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This book is a study of theatre and sovereignty that situates William Shakespeare's plays in the contraflow between two absolutisms of early modern England: the aesthetic and the political. It is a book about art and power on Shakespeare's stage, and argues that his plays are systematically engaged in untying freedom from royalty by dismantling sovereignty in all its forms. The book tracks the pre-Kantian nucleus of willed nonentity or interested disinterestedness in Shakespeare's own recorded words. The passive aggression of the creaturely voice that answers power back with the delinquent alterity of such a bad echo is found to be embodied in Shakespeare's dependent relations with his own Tudor overlords. In Julius Caesar, cries of 'peace, freedom, and liberty!' reverberate within the monumental irony of the Globe playhouse's imitation imperial design. The book views Hamlet as the great refusal of the absolutist system symbolized by certain triumphal facades. It considers King Lear as a staging of the challenge to speak freely by command which confronted the dramatist when the players were, after all, co-opted to proclaim the Stuart monarch's 'Free and Absolute' power. Shakespeare's obsession with doubleness arises in Macbeth from the play's barbaric circumstances. The book also argues that Antony and Cleopatra be viewed as an equivocation before the regime of absolutism, and a tactical surrender to the perspective technology focused on the sovereign only in order to subvert it.
started to take actions against the reform promised by presidential candidate François Hollande and the proposed bill legalizing homosexual marriage. The homophobic movement’s name – ‘la Manif pour tous’ (protest for all) – sounds like a bad echo of the bill, ‘le mariage pour tous’ (marriage for all), which was framed within the logic of republican universalism. Rengaine thus contributes to the sociopolitical cause seeking the recognition of ‘all’ love relationships as equal. Paths to existence: Djaïdani’s Rengaine 85 ‘The path of the righteous’: Dorcy’s story, or
‘Welsh roots’, the second chapter of Free Will , the passive aggression of the creaturely voice that answers power back with the delinquent alterity of such a bad echo is found to be embodied in Shakespeare’s dependent relations with his own Tudor overlords, the vice-regal Herbert dynasty whose ‘British’ imperial mythology his plays appear to rehearse. Turning the postcolonial cliché of Celtic
groundlings’ – ‘I hope we have reformed that indifferently with us, sir’ – cues the ‘unworthy antics’ of their eventual court appearance, which, far from abiding by Hamlet’s order for ‘temperance’, ‘smoothness’, ‘modesty’ and ‘discretion’, is its opposite: ‘miching malecho ’, or bad echo , with ‘inexplicable dumb-shows’, and such a ‘whirlwind of
over by meaning’. 34 Later, when Iago parrots Othello it therefore sounds ‘As if there were some monster’ of intention in the repetition [ Othello, 3,3,111 ]; and Hamlet will decry bad timing in ‘The Mousetrap’ as a ‘ malecho ’ [ Hamlet, 3,2,124 ] or deliberate bad echo. So in his first Globe text it is as if Shakespeare found in the accidental errancy of the ‘replication of your sounds’ the cue