Literature and Politics

Shakespeare’s King John contains a disproportionate number of ‘hands’ and ‘tongues’;  this paper is an examination of the relationship between sovereign power, speech and instrumentality in Shakespeare’s King John, through the play’s uses of ‘hands’ and ‘tongues’.

I will examine the particular crises in the functioning and representation of monarchy in King John – impossibly divided loyalties, the failures of oath-taking, the monarch’s refusal of responsibility for his own actions, challenges to the absolute authority of the monarch. These crises will not be seen, though, as anomalies in the functioning of sovereign power, but as sustaining sovereignty’s particular political relations, claiming agency and lack of agency at one and the same time. Conceiving of the politics of sovereignty through tongues and hands – slippery members that can be disavowed or assigned contrary functions – Shakespeare’s play anticipates the disembodied instrumentality of the Hobbesian sovereign, set adrift from any claims to metaphysical justification for its authority. Instead, the authority of the sovereign rests on the capacity for its voice to be heard and its will enacted, as well as an ability to disown any action that is taken on its behalf, should it choose to do so.

With its focus on the human body, this play allows us to see what is at stake in the arrival of the Hobbesian mechanics of sovereignty. In the context of the work of both Giorgio Agamben and the later work of Michel Foucault on biopolitics, this paper will argue for King John as a play which confronts the deadlock of sovereign authority, in particular sovereignty’s simultaneous claims to the efficacy of its own voice and a capacity to break its own oaths, and also to sovereignty’s simultaneous assumption and disavowal of responsibility for the lives of subjects.