bone relate to sovereignty? Griffiths advances our understanding of how human bodies are captured by - and escape - the grip of political systems.
Huw Griffiths is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature at The University of Sydney.
List of contents
Acknowledgements; Preface; Introduction: The Baroque Body Parts of Henry VI, Part Two; 1. Richard II as Robinson Crusoe: Sovereignty and the Impossibility of Solitude; 2. Necks, Throats and Windpipes in Henry V: Sovereignty Translated; 3. Prosthetic Hands in King John; 4. Copious Sovereignty in the Henry IV Plays; 5. 'My kingdom for a horse': Bestial Sovereignty in Richard III; Endnotes; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Huw Griffiths is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature, University of Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Hamlet: A Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism (London: Palgrave, 2005) and "Solitude Interrupted: John Ford's Soliloquies" Shakespeare and the Soliloquy, Eds. Daniel Derrin and Anthony Cousins (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, in press), in addition to many journal and book articles.
Summary
This book provides a sustained, formalist reading of the multiple body parts that litter the dialogue and action of Shakespeare's history plays.
