“With mine own tears I wash away my balm”: The King’s two bodies in Shakespeare’s Richard II and King Lear.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to delineate the representation of kingship in Tudor and Stuart England and its articulation in Shakespeare's political drama, through the examples of Richard II (1599) and King Lear (1606), two illustrative plays of the respective eras. Conceived of as two-bodied, the sovereign is, from early medieval 1 On Edward the Confessor's healing powers, in England and in Normandy, see Frank Barlow ed.,