Shakespeare’s Richard II, Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies, and Catoptromancy

Ernst H. Kantorowicz (1895-1963) was a most extraordinary scholar who infused his writings with an almost poetic, soaring aesthetic.  Recently, when re-reading his masterful tome, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, originally published in 1957, I was reminded of my deep appreciation for his work.  A quick distillation of the work is nigh impossible, but a summarization from The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c. 350- c. 1450 (1988, Ed. J.H. Burns) provides a necessary, if overly simple, foundation for this post: “Germanic custom subjected the prince to the law and limited his authority to govern without the consent of his subjects. Christian thought and classical jurisprudence and philosophy stressed the divine origins of kingship and the sacral nature of political authority. Kantorowicz demonstrated that this tension in the thought of the lawyers led them to distinguish between the prince’s private body that was subject to the law and his public body that was not” (pp. 426-427). 

Early in The King’s Two Bodies, Kantorowicz reminded me of his more than capable aesthetic sensibilities when he so ably demonstrated his theme by discussing Shakespeare’s Richard II and catoptromancy, which is the ancient art of divination using mirrors.

Before quoting the portion of The King’s Two Bodies which inspired today’s post, I provide, for those unfamiliar with the play Richard II, the following summary:  Richard II, who reigned as king of England from A.D. 1377-1399, banished his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, son of the Duke of Lancaster for his involvement in a dispute with another lord.  While Henry was in exile, his father, the Duke of Lancaster died, and King Richard seized the Duke of Lancaster’s lands and monies, which he then used to help fund his war in Ireland.  While King Richard was waging war in Ireland, Henry Bolingbroke returned to England with an invading force to seize his inheritance.  Many other lords joined Henry in opposition to King Richard so that by the time Richard returned to England from Ireland, he was compelled to relinquish his crown to the usurper Henry Bolingbroke, who had him imprisoned.  After Richard’s supporters conspired to restore Richard, Richard was murdered.

In The King’s Two Bodies, after Kantorowicz has walked us through much of the play, he describes the scene in which Richard is compelled to split his natural body from his public body through words of renunciation and acts of deposition:

The scene in which Richard ‘undoes his kingship’ and releases his body politic into thin air, leaves the spectator breathless.  It is a scene of sacramental solemnity, since the ecclesiastical ritual of undoing the effects of consecration is no less solemn or of less weight than the ritual which has built up the sacramental dignity.  Not to mention the rigid punctilio which was observed at the ousting of a Knight of the Garter or of the Golden Fleece, there had been set a famous precedent by Pope Celestine V who, in the Castel Nuovo at Naples, had ‘undone’ himself by stripping off from his body, with his own hands, the insignia of the dignity which he resigned – ring, tiara, and purple.  But whereas People Celestine resigned his dignity to his electors, the College of Cardinals, Richard, the hereditary king, resigned his office to God – Deo ius suum resignavit.  The Shakespearian scene in which Richard ‘undoes himself with hierophantic solemnity,’ has attracted the attention of many a critic, and Walter Pater has called it very correctly an inverted rite, a rite of degradation and a long agonizing ceremony in which the order or coronation is reversed.  Since none is entitled to lay finger on the Anointed of God and royal bearer of a character indelibilis, King Richard, when defrocking himself, appears as his own celebrant:

Am I both priest and clerk? Well then, amen. (IV.i.173)

Bit by bit he deprives his body politic of the symbols of its dignity and exposes his poor natural body to the eyes of the spectators:

Now mark me how I will undo myself:

I give this heavy weight from off my head,

And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand,

The pride of kingly sway from out my heart;

With mine own tears I wash away my balm,

With mine own hands I give away my crown,

With mine own tongue deny my sacred state,

With mine own breath release all duteous oaths:

All pomp and majesty do I foreswear…. (IV.i.203ff) 

(pp.35-37)

However, as breathless as the scene above was, it is not the most compelling, nor the genesis of today’s post.  Rather, the following is:

The mirror scene is the climax of that tragedy of dual personality.  The looking-glass has the effects of a magic mirror, and Richard himself is the wizard who, comparable to the trapped and cornered wizard in the fairy tales, is forced to set his magic art to work against himself.  The physical face which the mirror reflects, no longer is one with Richard’s inner experience, his outer appearance, no longer identical with inner man. ‘Was this the face?’ The treble question and the answers to it reflect once more the three main facets of the double nature – King, God (Sun), and Fool:

Was this the face

That every day under his household roof

Did keep ten thousand men?

Was this the face

That, like the sun, did make beholders wink?

Was this the face, that faces so many follies,

And was at last outfaced by Bolingbroke? (IV.i.281)

When finally, at the ‘brittle glory’ of his face, Richard dashes the mirror to the ground, there shatters not only Richard’s past and present, but every aspect of a super-world.  His catoptromancy has ended.  The features as reflected by the looking glass betray that he is stripped of every possibility of a second or super-body – of the pompous body politic of king, of the God-likeness of the Lord’s deputy elect, of the follies of the fool, and even of the most human griefs residing in inner man.  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, a physis now void of any metaphysis whatsoever.  It is both less and more than Death.  It is the demise of Richard and the rise of a new body natural.

Bolingbroke: Go, some of you, covey him to the Tower .

Richard: O, good! Convey? Conveyers are you all,

That rise thus nimbly by a true king’s fall. (IV.i.316ff)

Plowden: Demise is a word, signifying that there is a Separation of the two Bodies, and that the Body politic is conveyed over from the Body natural, now dead or removed from the Dignity royal, to another Body natural.

(pp.39-40)

The brilliance of the above is Kantorowicz’s allusion to catoptromancy.  It called to mind that art of divination as reportedly practiced at the sanctuary of Demeter at Patras:  

Before the sanctuary of Demeter is a spring at Patras, the spring separated from the temple by a wall of stones.  Here there is an infallible oracle, not for all events, but for the ill only.  They tie a mirror to a fine cord and let it down, judging the distance so that it does not sink deep into the spring, but just far enough to touch the water with its rim.  Then they pray to the goddess and offer incense, after which they gaze into the mirror, which shows them the presage of death or recovery according to the face appearing healthy or ghastly in the reflection.   

Pausanias, Description of Greece, Achaia, Book VII, Ch. 21, lines 12-13.   

For surely, Richard, upon gazing in the mirror, reacted so strongly as to shatter the mirror because he saw a reflection which presaged the death of his natural body, not just the reality of his demise from the body politic.