The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama
Philip Lorenz
A comparative study of the representation of sovereignty in paradigmatic plays of early modernity, The Tears of Sovereignty argues that the great playwrights of the period—William Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and Calderón de la Barca—reconstitute the metaphors through which contemporary theorists continue to conceive the problems of sovereignty.
The book focuses in particular on the ways the logics of these metaphors inform sovereignty’s conceptualization as a “body of power.” Each chapter is organized around a key tropological operation performed on that “body,” from the analogical relations invoked in Richard II, through the metaphorical transfers staged in Measure for Measure to the autoimmune resistances they produce in Lope’s Fuenteovejuna, and, finally, the allegorical returns of Calderón’s Life Is a Dream and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. The “tears” of sovereignty are the exegetical tropes produced and performed on the English stages and Spanish corrales of the seventeenth century through which we continue to view sovereignty today.
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About Philip Lorenz
Reviews for The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama
—Choice Magazine
“. . . a highly theorized account of a set of mesmerizing problem plays from Spanish and English theater,which generate a range of insightful new accounts of the operation of the tropes of metaphor, analogy, and allegory in relation to the theatrical image, the Eucharist, and the insignia of power.”
-—Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life In his first book, 'Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama, Philip Lorenz addresses Spain through inventive political-theological readings of the Jesuit theologian Francisco Suarez and Lope de Vega's 'Life Is a Dream'. The emphasis on Suarez is fresh and urgent, inviting us to think the Catholic question in a counter-reformation and Baroque rather than medieval/archaic frame, and to do so through a substantial, fascination, and under-examined body of texts.
—Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
“Tears of Sovereignty is a smart, philosophically textured analysis of sovereignty on the seventeenth-century stage.”
-—Graham Hammill, University at Buffalo, SUNY