Literature and Politics

Richard II does not conform to Hegel’s general picture of Shakespeare as a romantic. Like the Greek tragedies Hegel discusses, Richard II involves a conflict between two objective principles of political life (where Hegel detects romanticism in Shakespeare is in the conflicts between subjectivity and objectivity, as in the conflict between interiority and action in Hamlet and the conflict between desire and family authority in Romeo and Juliet). The conflict in Richard II is between the absolute as a legitimating principle of the body politic (Richard’s divine right) and the rights of subjects. Is it a tragic conflict because the two are irreconcilable? Was the subsequent War of the Roses proof of their irreconcilability? Richard has often been portrayed as imprudent and poetic (Pater, Yeats), but his imprudence and poetry are no less pragmatic in their way than the hard-headedness of his opponent, Henry IV: this is because the seeming unworldliness of his speech and actions has the political task of testifying to the absolute and ensuring its place in the foundation of political life (it is not his business to be more “sensible“). Richard’s dilemma is that as sovereign he is meant to stand outside the laws, norms and customs while nonetheless being expected to conduct himself with moderation. This contradiction of a contained absolute is a feature of Western sovereignty and a possible reason for the various attempts in the modern period at reconfiguring it without an embodying individual.

James Phillips is an ARC Australian Research Fellow in the School of History and Philosophy at the University of New South Wales.  He is the author of Heidegger’s Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005) and The Equivocation of Reason: Kleist Reading Kant (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007) and the editor of Cinematic Thinking: Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008).