For I must nothing be: Kings, Idols, and the Double-Body

of the Sign in Early Modern England

Pat r i ci a Canni ng
Abstract
The importance of the word in sixteenth century theology cannot be
overestimated in both its literal and literary manifestations. As the
incarnation of divinity, it is given form and material substance through
scripture. From a Reformed perspective, this presents a theological
anomaly: God is both form (word) and meaning (Word). As a duplicated
representation of divinity encoding both nominal and intrinsic properties
I propose that the W/word can be read idolatrously. This article considers
the implications of such a reading in the theological arena of early modern
England. It focuses on the ways in which a theory of duplicated
representation, or what I call, the double-body of the sign, strengthens
while it also problematises early modern conceptions of authority. To
date, few scholars have examined and debated these ideas through a
stylistic framework using contemporary linguistic models. Focusing on
the unstable signification that underpins monarchical and divine authority,
I offer an analysis of William Shakespeares Richard II which aims to
address this critical lacuna. Reading Foucault and Kantorowicz, for
example, alongside Fauconnier and Turner, I pay particular attention to
the ways in which the relationship or bond of resemblance between
signifier and signified animates the space in which tension, contradiction,
and ultimately, schism can operate to disrupt the process of signification.
It is this space within which representation can both exploit and be
exploited politically, religiously, and culturally, having the power to
destabilise monarchical authority and more devastatingly, the foundations
of the Reformed argument.
Critical Survey Volume 24, Number 3, 2012: 122
doi: 10.3167/cs.2012.240301 ISSN 00111570 (Print), ISSN 17522293 (Online)
2 Critical Survey, Volume 24, Number 3
Introduction
Early modern English theology was beset by problems of
representation governing worship and allegiance. The logocentric
concept of the word in Reformed theology frequently stood in
opposition to its Catholic-centred counterpart, the image. Based on
Aristotelian logic,
1
Reformers believed the worship of images and
material objects to be an idolatrous practice principally because such
acts substituted the (material) form for the (spiritual) entity it
represented. As David Hawkes has observed (2001, 53), this
effectively made the material sign, in teleological terms, both the
means and the end. For the early modern Catholic, however, images
both instructed and inflected divine meditation. Material objects
could stand for the entities they signified figuring metonymically as
physical representations of an invisible God. In contradistinction, for
Reformers, the Word was accessible only through the word of
scripture. As the sole incarnation of divinity it superseded all other
forms of divine representation. Yet, conceiving of the Word
simultaneously as both Christ and as a scriptural (material) object
entails a teleological paradox that, in accordance with the Protestant
polemic, also gives rise to idolatry. Therefore, as a spiritual and
material entity Word and word the Protestant representation of
Christ generates a configuration that I will call the double-body of the
sign the W/word that mirrored what Reformers considered was
the idolatrous because doubled signification of Catholic idols.
In general terms, the double-body of the sign focuses on the
dualistic function of representation impelled by the relationship
between signifier and signified. Put simply, the signifier has
(primarily) a denotative function while the signified operates
connotatively as the concept to which the signifier refers. I propose
that the unity of the double-body of the sign derives from conceptually
integrating, or blending, form and meaning. In Robert Weimanns
terms,
2
the wholeness of the sign involves complete continuity or
rather, the ignoring of discontinuity between what materially
signifies and what is spiritually signified by it (1996, 72). This article
develops Weimanns contention in the context of early modern
debates on idolatry and representation by looking more closely at how
this semiotic wholeness is achieved and its wider religious and
political implications. In so doing it adopts an integrated literary-
linguistic methodological approach that attends to the semiotic
Kings, Idols, and the Double-Body of the Sign in Early Modern England 3
tensions, the continuities and discontinuities engendered by the
wholeness of the sign, and explores how these discordances can be
cognitively, if not always ideologically, reconciled. Consequently, it
focuses on the relationship between signifier and signified informed
by my reading of Michel Foucault
3
which, I argue, generates a site of
contestation between conceptions of reality and representation, form
and content, materiality and immateriality in the theological, political,
and cultural arena of early modern England.
Situating the Sign
According to Foucault, representation is constituted through a process
of signification and resemblance. In his groundbreaking study The
Order of Things, Foucault argues that a sign must manifest [] the
relation that links it to what it signifies, so that not only must it
represent, but that representation, in turn, must also be represented
within it (2002, 71). Based on a theory of resemblance, for Foucault
the sign is predicated upon analogy and similarity. Foucault proposes
a theory of four similitudes that link the marks to the things
designated by them (47). The first of these similitudes, convenientia,
denotes the adjacency of places, things which come sufficiently
close to one another to be in juxtaposition (20). It is in the hinge
between these adjacent things that a resemblance appears [] that
becomes double as soon as one attempts to unravel it. Foucaults
second similitude, emulatio, a sort of convenience that has been
freed from the law of place provides the medium through which the
links of the chain, no longer connected are nonetheless enabled to
imitate each other without connection or proximity, much like a
mirrored reflection (2122). Analogy, the third similitude, involves
resemblances of relations, thus superimpos[ing] convenientia and
aemulatio: Its power is immense for the similitudes of which it
treats are not the visible, substantial ones between things themselves;
they need only be the more subtle resemblances of relations.
Disencumbered thus, it can extend, from a single given point, to an
endless number of relationships (24). Simultaneously uniting and
transcending the physical, the proximal and the abstract, Foucault
suggestively offers here a contentious way of conceiving of the
political and theological relationship between thing and concept in the
context of the Reformation. Reading Foucault alongside John Calvin,
4 Critical Survey, Volume 24, Number 3
for instance, offers insights into the function and salience of
resemblance in early modern theology. As I argue here, the Reformed
conception of the W/word, given its literal and literary properties,
made the issue of resemblance and representation in early modern
England a mutually problematic and potentially explosive one.
One such example of this semiotic problematic is typified in the
debate over the issue of transubstantiation. Reformed theology,
espoused principally by Luther and Calvin, offers a contrary
interpretation of the Catholic doctrine of the true presence; that is,
the change in substance of the sacramental wafer into the body of
Christ. Catholics believed that the priest, through divinely appointed
efficacy, literally transforms the wafer into the body of Christ.
Contrarily, Calvin and Calvinists believed the relationship between the
two to be one of representation and not simultaneity. Calvin
4
writes,
The sacred mystery of the Supper consists of two things; the corporeal
signs, which, thrust before our eyes, represent to us the invisible things
according to the feebleness of our capacity; and the spiritual truth,
which is at the same time figured and exhibited by the symbols
themselves (Institutes, IV.xvii.1.1). Highlighting the semiotic basis
upon which the theological argument is based, Christopher Elwood
(1997, 78) argues that Calvin and Calvinists sought a reorientation
of the meaning of the Eucharist, a process that reinterpret[ed] what is
involved in the process of signification or semiosis. Calvins
reorientation can be synthesised with a Foucauldian logic of
representation in that it concords with the latters view on the
representative capacity of signs; recall Foucault, [a sign] must
manifest [] the relation that links it to what it signifies (2002, 71).
As such, manifesting form and content, the sacrament becomes both a
sign and an end in itself, efficacious precisely because it simultaneously
represents and contains that which is represented by it.
The efficacy of such signs is a manifestation of the teleological
paradox that underpins Reformed conceptions of idolatry. Encoding
both nominal and intrinsic value, such duplicated representations
literally embody what are often arguably clashing signifying frames.
I want to argue that this particular aspect of signification is part of a
more general semiotic logic that guides our understanding of dynamic
double-bodied configurations such as the W/word, which
necessitate the construction and mapping of networks of meaning in
order to cohere conceptually and ideologically. Put simply, such signs
(whether the sacramental wafer or the lexical construction W/word)
Kings, Idols, and the Double-Body of the Sign in Early Modern England 5
act metonymically as signifying triggers that invoke a more complex
set of mental processes that structure and integrate information in
order to make sense. Conceptual Integration Theory, a cognitive
stylistic model first developed by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier
5

and developed by, amongst others, Barbara Dancygier,
6
provides the
theoretical framework through which this coherence is achieved.
Making Sense: Blending Form and Content
In brief, Conceptual Integration Theory, or blending, aptly
demonstrates the integral role of cognition in the generation and
comprehension of meaning. As Fauconnier puts it, thought and
language [] depend among other things on our capacity to
manipulate webs of mappings between mental spaces (2002, 149).
Mental spaces are defined by Fauconnier and Turner as small
conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of
local understanding and action (2002, 40) and by Barbara Dancygier
as temporary cognitive structures prompted by the use of linguistic
forms (2006, 5). Fauconnier proposes that blending operates on two
Input mental spaces to yield a third space, the blend. The blend
inherits partial structure from the input spaces and has emergent
structure of its own (149). Applying this model to the double-bodied
concept of the W/word, then, involves the projection of information
from two distinct mental spaces into a third space, the blend as can
be seen diagrammatically below in Figure 1.
Input 1 Input 2
Blended space
Word Word
W/word
Spiritual entity Material thing
Figure 1 The W/word blend
6 Critical Survey, Volume 24, Number 3
Input 1, the Word space, contains intrinsic properties; that is,
according to Reformed logic the Word is Christ. Input 2, the word
space, contains the nominal or formal properties in that it is the
medium through which Christ is represented. As the two black arrows
demonstrate, these elements are projected into the blended space
where they coalesce. In other words, integration occurs within the
new, dynamic third space, yielding a meaning that is not directly
available from either input. More importantly, this blended
information can project backwards to the two input spaces, creating
new and theologically contentious ways of conceiving of the
information contained therein.
In addition to this salient information, certain vital relations
(Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 101) connect information within and
across the input spaces that also participate in the blend, two of which
are identity (indicated by the broken lines) and representation
(indicated by the dotted lines).
7
These relations or counterpart
mappings are sustained across the inputs and compressed in the
blended space.
To return briefly to Foucault, this blended network is predicated on
resemblance; that is, the compression of the vital relations of identity
and representation generates a similitude between form and meaning
that permits the blended configuration to operate independently.
Foucault writes:
The [] arrangement of signs [] requires the formal domain of marks,
the content indicated by them, and the similitudes that link the marks to
the things designated by them; but since resemblance is the form of the
signs as well as their content, the three distinct elements of this articulation
are resolved into a single form (2002, 467, my italics).
These distinct elements the input spaces in blending terms are
conceptually and doctrinally reconciled through their emergence as a
single form via a blended network in the first instance, and through
Calvins integration of corporeal things and spiritual truth in the
second.
However, the conceptual coherence of Calvins semiotic
reorientation to which I referred earlier does not automatically entail
ideological coherence: if idolatry was, in Hawkes terms, a disruption
of natural teleology and thus a fetishism of the sign (2001, 53), then
the duplicated representation of form and content entailed by the
blended configuration W/word, tacitly engages Reformers in the
Kings, Idols, and the Double-Body of the Sign in Early Modern England 7
same fetishistic consciousness as idolaters. More crucially, the divine
Word, through its dual signification as both form and matter, may
figure analogously with idols. It follows, therefore, that iconoclastic
invectives risk losing their ideological credence and, by extension,
their political force.
Gods and Kings: Reflections of the Double-Body
I now want to turn to the political implications of the double-body of
the sign and its literal embodiment by looking at the ways in which
the theological assumptions outlined above are played out in dramatic
representation. Ernst Kantorowicz
8
has skillfully dealt with the
concept of the monarchical double-body; that is, the king as both a
human body and a figurative body. Developing Kantorowiczs
(1957) distinction, I propose that the kings two bodies,
diagrammatically represented below in Figure 2, conceptually and
semiotically parallel the double-body of divinity outlined above.
The King metonymically signifies the office of monarch
representing order and authority, whilst as king he is the human
vehicle in which the nominal signifier and the living incarnation or
referent coexists. The (metonymic) relations role and value
connect information in both input spaces, so that the figurative King
is conceptually linked to the physical king through the respective
identifying elements title and person. Not only is this cross-space
Input 1 Input 2
King king
K/king
Figurative
Body
Human
Body
blend
Key of vital relations:
Representation
Identity
Role
Value
Figure 2 The K/king blend
8 Critical Survey, Volume 24, Number 3
mapping imported to the blend, it is also compressed into uniqueness,
as can be seen by the fused lines. Similarly, the contiguous relations
of identity and representation that link the person of the king to the
sign King are also compressed into uniqueness. These compressions
(of role and value and identity and representation) ultimately yield the
K/king formulation.
The above diagrams (Figures 1 and 2) enable us to read historically
the analogy between the monarch and the divine in early modern
England. Religious and political texts of the period perpetuated a
sacral link between the divine and the earthly ruler that was ratified
in monarchical writings. Being both form and matter the K/king
was widely believed to have been divinely instituted, cast as James I
and VI
9
would have it, in the trew paterne of Diuinitie (Somerville
1994, 64). Cultivating a relationship of proximity and resemblance
between the earthly and divine ruler, as many treatises did, redirected
the seemingly paradoxical focus of the Reformed invective, rendering
it untenable. If, as Reformers believed, idolatry was the teleological
disruption of signs that in functioning as both means and end
necessarily entailed the fragmentation of divinity, then the monarch,
too, as an embodiment of signifier and referent, could be viewed
idolatrously.
Extending the referential range of the sign by blending its figurative
and literal significations in this way has a number of theological and
political implications. If power and authority are attached to the sign
itself, then that power is transferred to the thing designated by it.
Indeed, Calvin attests to this semiotic multiplicity in his biblical
exegesis. Speaking of the Holy Spirits incarnation as a dove, he
writes that:
Humanly devised symbols, being images of things absent rather than
marks of things present (which they very often even falsely represent),
are still sometimes graced with the titles of those things. Similarly, with
much greater reason, those things ordained by God borrow the names of
those things of which they always bear a definite and not misleading
signification, and have the reality joined with them. So great, therefore,
is their similarity and closeness that transition from one to the other is
easy (IV.xxvii.21, my italics).
Translating this logic into political terms, the title King (as opposed
to some inherent king-ness) carries with it the authority and
responsibility of office, which is then bestowed upon the person who
Kings, Idols, and the Double-Body of the Sign in Early Modern England 9
holds that title. Consequently, the natural telos of the sign is reversed,
as it is the signifier itself which creates the resemblance between it
and its signified, rather than to speak of some bond of resemblance
antecedently existing.
10
As such, the K/king figures holistically as a
unique entity in which the self merges with the sign of the self. The
political implications of this find expression in William Shakespeares
Richard II, in which Richards reluctance to conceive of himself as
being other than the figurative King generates, among other things,
a kind of nominal idolatry. Whether attributable to reluctance or
inability, Richards refusal to acknowledge an analogical (and
metonymic) relationship between the figurative and literal king makes
his loss of the signifier King at the close of the play as much of a
human tragedy as it is a political one.
Shakespeare
11
first introduces us to the political ramifications of
resemblance when his protagonist, Richard, faces his successor,
Bolingbroke, and gives physical form to the double-body of the king.
Adopting the role of pseudo-iconoclast, Richard condemns the
irreverence of false worship as he addresses the kneeling Bolingbroke:
RICHARD: Fair cousin, you debase your princely knee
To make the base earth proud with kissing it.
Me rather had my heart might feel your love
Than my unpleased eye see your courtesy (III.iii.188191).
As soon-to-be deposed king, Richard adds a third body to this literal
and figurative mirror image, that of monarchical subject, or worse
still, condemned man. Inverting power structures, Richards
resignation and status as condemned man is impelled by his subjects.
Yet, condemned man and king are not so far removed. Rather, they
occupy in the dramatic space of the play a continuous unbroken chain
of resemblance, markedly reducing the gulf between sovereign and
subject proposed by Foucault in Discipline and Punish.
12
He states:
At the opposite pole [to the king] one might imagine placing the body of
the condemned man; he, too, has his legal status; he gives rise to his own
ceremonial and he calls forth a whole theoretical discourse, not in order
to ground the surplus power possessed by the person of the sovereign,
but in order to code the lack of power with which those subjected to
punishment are marked. In the darkest region of the political field the
condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the
king (29).
10 Critical Survey, Volume 24, Number 3
However, in Shakespeares play, this chain of resemblance overlaps.
Richard, in the following speech, embodies rather than polarises
Foucaults inverted figure, being both condemned man (traitor)
and monarch:
RICHARD: Nay, if I turn mine eyes upon myself,
I find myself a traitor with the rest;
For I have given here my souls consent
Tundeck the pompous body of a king (IV.i.237240, my italics).
This multi-layered (self-)representation of Richard extends the chain
of emulation further, so that, evoking Calvins philosophy, the name
[is] transferred from something higher to something lower.
Embodying both referents, Richards status as both King and
condemned man splits not only the sign but the person represented by
it. Thus, Richard effectively causes his own political death through a
self-directed semiotic schizophrenia that has wider implications for
the theological doctrine that secured his subjects unfaltering belief,
and by extension, imbued him with Christological power in the first
place.
The dramaturgy of this scene is central to David Kastans
13
analysis.
He writes: Richard comes to see that in agreeing to make his political
subjection the subject of his dramatizing, he has become complicit in
the political act (1986, 472). Literally playing on the relations of
analogy and disanalogy, Richard conceives of himself as a traitor
who has betrayed a king. At the same time, he is the king who has
been betrayed. As Travis Bogard
14
observes: He [Richard] is a
divided being, a king, the anointed of God, but also a man, frail and
doomed in his frailty. Indeed the opinion is repeatedly advanced that
Richard is his own Judas, the man betraying the king (1955, 199).
Scott McMillin
15
argues that it is in the deposition scene that Richard
asserts a new self, one that is grounded in negativity (for I must
nothing be) (1984, 44). While I agree with both Bogard and
McMillin, that Richard is indeed a divided being who attempts to
create a new self, my own stylistic analysis attempts to go further
than these previous studies by demonstrating how such duplications
can be cognitively construed and reconciled.
The schizophrenic split noted above is achieved through the use of
the conditional if: Richard proposes a counterfactual reality in
which he is able to look upon himself as two separate identities, two
actors in his own staged world. Thus, I argue, Richard can be
Kings, Idols, and the Double-Body of the Sign in Early Modern England 11
understood separately and simultaneously through a counterfactual
blend informed by two input spaces, one in which Richard is a traitor
and one in which he is king.
16
These mental spaces are connected by
the vital relation of identity. The inputs project into a counterfactual
blend, accounting for the contradictory reality of Richard being two
separate people.
17
Within the counterfactual space, Richard the traitor
is able to undeck the body of a king. The new reality requires not
only the compression of certain relations but also the decompression
of others, as can be seen in Figure 3 below.
Richard, through his resignation of the crown, causes himself to
become a traitor, thus compressing the relations of cause/effect in
the blended space in which he is both. In the inputs, the relation of
identity links the traitor and the king given that Richard is the
referent in each input. However, both concepts traitor and king
are disanalogous in that there is no shared topology between them.
Therefore, across the inputs, what Fauconnier and Turner (2002, 92
93) term outer space relations, in this case, the relation of
disanalogy, is compressed in the counterfactual blended space into
the inner space relation of analogy. Crucially, this compression,
along with that of identity, is projected back to the input spaces, as
can be seen from the direction of the black arrows.
By undecking himself, Richard the king is unavoidably
responsible for resigning not only the name of king, but his sole
kingly identity, without which, he later admits, he is nothing: I
have no name, no title [] And know not now what name to call
Input 1 Input 2
Richard
Richard
Richard
as traitor as king
blend
Representation
Identity
Role
Value
==== Cause/efect
====
Key of vital relations:
Figure 3 The traitor/king blend (B2)
12 Critical Survey, Volume 24, Number 3
myself! (IV.i.245249). He attempts to reconcile this anomaly by
reconfiguring kingship as a property rather than a definitive identity:
thus, he becomes in the blend, a rather than the king. In so doing,
he decompresses his identity further (from the realm of the specific to
the general) in a bid to avoid disintegration into nothingness at the
loss of the name-identity king.
18
The point of the blend, then, is that
Richard cannot conceive of the reality that draws a distinction between
inherent king-ness and the man that holds the office of king in
other words, the duality or double-body of kingship. For him, the role
and the person are one and the same. Ultimately, then, he must
construct an unrealisable counterfactual reality in which he is at the
outset two people, condemned traitor and king. Crucially, it is
only in Richards counterfactual reality that he is able to acknowledge
the separateness of the signifier from the signified.
As traitor, Richard is a condemned man. As he is also a monarch,
he singularly represents, in Foucauldian terms, the symmetrical
inverted figure of the king. Becoming his own mirror image, Richard
plays with the double-body of the king. As condemned ex-king and
newly formed subject he inverts rather than deflects monarchical
power. Reflecting the power of the subjects who (with him) wrought
his fall, he contemplates the political implications of Bolingbrokes
address to him as fair cousin, stating:
RICHARD: Fair cousin? I am greater than a king;
For when I was a king my flatterers
Were then but subjects; being now a subject
I have a king here to my flatterer.
Being so great I have no need to beg (IV.i.295299).
The chiastic construction divided by the semicolon (in line 297)
literalises the mirroring noted above two poles converge producing
a superimposition, a kind of hybridised subject/king. As his own
inversion Richard kaleidoscopically embodies the subdivision of
power (just as the early modern idol infinitely subdivided the power
of God) that through resemblance subdivides to infinity. The danger,
here, is that as a composite of reflections that incorporate subject,
king, and God, any worship offered to the figure of the king is also
implicitly directed to the subject, arguably making subjects analogous
to kings.
Kings, Idols, and the Double-Body of the Sign in Early Modern England 13
Double or Nothing: Distinguishing Form
Blurring the distinctions between prototype and copy creates a
plethora of shadows, resemblances or simulacra that through
emulation are accorded their own autonomous existence. As Jean
Baudrillard
19
puts it:
By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor
that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all
referentials [] It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication,
nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for
the real (1994, 2).
I will now argue that, in Richard II, these processes are seen more
extremely. For instance, substituting the signs of the real for the
real, a distinctly Calvinist line, is exactly what motivates Richard to
focus simultaneously on the intrinsic and nominal value of the
signifier king. As I suggested earlier, it could be argued that the sign
itself creates the resemblance between signifier and signified, rather
than to speak of some bond of resemblance (in its literal and figurative
forms) antecedently existing. It is perhaps this focus on the sign, the
name of king that causes Richard to compress the relations of role
and identity thus, collapsing the double-body into a singular form.
As Samuel Weingarten
20
observes: symbols, especially verbal
symbols, are more important to him [Richard] than the things for
which they stand (1966, 536). As he is about to be deposed, Richard
clings to the name of king as he talks of himself in the third person:
Must he lose the name of king? A Gods name, let it go (III.iii.144
145). Later, desperate to maintain title or be king of something,
Richard holds on to an abstraction in the form of his griefs. In
response to Bolingbrokes statement, I thought you had been willing
to resign, Richard replies somewhat ambiguously: My crown I am,
but still my griefs are mine. / You may my glories and my state
depose, / But not my griefs; still am I king of those (IV.i.180183).
When considered alongside Bushys earlier exposition of the nature
of grief, quoted below, Richards statement is strangely prophetic:
BUSHY: Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows
Which shows like grief itself but is not so.
For sorrows eye, glazed with blinding tears,
Divides one thing entire to many objects
Like perspectives, which, rightly gazed upon,
14 Critical Survey, Volume 24, Number 3
Show nothing but confusion; eyed awry,
Distinguish form (II.ii.1420, my italics).
Richard is willing to resign his crown, but this token does not in
itself constitute kingship. He cannot resign his kingship because it is
who he is: without the name of king he has, and more importantly, is
nothing. Therefore, for him, removing the trappings of monarchy (the
visible things) does not entirely deprive him of his kingly status.
Indeed, by clinging to the remnants of his authoritative power, albeit
over griefs still am I king of those Richard attempts to assert
some inherent king-ness. However, the properties of each grief are
merely a multitude of shadows that even the queen cannot name:
what it is that is not yet known what. / I cannot name: tis nameless
woe, I wot (II.ii.3940). The act of losing his name, then, places
Richard alongside other nameless phenomena, his griefs or
pseudo-subjects. Occupying a transitional shadowy position, he is
caught between I and nothing. Richard realises this when he says:
why am I sent for to a king / Before I have shook off the regal
thoughts / Wherewith I reignd? (IV.i.162164, my italics). Clinging
to shapes without substance, as lord only of his griefs and mere
thoughts, Richard effectively reigns over a plurality of no things.
A king cannot be a king if he is king of nothing.
Richard as King, therefore, occupies a paradoxical position of
prototypical shadow, which manifests itself most clearly in the mirror
scene in Act Four, Scene One. Staring at his reflection in the glass,
Richard remarks: A brittle glory shineth in this face. / As brittle as
the glory is the face (277278). The latter clause unites the concepts
glory and face through the property brittleness. That they are
reconfigured as one and the same thing is interesting: given Richards
inability to sever the name of King from the person of the king it is
no surprise to find that his face and the glory of kingship are
inextricable (the face being considered as metonymically standing for
the entire person). Moreover, Richard aligns his name with kingly
glory in Act Three, Scene Two when he remarks, Is not the Kings
name forty thousand names? / Arm, arm, my name! A puny subject
strikes / At thy great glory (8183). Thus, Richards remark, you
may my glories and my state depose (IV.i.182) is rather ominous
because stripping him of the glories of monarchy simultaneously
strips him of his very identity.
Contemplating the transience both of the reflection and the real,
and of the worship (the glory) and the object of that worship (his
Kings, Idols, and the Double-Body of the Sign in Early Modern England 15
face), Richard, in a final effort to unite the nominal and the real,
shatters the relation of resemblance between them the mirror.
21

Unfortunately, for Richard, this multiplies the already reflected
reflections, creating an infinite chain of emulation: there it is, cracked
in an hundred shivers. Mark [] how soon my sorrow hath destroyed
my face (IV.i.279281). Bolingbrokes reply, the shadow of your
sorrow hath destroyed / The shadow of your face (IV.i.280283),
wonderfully encapsulates the power of resemblance. Like a shadow
without form, emulation provides the means of transcending place it
is the justification for analogy. Yet it is precisely because the reality
is very different that Richard creates a counterfactual world in which
the unseen griefs of which he is still king cast their own shadow
in the form of visible external manners, ultimately reversing the real
and the non-real. Responding to Bolingbrokes reply, Richard says:
RICHARD: The shadow of my sorrow! Ha! Lets see.
Tis very true, my grief lies all within;
And these external manners of laments
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief
That swells with silence in the torturd soul.
There lies the substance (IV.i.284289, my italics).
Unable to acknowledge any separation of the K/kings double-body,
Richard internalises all that monarchy means, so that what is real is
the unseen. Richard reverses the iconoclastic invective by tacitly
advocating an inherently Catholic position in which substance is
intangible, immaterial. Moreover, this substance (of Richards
grief) is itself kaleidoscopically emulative: consider Bushys
interpretation of the self-generating nature of griefs to the queen in
Act Two, Scene Two, each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows
/ Which shows like grief itself but is not so (1415). In Richards
counterfactual inverted world, shadows simply cast more shadows.
Thus, his visible sorrow, like his face and his subjects, are mere
projections or images lost in a world of aemulatio wherein the real
and the resemblance, complicated by the omnipotence of simulacra,
are difficult, if not impossible to discern.
Confounding this already complex world of shadows and reflections
is its analogical position alongside the world of signs. Internalising
the double-body of the king, Richard collapses his status as transitory
referent and nominal signifier into a single form. Reversing
Aristotelian teleology, Richard moves from the signified to the
16 Critical Survey, Volume 24, Number 3
signifier through his interrogative in Act Three, Scene Two, Is not
the Kings name forty thousand names?
22
For Richard, the signified,
his corporeality, is insignificant. In his world, the signifier is
everything. Kingship, therefore, is subsumed within the sign of
King. Both role and title constitute Richards unique identity; his
great glory is his name. As Theodore Spencer
23
puts it: the
traditional glorifications of his position have become the essence of
his being, and he lives in an unreal world in which he thinks of these
glorifications as the only reality (1961, 74). To that end, it is not the
signified that Richard wants to arm but the sign itself. Without the
title of King Richard cannot exist, literally becoming nothing: I
have no name, no title [] And know not now what name to call
myself! (IV.i.245249). For Richard, relinquishing his name
equates to the loss of subjectivity nothing is all that remains
because for him nothing is all there is.
24
It is perhaps Richards obsession with becoming nothing that best
underscores the God/monarch analogy which most radically
undermines the prototypicality of God. Nothing in sixteenth century
England was pronounced noting when spoken aloud, as it would
have been in the theatre. Such a pronunciation invokes the synonymous
term text. I would argue that Richards gradual transformation into
nothing can be understood semiotically; Richard figures as a
textual entity. His statements about nothing, therefore, assume a
much greater significance when considered alongside configurations
of God-as-text, or the Word. Richard conceives of himself as
nothing when he responds to Bolingbrokes question, Are you
contented to resign the crown? with, Ay, no; no, ay; for I must
nothing be (IV.i.9091, my italics). The clash of (mirror) image and
word in Richards response is engendered by the chiastic construction
of ay, no; no, ay. This blend of the textual and imagistic undermines
the Reformed theological argument as it plays on the early modern
critique of idolatry. The word/image dichotomy is presented as an
emblematic mirror, a picture derived from words so that both are put
on display. As McMillin puts it: His answer managed to set the word
against the word in a perfect stalemate of signifiers. It was a balance
of I against nothing and of yes against no (1984, 52). I and
nothing are held in relation: Richards rejection of the double-body
of the K/king compresses both into Richard, so that, as McMillin
states with perhaps more irony than he intends, at the heart of loss
there is nothing for the eye to see, and I and no are one (52, my
Kings, Idols, and the Double-Body of the Sign in Early Modern England 17
italics). Cognisant of the caution offered by Corinthians 8.4 (An idol
is nothing in the world), it is politically and theologically devastating
that what the world sees when they look at Richard is, indeed,
nothing.
The puns on ay/I and nothing/noting create an-other textual
authority other, that is, than Christ.
25
Recalling the divinely imbued
status of the king, Richard, in order to signify, must become text, a
nominal entity. Richard ensures his own semiotic transformation
when he is asked to read a paper while waiting on the mirror in Act
Four, Scene One; Ill read enough / When I do see the very book
indeed / Where all my sins are writ, and thats myself (IV.i.263265,
my italics). This is doubly significant. Firstly, Richard has changed
form, engaging in a kind of transubstantiation in reverse. Becoming
a book, he has inverted the doctrine of the Word-made-flesh: as a
mirror image of God, he is the Flesh-made-Word. Secondly, this is
immediately followed by the presentation of a mirror in which
Richard sees his newly reconfigured textual self. Gazing upon himself
in this way creates an object from the subject. The problem with this
in the context of the plays production is that exposing the K/king-as-
text to the (male) gaze implicates, by analogy, the W/word rendering
both as idolatrous creations. Ultimately, Richard not only literalises
the double-body of the word, but literally becomes the word-as-
image.
Complicating Richards already problematic reconfiguration into
text is the kingsubject transformation to which I referred earlier.
Aligning subjects with kings as Richard does in his deposition, creates
an-other concentric circle of resemblance that also rivals God-as-
text. Richards final contemplation of himself as nothing not only
reinforces his position as text, but also tacitly implies that of others,
opening up the unbroken line of resemblance once again:
RICHARD: I am unkinged by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing. But whateer I be,
Nor I, nor any man that but man is,
With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased
With being nothing (V.v.3741, my italics).
Unkinged and nameless, Richard is at one and the same time I and
nothing. Perhaps acknowledging his fading status as prototypical
name, the properties of which are shared by forty thousand,
Richard is simultaneously investing any man with the same status
18 Critical Survey, Volume 24, Number 3
as both himself and God a position of nothing/noting, or text.
The implication of this subdivision of power is akin to the idolatrous
practice of false worship the dilution of divinity through reproduction
and the objectification of God-as-text. Furthermore, it offers an
alternative way of reading the Platonic conception of the relationship
between prototype and image (whereby the latter participates in the
former), by suggesting that the prototype God is contained within
the image. As such, God is not as Baudrillard conceives of him,
nothing more than his own simulacrum (1994, 4), but rather, as
simulacrum, God is little more than nothing.
Ironically, and perhaps most alarmingly, this reversal of prototype
and image can be espoused through an examination of the etymology
of the word idol. As Hawkes has already noted, the word idol or
eidolon refers to the false mental image that the idolator imposes
upon the material icon (2001, 58). In the Septuagint, the Greek
version of the Hebrew Bible, eidolon translates the Hebrew a ven,
which literally designates various forms of non-existence, the first
of which is nothing.
26
As a multiple signifier, nothing is
simultaneously idol and, through its phonetic transcription, noting
or word. The transformation, then, of the word-as-nothing/noting
into an image or idol entails the final inversion of the proper telos of
signs. Exposing the irony in St. Pauls Epistle to the Corinthians 8.4
(King Jamess Bible), we know that an idol is nothing in the world,
text has become a duplicated end in itself, figuratively and literally,
an idol (an idol is nothing). In a parallel of the Christ-as-Word
formulation, the King-as-W/word has been reconstituted as both
thing and no-thing. As a phantasmic shadow that is neither real
nor non-real, and through the reconfiguration as text, nothing throws
the antagonistic relationship between spirit and matter, word and
image, and prototype and copy into sharper focus more effectively
than nothing.
Conclusion
If idolatry is the worship of false idols or, in semiotic terms, empty
signs, then Richards conception of himself as nothing, with its
attendant etymological derivations, significantly undermines the
sacral analogy that James I and other political writers sought to
establish between earthly and heavenly rulers. The fragmentation of
Kings, Idols, and the Double-Body of the Sign in Early Modern England 19
divinity further complicates this analogy. Nowhere is this more
contentious than in the Reformed focus on Christ as the Word and His
incarnation through the words of scripture. Reformed doctrine negates
the intrinsic worth of any object of religious veneration. In essence,
this means that matter and spirit cannot coexist in an earthly
representation of Christ. To advocate a doctrine of Christ, then, that
generates its own double-body (the W/word), and one that participates
in the same processes of duplicated representation as the K/kings
double-body, inculcates a conception of both as fetishised signs.
Indeed, this is the framework within which I have analysed
Shakespeares play. I have shown that in its treatment of the circularity
of emulation between hierarchies, it inculcates the Foucauldian idea
of the world as linked together like a chain.
In political terms, the uncertainty and deep concern over Elizabeths
succession must have made the thematic preoccupations of these
plays seem less like theatrical escapism and more like plausible
stories. Extending the chain of emulation, and in so doing traversing
hierarchies would have significantly narrowed the gap between who
would and perhaps more worryingly, who could be monarch. Writing
and staging these plays at a time of political and monarchical
uncertainty both extends and foregrounds their own status as
duplicated representations. It is my view that they serve to undermine
early modern perceptions not only of monarchy but also of divine
omnipotence. At the same time, they unravel as they seek to redefine
boundaries between characters, roles, and more importantly, concepts.
In reconceiving signification in the ways in which I have outlined
through my exposition of the double-body of the sign, Shakespeares
play highlights the theological incongruities in iconoclastic Reformed
doctrine. Rather than merely establishing the world as linked together
like a chain, Protestants, I have argued, recreated the chain of being.
By imbuing signs with the very power they disavowed, they showed
that nothing was in fact something. In other words, my analysis of
Richard II exposes a teleological paradox that posits the sign as both
the means and the end the ultimate act of idolatry. Indeed, the kingly
figure in Shakespeares play is implicated in a web of idolatry and
semiotic fetishism. His double-body is itself reproducible as both
idol/king and ultimately, Christ-as-text.
Finally, I have shown that the tension surrounding the double-body
of the king parallels that of the sign itself: as a lexical item made up
of letters the sign is given physical form. In the context of an early
20 Critical Survey, Volume 24, Number 3
modern scriptural or logocentric epistemology the sign is also
inherently meaningful. Given its various semantic and pragmatic
applications, the sign both represents, and contains within it, each
representation. In other words, it can be construed in the same manner
as the king as both the self and the sign of the self. Having value
both in and of itself, the sign, I argue, issues forth as the single most
prolific idol of early modern England.
Notes
1. Scholars have previously drawn attention to the justification of iconoclasm on
Aristotelian grounds. For the influence of semiotics on exegesis, see especially Carlos Eire,
War Against The Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986); David Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry
and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 15801680 (New York: Palgrave, 2001);
Christopher Elwood, The Body Broken: The Calvinist Doctrine of the Eucharist and the
Symbolisation of Power in Sixteenth-Century France (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999); Michael OConnell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm, Anti-
Theatricalism, and the Image of the Elizabethan Theatre, English Literary History 52, 2
(1985), 279310.
2. Robert Weimann, Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse
(Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
3. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
(London and New York: Routledge, 2002).
4. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T Mc Neill, trans. Ford
Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960).
5. Gilles Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997); Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, Conceptual Integration and
Formal Expression, Metaphor and Symbol 10, 3 (1995), 183203; Fauconnier and Turner,
The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Minds Hidden Complexities (New York:
Basic Books, 2002).
6. Barbara Dancygier, What Can Blending Do for You?, Language and Literature
15, 1 (2006), 515; Patricia Canning, The Bodie and the Letters both: Blending the
Rules of Early Modern Religion, Language and Literature 17, 3 (2006), 187203.
7. Other key vital relations are Identity, Cause-Effect, Time, Space, Change, Part-
Whole, Role, Disanalogy, Property, Similarity, Category, Intentionality, and Uniqueness,
Fauconnier and Turner (2002), 101; see also 92111.
8. Ernst Kantorowicz, The Kings Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political
Theology (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957).
9. James VI and I, The Trew Law of Free Monarchies: Or The Reciprock And Mvtuall
Dvetie Betwixt A Free King, And His naturall Subjects, in King James VI and I: Political
Writings, ed. Johann P. Somerville (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,
1994).
Kings, Idols, and the Double-Body of the Sign in Early Modern England 21
10. The naturalness of this shared signification between kings and God is a feature
of many treatises and tracts. In addition to those referenced, Thomas Fuller asserts a natural
bond between divine and earthly ruler and writes of the divine investiture of the latter by the
former; in The Holy State he observes that the power of the king Is given him by God, who
alone hath the originall propriety thereof, and which Is derived unto him by a prescription
time out of mind in the Law of Nature, declared more especially in the Word of God.
11. All references to Richard II will be from The Norton Shakespeare, eds, Stephen
Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York and
London: W. W. Norton & Company Inc, 1997).
12. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan. (London: Penguin, 1991).
13. David Scott Kastan, Proud Majesty made a Subject: Shakespeare and the Spectacle
of Rule, Shakespeare Quarterly 3, 4 (1986), 45975.
14. Travis Bogard, Shakespeares Second Richard, PMLA 70, 1 (1955), 192209.
15. Scott McMillin, Shakespeares Richard II: Eyes of Sorrow, Eyes of Desire,
Shakespeare Quarterly 35, 1 (1984), 4052.
16. Developed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (1995; 1998; 2000; 2002)
Conceptual Integration Theory, or blending, describes meaning by specifying the nature
of operations on cognitive constructs called mental spaces, which, in Barbara Dancygiers
terms, are temporary cognitive structures prompted by the use of linguistic forms. In a
conceptual integration network, mental spaces act as input spaces from which we selectively
project properties or elements into a blended space.
17. Barbara Dancygier and Eve Sweester define counterfactuality as pertaining to
specific interpretations involving a construed contradiction with reality. Mental Spaces
in Grammar: Conditional Constructions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005),
58. Fauconnier and Turner state that counterfactuality is forced incompatibility between
spaces [] that involve some of the same people and the same events. Fauconnier and
Turner (2002), 230.
18. As Fauconnier and Turner state: integration and compression are one side of
the coin; disintegration and decompression are the other [] In principle, a conceptual
integration network contains its compressions and decompressions (2002), 119.
19. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor:
The University of Michigan Press, 1994).
20. Samuel Weingarten, The Name of King in Richard II, College English 27, 7
(1966), 53641.
21. Throughout his analysis of Richards double-body, Kantorowicz (1957) argues
against the fictional oneness (31) of this duality. For him, the splintering mirror means, or
is, the breaking apart of any possible duality. All those facets are reduced to one: to the banal
face and insignificant physis of a miserable man (40). At this point, my argument departs
from Kantorowiczs. I argue instead that Richard attempts albeit unsuccessfully to unite
the double-body of the king in the act of shattering the glass, as the mirror represents the
relation of resemblance that links them. Richard strives to effect a literal superimposition of
the nominal and the real, the Body politic and the Body natural, creating oneness. Without
this superimposed singularity Richard cannot possibly be.
22. Richard, here, invokes Calvins exegesis of the relationship between the church
and Christ. Calvin writes, as Christ suffered once in himself, so he now suffers every day
in his members; and the sufferings which the Father decreed and appointed for his body
22 Critical Survey, Volume 24, Number 3
are completed [in the church] (1958, Col. 1:24). For Calvin, the church is Christ and the
signified deity is contained within the sign of the church. While Richard can gain biblical
validation from this for his divinely instituted position as king, the analogy is politically
suggestive in that it extends to the kings subjects.
23. Theodore Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (New York: Macmillan,
1961).
24. I agree with James A. McPeek (1958: 198) in his analysis of Richards obsession
with the name of king, in which he argues for what amounts to the teleological disruption of
the sign: With him [Richard] the symbol is a substitute for the reality behind it that is, the
symbol has become the reality. Richard and His Shadow World, American Imago 15, 195
203. On the theme of nothing, Howard Caygill (2000) debates the various equivocations
of the concept and its relationship to substance in Shakespearean drama, exploring the
Hegelian concept of the determinate relation between being and nothing (107). He argues
for a wider understanding of these relations, for ways of thinking the relation of nothing
and not-nothing other than in terms of being and not-being (108), finding in Shakespeares
work, an in-between state that is neither being nor nothing (109). Shakespeares Monster
of Nothing, Philosophical Shakespeares, ed. John J. Joughin (London and New York:
Routledge), 105114. Reconceptualising nothing, Leonard F. Dean (1952: 212) notes:
Death, like the end of the play, will show him [Richard] who he really is. While this
suggests a somewhat conventionally Christian reading, I regard Deans comment ironically.
Richards death will in fact show him who he really is, a no-thing. Richard II: The State
and the Image of the Theatre, PMLA 67, 2, 21118.
25. Caygill refers to this equivocation of the first person pronoun in ay, no as a
definite refusal to resign and the following no, ay as resigned acquiescence, so that
[Richard] acknowledges he must be nothing, but can neither affirm nor deny this nothing.
(2000: 112). This view is in keeping with Caygills consideration of an in-between status
that conceptualises nothing as neither being nor not being.
26. The Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, Vol. 1. ed. G. Johannes
Botterwelk and Helmer Ringgren, trans. John T. Willis (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William
Beerdmans Publishing Company, 1974), 147.
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