\"What more remains?”: Messianic Performance in Richard II

$: \"What more remains?”: Messianic Performance in Richard II$
“What more remains?”: Messianic Performance in Richard II

Donovan Sherman

Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 65, Number 1, Spring 2014, pp. 22-48(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/shq.2014.0002

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“What more remains?”:Messianic Performance in Richard II

D O N O VA N S H E R M A N

RI C H A R D II I S L I T T E R E D W I T H D I S C A R D E D O B J E C T S . A mirror, ascepter, gages, a seemingly seditious document, and a host of other items

crowd the margins of the dramatic action. Each is at one point central to a pre-scribed ceremony but, once found to be useless, cast aside without any furthercapacity to participate in political machination: the mirror cracks, the scepter istaken away, the gages fall without fully initiating a duel, and the letter, disownedby its author, comically slips away into inconsequence. Much of the criticalresponse to Richard II has found a distinctly theatrical quality in this compulsivediscrediting, examining its repeated performances as analogous to the manipula-tions of things and bodies that constitute the mimetic actions of the stage—manipulations that, like a coronation or duel, could become emptied of signifi-cance by a simple misplaced gesture. The play serves as a laboratory for testing thetenuous correlation between performative and political efficacy by straining itsrepresentational fabrications and daring its rituals to fail.1 Material manipulationsthat should occur with undoubted faith are slowed down, picked over, questioned,and abandoned before reaching fruition; for most, the attempt to perform prop-erly is forced, in Richard’s words, to “end where it begun” (1.1.158).2

The most prominently cast-off object is, of course, the king himself, who inhis deposition ends where he began, in a public display of monarchical powertransferring hands.3 Seemingly unlike the other discarded items and with an

I thank members of the “Literature and Theater as Skeptical Lab” seminar at the 2011Shakespeare Association of America conference, organized by Joseph Loewenstein, for theirfeedback. I am also grateful for the close attention and thoughtful responses of Jonathan Farinaand Angela Weisl and for the generous guidance offered by Shakespeare Quarterly’s twoanonymous readers.

1 The term “performative” comes from J. L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words, ed. J. O.Urmson and Marina Sbisa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1962), 6–7. Austin’s example issaying “I do” at a wedding; it does its own action rather than simply describe an external event.While the definition is handy, much of Austin’s work that follows this early distinction seeks toblur the easy binary of a statement as performative or constative.

2 All citations from the play are from King Richard II, ed. Charles R. Forker (London: ArdenShakespeare, 2002), and are quoted in the text by act, scene, and line.

3 For a recent example of the popular perception of Richard as object-like, see Ben Brantley’sreview of the 2012 Donmar Warehouse’s production: “[Richard] might as well be a porcelain

oft-noted irony, the king actually has a degree of agency in the very act of remov-ing his agency. While Richard is largely despised and ridiculed, he is also theonly figure capable of severing the connection between the divine and the polit-ical. He does so through a series of carefully orchestrated divestments, demand-ing different objects (the mirror, for one) and concluding in a speech that invertsthe rhetoric of coronation:

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.

(4.1.207–10)

After the deposition he asks simply, “What more remains?” (l. 222). The ques-tion plays with two meanings of the word: the temporal notion of somethingremaining on the docket and the corpse-like “remains” he has itemized in hisself-deposition. Richard’s use of the latter definition rehearses a plaintivemoment in one of the play’s sources, the entry for Richard in The Mirour forMagistrates, when the wry posthumous narrator asks, “What mould be Kingesmade of, but carian clay?”4 Richard loses the tincture of sovereignty that couldgive his bodily and material movements the invisible sheen by which theatergrants the ruse of coherent life onto what is otherwise a corpse. Later, in hisfinal moments, he will be literally closed off, imprisoned in the dark and bereftof any meaning-making ability, as useless as a broken mirror.

This essay rethinks these assumptions by rethinking Richard’s relationshipto theater. My hope is that by viewing his “carian clay” not as a decaying body,but as a performing one, I can intervene in the nearly reified interpretive tradi-tion that finds in the theatricality of the un-kinged body a source of impotence.Criticism of Richard II that focuses on the hinge between the theatrical and thepolitical stems largely from the most famous reading by Ernst Kantorowicz,who interprets Richard’s deposition as demonstrating a medieval doctrine thatdictated separate discursive fields for the “body natural” and the “body politic.”The latter, a figure of eternal divine appointment, cannot die, whereas theformer is the mortal, culpable subject that grows old and decays. ForKantorowicz, the deposition performs the cleavage between the two: afterward,the logic goes, Richard is solely a body natural. After seeing his reflection,

MESSIANIC PERFORMANCE IN RICHARD II 23

figure—exquisite, immobile, infinitely fragile”; see “Uneasy Heads, Burdensome Crowns,” NewYork Times (9 February 2012), http:// http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/theater/richard-ii-madness-of-king-george-and-collaborators-in-london.html?_r=0 (accessed 4February 2014).

4 [William Baldwin,] The Last Parte of the Mirour for Magistrates (London, 1574), fol. 16v.

Richard “is stripped of every possibility of a second or super-body—of thepompous body politic of king, of the God-likeness of the Lord’s deputy elect, ofthe follies of the fool, and even of the most human griefs residing in inner man.”5

The collapse of his super-body inaugurates the rise of his regular one. VictoriaKahn locates in Kantorowicz’s interpretation a meditation not only of kingshipbut also of the broader dynamic between political and fictional textual systems;Kantorowicz “finds in literature an exemplary self-consciousness about thesymbolic dimension of human experience, about the human capacity to makeand unmake symbolic forms.”6 In this regard, the deposition is thoroughly suc-cessful: “what more remains” is a symbolically unmade and fallible subjectacutely aware of its closeness to literal death.

Following Kantorowicz’s lead, criticism of Richard II has linked this unmak-ing to an excessive, inefficacious use of theatricality. The presumably doubledbody of the king generates belief in the royal figure as either merely theatrical,devoid of agency or actual power, or ritualistically invested with capacity foraffecting political reality. More nuanced theoretical approaches to the play’spolitical theater end up reaffirming this binary. David Scott Kastan argues thatRichard’s theatrical facility has an empowering, threatening capacity that stemsfrom the shallowness of its spectacle: “The ‘lye’ of the theater demystifies theidealization of the social order that the ideology of degree demanded.”7 In otherwords, theater has no positively conceived, generative ability. Rather, its empti-ness has power only so far as it can expose emptiness elsewhere: theater showsthat the body natural is the only body, after all. A recent political analysis byJames Phillips finds in the separation of bodies politic and natural a form oftheatricality. For Phillips, the body politic creates a fiction of the natural withthe care of a theatrical artist, making the “body natural” a technical constructionthat aims for seamless verisimilitude. The theater is a subtle and jejune decep-tion, since “there is an element of insecure make-believe, of the theatrical sus-pension of the Kantian as if to this setting aside of the state of nature.”8

24 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

5 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology(19757; repr., Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997), 40.

6 Victoria Kahn, “Political Theology and Fiction in The King’s Two Bodies,” Representations106 (2009): 77–101, esp. 81. Kahn’s essay appears in a special issue reassessing Kantorowicz’swork and its aftermath. Richard Halpern’s contribution in the same issue, “The King’s TwoBuckets: Kantorowicz, Richard II, and Fiscal Trauerspiel” (67–76), also offers an inquiry rele-vant to my concerns here. Both Kahn and Halpern position Kantorowicz, with particular atten-tion to his reading of Richard II, within the broader field of political theology and specifically inrelation to Kantorowicz’s philosophical foil, Carl Schmitt.

7 David Scott Kastan, “Proud Majesty Made a Subject: Shakespeare and the Spectacle ofRule,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 459–75, esp. 464.

8 James Phillips, “The Practicalities of the Absolute: Justice and Kingship in Shakespeare’sRichard II,” ELH 79 (2012): 161–77, esp. 173.

Writing in an altogether different theoretical key, Slavoj Žižek similarlyidentifies Richard’s remains as devoid—more precisely, as a void. Žižek utilizesthe deposition as a primer for Lacan’s conception of hysteria, “whereby the kingloses the second, sublime body that makes him a king, is confronted with thevoid of his subjectivity outside the symbolic mandate-title ‘king,’ and is thusforced into a series of theatrical, hysterical outbursts, from self-pity to sarcasticand clownish madness.”9 Richard’s lack, as empty as the zero at the center of thecrown, constitutes “Richard” the illusory subject who, like the anamorphicpainting Bushy describes in his “attempts to console” the Queen, must be viewedwhile “looking awry” or else reality will reveal as a “shadow of nothing” andreduce the subject to a hysterical actor who shifts from fiction to fiction in afragmented citational panic.10 The existence of the subject, for whom the depo-sition is a template for psychic survival, depends on the properly skewed rela-tionship of spectator to warped image: chaotic reality must coalesce into a com-placent fakeness.11 Eric L. Santner also draws from psychoanalysis, although hereconstitutes Žižek’s void as a surfeit in order to offer a more sympathetic read-ing of Richard’s stripped self. Santner considers the king’s vestigial body not as“the natural human body left over once all of one’s social vestments have beenstripped away, but something more like the rotting flesh of the sublime body,what remains when its sublimity has wasted away.”12 The law of the doubledbody is not to “recognize the pompous theatricality of all rites of symbolicinvestiture” but “to show” that “in such fictions we might discover some truthabout our own inner lives, fantasies, moral commitments, political passions,might catch a glimpse of the substance that sustains their uncanny vitality.”13

The “rotting,” no longer “sublime” excess of the body natural reveals, in hind-sight, a sacral energy materially inherent in the human that is magnified, not


9 Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 9 (emphasis added).

10 Žižek elaborates the connection of hysteria to Bushy’s advice in How to Read Lacan (NewYork: W. W. Norton, 2007), 70. Žižek’s fascination with the play extends across multiple worksdevoted to exploring resonances of psychoanalysis in cinema, politics, and theology; as heobserves in Looking Awry, “Richard II proves beyond any doubt that Shakespeare had readLacan” (9). Žižek has also written at length on St. Paul; in particular, see The Puppet and theDwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

11 The most popular utilization of theater as a demonstration of emptiness is found in thework of Stephen Greenblatt, who refers to mimesis’s ability to hollow out systems of power bymaking porous the borders between supposedly fabricated art forms and the societies that sur-round them. See “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: U ofCalifornia P, 1988), 94–128, esp. 127.

12 Eric L. Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames ofSovereignty (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011), 44.

13 Santner, 45.

effaced, through the pageantry of political ritual. Santner seeks a vital, even fetidquality that overburdens and sustains theatricality in order to deliver it fromempty pompousness.

My aim here is to reconsider the variously shallow, clownish, and emptyaspects of theatricality that these critics dismiss. Rather than counter suchtroublesome claims by suggesting that theater can be efficacious instead ofimpotent, though, I suggest that it is both: Richard II mobilizes theater’s inef-fectiveness as powerful because it is paradoxically self-defeating. The play con-tinually defines the theater as a specifically executed set of actions that dependon materiality to disconnect signification and to make themselves impotent,incapable, and ultimately immaterial by design. We could say that the deposi-tion articulates the failure of theater as a form of theater, one that must bla-tantly highlight the inefficacy of its own devices—a theatrical detheatricaliz-ing. Such behavior, which I call “messianic performance,” presents us with achoreographed rendering irrelevant of action that must be executed throughaction. By this mode of self-defeat, the play suggests a unique contact pointand unheralded complicity between two important discourses of both earlymodern and contemporary culture—performance theory and the spiritualityof St. Paul. By situating the scriptural dicta of St. Paul’s theology within thematerial texture of the stage, Richard II constructs a subject that is somehowinsubstantial and excessively tangible, a figure that recruits the bare body inorder to dissolve its own relevance. I will first elaborate on the contours of thisformulation by attending closely to foundational texts in Pauline messianismand performance theory while drawing upon the play in order to show how thefallen king’s actions synthesize their claims. The essay then maps the progres-sion of messianic performances in Richard II as a whole. Throughout the play,Richard scrapes away the mechanics of the stage to suggest the nothingness oftheater as an alternative to ideological structures of meaning-making. He fig-ures this nothingness, both within the play and outside it in its own existenceas a performed text, as the promise of another order beyond his forces todemonstrate but that must be demonstrated nonetheless in an enactment thatfulfills itself only by failing.

I. EXPLICIT REMNANTS

Richard’s body, hailed as excessively material, may provide the end productin Kantorowicz’s analysis of the deposition scene, but a performance-centeredinterpretation takes the former king’s flesh as a starting point. By grantinghermeneutic primacy to the body over textuality—the signal critical maneuverof performance studies—the formative work of Diana Taylor, RebeccaSchneider, Joseph Roach, and others would find in Richard a site of powerful


potential rather than abjection.14 The body natural could be rethought specifi-cally as Schneider’s notion of “the explicit body.” For Schneider, performers whomake the body explicit are “manipulating the body itself as mise en scène” andthat “such artists make their own bodies explicit as the stage, canvas, or screen.”15

The lack of artifice mobilized in the performing body offers a distinct strategyfor resituating the theatrical scene upon that body, which is made “explicit” andthus impossible to co-opt as metaphor within a larger symbolic scheme. If werethink the body natural as the body explicit, as a stage or screen rather thansomething deprived of theatrical illusion, Richard’s remains gain theatricalempowerment in his bare and stubborn literalization. He becomes an irre-ducible irritant of tangibility chafing against the symbolic fabric of his sur-roundings—as when, faced with his untimely end as the armed Bolingbrokeapproaches his castle, he strips himself of embellishments with the attentivenessof a solo performer, trading jewels for beads, a palace for a hermitage, gayapparel for an almsman’s gown, goblets for a wooden dish, a scepter for a staff,subjects for carved saints, and a kingdom for a “little, little grave, an obscuregrave” (3.3.147–54). The economy that he proposes, foreshadowing the depo-sition, exchanges spectacle for concrete and quotidian materiality: a terrifyingprospect for any monarch, but a source of self-affirmation for a performer layingbare his utterly mundane and explicit self.

Such acts of self-dissection grant Richard the ability to discredit and strate-gically disavow the body’s capacity for significance as a means to “remain” as afragment of inarticulable matter. In remaining as such, Richard threatens thesubtler processes of signification that characterize Bolingbroke’s representa-tional economy. As Diana Taylor asserts, by “shifting the focus from written toembodied culture, from the discursive to the performatic,” we can reinvent “whatacademic disciplines regard as appropriate canons.”16 Taylor’s call has acted as amethodological intervention across various sites of inquiry that accept her cri-tique of “archival memory,” the hegemonic force that operates “across distance,over time and space” and consider instead the bodily “repertoire of embodiedpractice / knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports, ritual).”17 Richard IIsustains the tensions between Bolingbroke’s carefully orchestrated archive and


14 Joseph Roach supplies a similarly powerful consideration of the performing body’s(dis)placement in a landscape dominated by literary systems of meaning production. He devel-ops an influential genealogical method of performance documentation in Cities of the Dead:Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia UP, 1996). See also Rebecca Schneider, TheExplicit Body in Performance (New York: Routledge, 1997); and Diana Taylor, The Archive andthe Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke UP, 2003).

15 Schneider, 20.16 Taylor, 16–17.17 Taylor, 19.

Richard’s persistent repertoire. The bodily remains of the former king, inca-pable of assimilation into a nationalist narrative, tinge the closing monologue ofBolingbroke, now Henry IV, with the melancholy of irresolution:

Lords, I protest my soul is full of woeThat blood should sprinkle me to make me grow.Come, mourn with me for what I do lament And put on sullen black incontinent.I’ll make a voyage to the Holy LandTo wash this blood off from my guilty hand.March sadly after; grace my mournings hereIn weeping after this untimely bier.

(5.6.45–52)

Ostensibly a lament about his rule’s legitimacy, these lines demonstrate a desireto re-archive the spontaneous, unpredicted, and thoroughly theatrical reper-toire of Richard’s sudden demise. In the Holy Land, the proper rituals willcleanse the actual blood of regicide, but they also attempt to heal the abstractinjury to the ability to graft ritualistic utility onto things. Henry attempts tolend symbolic power to the blood and bier, as if directing the action of the playin order to supply closure through effective pageantry. But the bier is “untimely,”jarringly out of place, a return of the figure of the “obscure grave” Richard pre-dicted for his interment. Obscure and untimely, Richard lingers as an unset-tlingly live presence. Like a comic ending that promises a wedding, the tragic-historical closure promises a coda that enacts forgiveness. But this effort will failand transfer its tensions to the plays following, in which Henry V, haunted byRichard’s persistent untimeliness, will order expensive chantries in order toattempt atonement for the past.18

Situating Richard II within a theoretical discourse that focuses primarily onthe techniques of contemporary artists presents an obvious anachronism; it cer-tainly seems like a stretch to imagine Shakespeare’s king as a peer to MarinaAbramović or Karen Finley.19 However, the comparison proves strangely anal-ogous to a set of beliefs local to the site of the play’s inception. In RenaissanceEngland, the untimely acts that Richard executes through his bodily persist-ence, positioned as antagonistic to Bolingbroke’s relentless archive, would res-


18 Shakespeare’s Henry V has, of his own accord, transferred his father’s transgressions ontohimself (and Richard’s body into a new grave) and paid a hefty sum to ensure that newer, bettertears will scrub the episode more vigorously of sin. See Henry V, ed. T. W. Craik (New York:Methuen Drama, 1995), 4.1.300–302.

19 For a provocative transhistorical engagement with the aesthetics of performance art, seeMarla Carlson, Performing Bodies in Pain: Medieval and Post-Modern Martyrs, Mystics, andArtists (New York: Palgrave, 2010), which compares shifting rhetorical structures of sufferingin late-medieval saint plays and contemporary body artists.

onate with an audience familiar with St. Paul’s assimilation into their religiousand cultural practices.20 As John Coolidge explains, while Paul defines twotypes of covenantal assurance, earthly and divine, his distinction is a more subtleone than simply conditional” and “unconditional.” As articulated in English cler-ical doctrine that followed Pauline religion, the law

cannot condition the Covenant with Abraham since it was communicated, byhis reckoning, 420 years after. That is to say that the Covenant which consti-tutes the chosen people of God is not conditional upon their performance. Theconditions of the Sinai Covenant were communicated, paradoxically, in orderto bring the people to a recognition that their Covenant with God was uncon-ditional; for until they recognized their radical inability to fulfill God’s condi-tions of righteousness they might imagine that they were chosen for doing so.21

The necessarily unconditional nature of grace demands, nonetheless, a set ofcareful conditions to gain realization. A “radical inability” must make itselfknown through performance to reveal grace’s essential disinterest in perform-ance. Although it operates with a drastically different set of principles than per-formance theory, the covenant of grace similarly destabilizes the precise condi-tional link of action to referent that Bolingbroke attempts in his funeral promiseby rendering the act of conditioning unnecessary. Yet it does so by walkingBolingbroke’s audience—and the play’s—through its enactment. The inter-twining of grace and condition, as Coolidge puts it, leads to action that is “gra-tuitous but not inconsequential.”22

While engaging with the performance-based approaches of Schneider andTaylor, then, Richard’s brand of acting also modulates their claims by uniting theexplicit body of the performer to the gratuitous body of the apostle. The deposedRichard does not utilize his flesh as the sole index of meaning, but neither doeshe simply disregard it—and neither did Paul, who, as Daniel Boyarin remindsus, understood that the body “had its place, albeit subordinated to the spirit.”23

Paul’s subordination of the body demands its utilization as a mode of undoing


20 As Randall Martin points out, Paul’s edicts were, at the time, conceived of as highlydynamic pedagogical acts; the “theatricality of Pauline rhetoric” positioned itself in the work of“Shakespeare and his contemporaries as situationally interactive transactions among writers,scribes, messengers and listeners/readers.” Pauline ideas were not fixed and stable, but con-stantly interpreted and appropriated in theatrical exchanges. See “Shakespearean Biography,Biblical Allusion and Early Modern Practices of Reading Scripture,” Shakespeare Survey 63(2010): 212–24, esp. 218.

21 John Coolidge, The Pauline Renaissance in England: Puritanism and the Bible (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1970), 101.

22 Coolidge, 119.23 Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: U of California P,

1994), 7.

rather than as a site of theatrical empowerment. Richard’s performances simi-larly aim toward unbinding conditionality by effacing tangibility: he is not justan explicit body, demanding literalization, but also somehow in search of a wayto perform himself into occlusion, invisibility, even nonbeing. As Jeremy Lopeznotes, Richard frequently evinces a “desire, and inability, to disappear,” as when hecompares himself to a “‘mockery king of snow.’”24 His undoing in the deposition,which magnifies this desire, resists a reading solely in terms of performancetheory. It is not the intrusion of a repertoire clamoring for its own agency amidthe suffocating archive: it is as much termination as assertion of the self, the cre-ation of a body that will, when later imprisoned, reimagine itself as nonexistent.We might think of Richard’s mode of theater as more of a “de-formance” thanperformance—a programmatic dissolution of his own faculties.25 Rather thanTaylor’s idea of corporeal action as assertion of identity, Richard utilizes a the-atrical vocabulary to show the radical unimportance of his condition.

The covenantal paradox defined by Coolidge typifies the complex logic of St.Paul’s epistles, which offer a richly braided, occasionally contradictory set ofbeliefs and practices that have been interpreted through various disciplinarylenses. Julia Reinhard Lupton finds in Paul a radicalization of subjectivity thatilluminates hybridized modes of citizenship within Shakespearean dramaturgy.The bifurcated Pauline figure of the “citizen-saint” is for Lupton one who must“die into citizenship,” a dictum imagined in Paul’s complex mapping of Judaicpractice and law onto the universalism of Christianity.26 Given his interest incorporeality and temporality, however, we can also cull from Paul’s network ofwriting a distinct brand of action that invites synthesis with contemporary ideasin performance theory. Thinking of Paul as a performer has received little atten-tion in contemporary theater scholarship, even though he persistently links reli-gious practice to theatricality throughout his letters. In one of his most cele-brated passages, Paul outlines his disparate claims to cultural identification interms of actorly facility:

For though I be free from all men, yet have I made myself servant unto all, thatI might gain the more. And unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain


24 Jeremy Lopez, “Introduction,” in “Richard II”: New Critical Essays, ed. Jeremy Lopez (NewYork: Routledge, 2012), 1–50, esp. 34–35.

25 Richard II achieves a form of kinship with Richard III, whose possible deformation findsprovocative manifestations on stage. One point of contact in particular is Carmelo Bene’s adap-tation of Richard III, in which he sought to demonstrate “‘the spectacle of the ridiculousness ofspectacle’” (quoted in Allen S. Weiss, “In Memory: Carmelo Bene, 1937–2002,” TDR 46[2002]: 8–10, esp. 9). For a critical meditation on Bene’s production of Richard III, see CarmeloBene and Gilles Deleuze, Superpositions (Paris: Minuit, 1979).

26 Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: U ofChicago P, 2005), 21.

the Jews; to them that are under the law, as under the law, that I might gainthem that are under the law; To them that are without law, as without law,(being not without law to God, but under the law to Christ,) that I might gainthem that are without law. To the weak became I as weak, that I might gainthe weak: I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.

(1 Cor. 9:19–22)27

This appears as a form of traditional Aristotelian mimesis: Paul “makes him-self ” into another identity with the skill of a trained actor.28 Such acting is noticonographic or even straightforwardly semiotic; it does not rely on our con-temporary rhetoric of “slipping into” or “taking on” a role. It is instead a per-formance of self-refutation. Like Schneider’s figure of the explicit body, Pauloffers a lack of total assimilability, but he does so by delivering himself into amultiplicity of identities rather than by staunchly rejecting them. His per-formance is not simply “as” a Jew or “not” a Jew but as a “non-non” Jew, showingthat he is neither.29 He is the space between one clear identity and another.Elsewhere in the same letter, Paul condenses this cultural gesture within histangible self, writing, “For the body is not one member, but many. If the footshall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore notof the body? And if the ear shall say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of thebody; is it therefore not of the body?” (1 Cor. 12:14–16). Paul’s self-blazoningechoes Richard’s dissection of his royal self, but for Paul, corporeal elementsare separate and bound, self and other. Paul declares that he is more than hiscultural identity, even more than his body, because he disavows himself ofthem: his subjectivity is flexible, changeable, not because of a deficit butbecause of a surplus that goes beyond the confines of his own material self. Butthis surplus has no legible grammar, since grammar depends on the signifyingsystems that the spirit escapes: the spirit lives in the gap between cohesiveidentities, and Paul’s ability to shift between modes of personhood shows theirinherent hollowness.

In his taunting speech to Bolingbroke at the deposition, Richard offers avivid demonstration of this “not not” being as a form of performance, flickeringhis remains between king and not-king, and weaving back and forth over theline of subjective coherence:


27 All citations from Paul’s writings are from The Holy Bible . . . Authorized King JamesVersion (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1961).

28 See Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Kenneth McLeish (New York: Theatre CommunicationsGroup, 1998), 6. The philosopher’s modulation of Plato’s theory of imitation allows the devel-opment of poetic art beyond its role as propagandistic tool for grooming the citizenry.

29 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the “Letter to the Romans,”trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005), 51. Agamben adopts the “non-non” for-mulation from Nicholas of Cusa’s De non aliud.

Ay, no. No, ay; for I must nothing be.Therefore, no “no,” for I resign to thee.Now mark me how I will undo myself:I give this heavy weight from off my head.

(4.1.201–4)

Richard vibrates somewhere between “ay” and “no,” which is to say “nothing,” ormore precisely “no-no-thing,” performing himself into nearly quasi-substantialstatus. The logic of representation thus twisted, Richard is left with “no name, notitle— / No, not that name was given me at the font” and continues his ritual ofapparent de-sacralization (ll. 255–56). By enacting the space between identities,he melts his subjectivity into a nonmimetic brand of action, manipulating hisown vestigial body. Giorgio Agamben calls this Pauline spacing of identity, asdemonstrated by Richard, “the remnant,” recalling the apostle’s proclamation that“at this present time . . . there is a remnant according to the election of grace”(Rom. 11:5). Like Richard’s remains, Paul’s remnant can indicate either a sign ofruin or a temporal fragment, the ambiguity of which Agamben evokes in the titleof his meditation on Paul, The Time That Remains. As both death (of the pres-ent) and birth (of an inarticulable new subjectivity), the remnant, for Agamben,captures in the intrusion of absolute presentness the capacity for radicalchange.30 It is this evocation of and sensitivity to the insistent present, which forPaul is stretched between the events of Christ’s ascension and his return, thatmarks Agamben’s reading among the many philosophical treatments of Paul asparticularly vital for a performative reclamation of messianism. Performancestudies have long signaled “presentness” as one of its defining features: it alwaysoccurs now, but is compelled to repeat itself, operating as a demonstration of itsfamous definition of the field as “repetition with a difference.”31 Both new andrepeated, located between presentation and ritual, an abstract understanding ofperformance recalls Agamben’s liminal situating of Paul’s remnant: it “is not any


30 Agamben’s thesis deliberately opposes that by Alain Badiou. After considering the subtitleof Badiou’s book on Paul, Saint Paul: The Foundations of Universalism (trans. Ray Brassier[Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003]) as symbolic of a wider philosophical apprehension of Paulinetheology as a form of transcendence, Agamben distinguishes his concept of the ‘remnant’ fromthat of the universal by claiming “one can measure the distance that separates the Pauline opera-tion from modern universalism” and that, furthermore, the “universal is not a transcendent prin-ciple through which differences may be perceived—such a perspective of transcendence is notavailable to Paul” (52). In contrast, Badiou proposes that Paul gives us a subject simultaneouslygiven “to the aleatory dimension of the event as well as to the pure contingency of multiple-beingwithout sacrificing the theme of freedom” (4). Both divided and dissolved, Badiou’s PaulineChristian founds itself in the richness of an essential paradox: “To declare the nondifferencebetween Jew and Greek establishes Christianity’s potential universality; to found the subject asdivision, rather than as perpetuation of a tradition, renders the subjective element adequate tothis universality by terminating the predicative particularity of cultural subjects” (57).

kind of numeric portion or substantial positive residue, that would entail a wholehomogeneous to the former divisions, in itself harboring the capacity to surpassdifferences without our understanding precisely how”; instead, the remnant cutsaway the possibility of polarity entirely, rendering the follower of messianic lawas being “not-not in the law.”32 The remnant is not a subject or role, as such. Itsdislocating forces disassociate self from self, king from king, making manifestwhat Agamben calls the “as not” of Paul: “The coming of the Messiah means thatall things, even the subjects who contemplate it, are caught up in the as not, calledand revoked at one and the same time. No subject could watch it or act as if at agiven point. The messianic vocation dislocates and, above all, nullifies the entiresubject.”33 Replacing the performer’s imperative to acting as if he or she wereactually a role with a demand to act as not, the remnant offers a distinctly self-negating brand of theatricality.34

Paul’s remnant, like Richard’s remains, is not just a physical leftover—notthe body political, natural, nor even explicit—but the wedge driven between selfand self, between “ay” and “no,” the “nothing” that must somehow “be.” What Pauland performance theory help to reveal in Richard II’s treatment of theater is thatthe deposition does not cleave one body from another but locks the king intothe space between bodies and roles. Richard’s remains trap him within thebreach of transition, without the promise of coalescence: not the condition thatsignals fleshy, artificial, empty weakness, not the sovereign and divinely investedbeing, but the act of making this binary into a spectrum and occupying themiddle ground within it. In so doing, Richard’s deposition recovers the per-forming body as a literalized agent of irreducibility and as a Pauline collapse ofsubjectivity into “not-not” being. Richard’s brand of failure and uselessness thus


31 “Repetition with a difference” has been used across different disciplines, from anthropol-ogy to queer theory to structuralism; see Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, trans. PaulPatton (New York: Continuum, 2004). For its application in performance studies, see PeggyPhelan, “Introduction,” in The Ends of Performance, ed. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (New York:NYU Press, 1998), 1–22; Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia:U of Pennsylvania P, 1985), 36; and Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The HumanSeriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982).

32 Agamben, 50–51. 33 Agamben, 41. 34 Konstantin Stanislavski created the “magic ifs” as a device by which performers lend

authenticity to their actions by richly imagining their characters’ internal life and external cir-cumstances. See An Actor Prepares, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood (New York: Routledge,1989), 159. Doug Eskew sees a divine connection to this phrase in his reading of Richard II;Richard, like some conceptualizations of Christ’s doubt upon the cross, engages in the “as if ”way of thinking to comment on and participate in systems of kingship. Both Christ and Richard“conflate the otherwise antithetical categories of fiction and ontology.” See “Richard II and theUnforgetting Messiah” (unpublished manuscript, 2013).

gives us a reappraisal of his subjectivity as both willed performance and disso-lution. The remaining section of this essay will draw this theory into a readingof the play as a whole so as to resituate the deposition within two larger arcs:first, of Richard’s fall from king to prisoner, and second, the wider failure of themimetic logic of the play’s own dramaturgy.

As a preface to this reading, however, I want to define further what I meanby “messianic.” Surely Paul’s theology promotes messianism in anticipating JesusChrist, suggesting a temporality altered by the forthcoming logos. But the mostinfluential critical appropriation of this term translates the concept into a cri-tique of historical practice. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” WalterBenjamin proposes “Messianic time” as an alternative to the “homogenous,empty time” with which historians falsely characterize the past. Rather thanbelieve in the possibility of grasping and measuring chronology, Benjamin callsfor historians to reconceive the presentness of history by uncovering its spiritualunderpinnings, thereby allowing time to be “filled by the presence of the now”and extricating it from the apparent “continuum” of “progress” to allow a “leap inthe open air of history.”35 Indeed, the present is the “model of Messianic time”which “comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgement.”36

Jonathan Gil Harris evokes both Benjamin’s philosophy and Paul’s theology inhis treatment of the “polychronic material” caught among competing temporal-ities and drawn out of apparent conditional causality by the messianic pull ofBenjamin’s hidden spirituality. Harris connects the polychronic object to thefigure of “the ruin” from Benjamin’s writings on German tragedy, or Trauerspiel,repurposing material as “a shard that has been sundered from official historyand now presents the possibility for doing and imagining things differently.”37

Remnant, remains, and shard: philosophies of messianism seem focused onthe figure of the cast-off, failed, discarded entity whose uselessness in this polit-ical order allows it to realize the possibility of another procession of eventsentirely. As Gregory Kneidel notes in his study of Paul’s influence onShakespeare’s England, Paul’s in-between time binds itself to the promise of anew order even as it persists, overstaying its welcome, in the present. A pervasivesense of delay thus “became normative not by design but because, to put thepoint crudely, Paul thought time was short and it wasn’t”; echoing Agamben,Kneidel observes that as a result a “repetition-remainder narrative in whichremaining, with its ‘yes . . . but’ and ‘already . . . not yet’ logic, ironically becomes a


35 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. HannahArendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 253–64, esp. 263, 261.

36 Benjamin, 263.37 Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: U of

Pennsylvania P), 94.

permanent condition.”38 Locked in this sustained abeyance for too long, Paul—and the practices his beliefs engender—formulates a set of strategies for activelywaiting or, put less generously, doing nothing. Paul’s ministry opens a spacewhere Richard’s lament of being nothing can be recovered as a promise: yes, youwill be nothing, it beckons, because all things will lose their purpose. We find inthis promise a hint of displaced modernism; Samuel Beckett, channeling Pauland Richard, begins Waiting for Godot with the tramp Estragon both announc-ing and deflating dramatic expectation by stating, “Nothing to be done.”39 Butthis promise, while encouraging nothing, still requires a carefully curated selec-tion of strategies, including, as Kneidel puts it, “expecting, anticipating, fulfilling,repeating, waiting, remaining, and delaying.”40 These are, of course, the sametechniques utilized by the deposed Richard, who enters the space of the presentbetween his selves as “not-not” being and, as a result, executes Paul’s promisewithin a world that can only view such a redemption as demise.

II. UNPROMISING GAINS

When read as manifestations of Pauline messianism, the repeatedly stymiedactions of Richard II confront us not as scenes of failure, but as perforations inthe mimetic logic of the play’s doubled sense of theater—in both its elaboratesymbolic rituals and the overdetermined possibility of its embodied presenta-tion. These moments of messianic performance unhinge Richard from hisscripted identity and promise “nothing” within the resolute thingness of the the-ater. Crucially, as I have been arguing, they do not appear as haphazard or asmanifestations of a botched plan: they are highly intentional and staged willfully,with attention to their precise execution—even though the result is the negationof performance’s legible vocabulary. Put differently, Richard’s apparently weaktheatricality in the deposition comprises the climax in a larger pattern of his care-ful corporeal manipulations leading to hollowing out and disappearance. Hissimultaneous assertion and deletion plot the king on mutually unbinding trajec-tories of becoming explicit presence and disappearing absence, both a persistentlump of flesh and a ghostly invisible memory. The play suggests that the theatermust be instrumentalized as the Pauline method of transferring meaning by ini-tiating its own expiration. With this contradiction in mind, I will return to theplay’s delays, dilations, distractions, and other seemingly inefficacious maneuversand reframe them as revelations of radical alternatives to a more archival and res-


38 Gregory Kneidel, Rethinking the Turn to Religion in Early Modern Literature: The Poetics ofAll Believers (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 14.

39 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts, trans. Samuel Beckett(New York: Grove Press, 1954), 2.

40 Kneidel, 17.

olutely representative logic, emblematized in the play most saliently byBolingbroke. On the surface, the suggestion that compulsively irrelevantprocesses articulate anything radical is absurd, since as a result of this irrelevancethe very notions of space and time must become unstitched from their roles inensuring a knowable future. But rather than view this situation as a nihilisticendgame, I believe Richard II suggests a Pauline pact with a future so incompre-hensible that it can only imprint itself on the in-betweenness of the present byflagrantly underlining that present’s gratuitousness.

Richard’s willed erasure of conditional promises asserts itself immediatelyupon his, and the play’s, first line, which announces a contract between a prom-ise and a fulfillment located within a larger pact:

Old John of Gaunt, time-honoured Lancaster,Hast thou according to thy oath and bandBrought hither Henry Hereford, thy bold son,Here to make good the boist’rous late appeal—Which then our leisure would not let us hear—Against the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Mowbray?

(1.1.1–6)

John of Gaunt has an oath and bond that he pursues to advance the process of“appeal” that has been delayed by Richard himself, and which will be annulledtwo scenes later at what should be its climax, when Bolingbroke and Mowbraycease their duel immediately after it begins. The audience finds itself thrust intothe drama after an event referenced obliquely—the death of Gloucester, per-haps in collective memory as a result of the anonymous Thomas ofWoodstock41—and is told that they must align their expectations to the rhythmsof a postponed civic ritual. As if to compensate for its lack of closure, the scenefills itself with characters determinedly asserting action’s connection to verbalfacility, assuring each other of solid promises of future fulfillment. As


41 The alternate title of this play, King Richard the Second, Part One, indicates its possible con-nection to Shakespeare’s work. The manuscript does not actually have a name; the Revels edi-tion (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2008) allows for both possibilities in its full title. While nodirect evidence exists of Woodstock’s performance in Shakespeare’s day, the thematic and formalconnections between it and Richard II have long supplied critical conversation and speculation.In his introduction to Richard II, Charles Forker claims that the play’s influence as a model forShakespeare is “virtually certain” (116) although he also asserts that “Despite the many details,linguistic or otherwise, that link Shakespeare’s tragedy to Woodstock, differences between thetwo plays remain more significant than the likenesses, for they appear, superficially at least, toembody opposed theories of monarchy—contractual versus sacramental” (149–50). For a bib-liographic exploration of Woodstock, see Gabriel Egan, “Precision, Consistency andCompleteness in Early-Modern Playbook Manuscripts: The Evidence from Thomas ofWoodstock and John a Kent and John a Cumber,” Library 12 (2011): 376–91.

Bolingbroke vows, evoking a common trope of honor, “What my tongue speaksmy right-drawn sword may prove” (l. 46). Both combatants narrate what theydo: “there I throw my gage” (l. 69); “I take it up” (l. 78). The speakers figure gagesas signatures guaranteeing the actions they punctuate. Later, in the cascade ofgages before the deposition, Aumerle calls his gesture a “manual seal” (4.1.26) asif imbuing his speech with a wax imprint. Such an imprint betrays Aumerlelater when his father spies the traitorous letter peeking out from his clothes,asking “What seal is that that hangs without thy bosom? / Yea, look’st thoupale? Let me see the writing” (5.2.56–57). Like the actual seal and despite theinsistence on textualizing action through narration, none of the gages results indecisive execution, thanks to Richard’s interruption of the duel in its openingseconds. He oversees and orchestrates an elaborate preparation only to removethe hope of logical causality, instead asserting a previously unarticulated plan.

Such a naked demonstration of inefficacy creates a powerful reaction inBolingbroke and, through this aversion, situates him as almost fetishisticallyfocused on framing his every motion as a condition for emergent meaning.When Richard calls off the duel with Mowbray, Bolingbroke spitefully equatesthe stymied battle with the inherent failure of poetic imagery:

O, who can hold a fire in his handBy thinking on the frosty Caucasus?Or cloy the hungry edge of appetiteBy bare imagination of a feast?Or wallow naked in December snowBy thinking on fantastic summer’s heat?O no, the apprehension of the goodGives but the greater feeling to the worse.

(1.3.294–301)

As his funeral plan to wipe Richard’s blood from his conscience will later estab-lish, Bolingbroke believes his words must secure actions that follow a specificsemantic chain. Here, as in his final half-elegy, he embodies Benjamin’simproper historian—the archivist who seeks to place the present within a largerpreordained chain of events that closes off the possibility of the open air of now.Later, appearing at Flint Castle to demand a meeting with the king, and at thispoint pretending to ask only for his land and title, he tells Northumberland tothreaten Richard with the possibility of “showers of blood / Rained from thewounds of slaughtered Englishmen” (3.3.43–44). After Northumberlandleaves, he announces a carefully plotted scenography: “Let’s march without thenoise of threat’ning drum, / That from this castle’s tattered battlements / Ourfair appointments may be well perused” (ll. 51–53). The lack of apparent arti-fice in the drumless procession is the result of precise material framing; this is


“doing nothing” in the sense of abstaining from seemingly inefficacious action,rather than the Pauline “doing nothing” of actively conscripting materiality so asto make it strategically worthless. After his eventual departure from FlintCastle, however, Richard transforms Bolingbroke’s nothing into his ownPauline form of gratuitousness by negating the prodigal duke’s plan altogether.When Bolingbroke states, with calculated modesty, “I come but for mine own,”Richard responds by giving over everything: “Your own is yours, and I am yoursand all” (ll. 196–97). Precluding a struggle, Richard gives himself up utterly,avoiding the mechanics of vengeance and jettisoning himself into unconditionalabsorption as Bolingbroke’s prisoner. As with the devaluation of the gages,Richard renders Bolingbroke’s theatrics radically unable to effect change. In hissurrender, Richard replaces the physical leftover of the gage with himself, aremainder in the new regime.

The called-off duel and irrelevant procession offer episodes of theatrical con-ditionality disrupted by gestures of Pauline promises. They also suggest, in themetatheatrical landscape of Richard II, that the scripted and coordinated annul-ment of mimetic promise doubles as an expurgation of the theatrical contract inwhich the play finds realization. As has often been noted, Richard II obsessivelyuses the stage as metaphor for its narrative execution; Brian Walsh observesthat the play’s dependence on the manipulations of bodies in a defined space,with repeated meditations on breath and speaking, is thematized as a frequentsubject of its own dialogue.42 While the rituals of gage-throwing and politicalpresentation are implicitly theatrical, many events in the play are explicitly so,most palpably York’s famous comparison of the official processions throughtown by the two monarchs, one ascendant and the other fallen. After raptur-ously noting Henry’s nearly erotic integration into the social fabric, replete withcries of support and inanimate objects bending themselves to integrate into hisbrand of political teleology, York compares this scene to the subsequentlyreported theater of Richard’s procession through the streets as dejected,unkinged body:

As in a theatre the eyes of men,After a well-graced actor leaves the stage, Are idly bent on him that enters next,Thinking his prattle to be tedious,Even so, or with much more contempt, men’s eyesDid scowl on gentle Richard. No man cried God save him!No joyful tongue gave him his welcome home, But dust was thrown upon his sacred head,


42 Brian Walsh, “The Dramaturgy of Discomfort in Richard II,” in “Richard II”: New CriticalEssays (see n. 24 above), 181– 201.

Which with such gentle sorrow he shook off, His face still combating with tears and smiles.

(5.2.23–32)

With the people, so go the objects: no horse, crown, or smiling walls greetRichard, just dust, the mocking replacement of his lost authority. He has dis-pleased his audience and failed to connect his theatricality to political power—he is all imagined feast, no satiation of hunger. No longer capable of letting the-ater seamlessly resemble reality, the deposed king is, like the dust he gentlyshakes off, only a remnant. By smiling and crying, resolutely unsatisfying the cit-izenry with his poor and tedious performance, Richard deprioritizes their anx-ious anticipation of the next ruler by slowing down an empirical notion of timereaching a teleological climax and finding affective power instead in acknowl-edging the present’s nothingness, smiling in a moment of apparent degradation.His slowing and delaying, furthermore, repurpose an episode from one ofShakespeare’s sources, Jean Froissart’s Chronicles, in which Richard attempts toquell the Peasants’ Revolt by cautiously approaching the rebels; as he “beheld allthese people, than the kynge rested and sayde, how he wolde go no farther, tyllhe knewe what these people ayled, sayenge, if they were in any trouble, howe hewould repease them agayne. The lords that were with hym taried also, as reasonwas when they sawe the kynge tarye.”43 The repeated Pauline “tarying” ofFroissart’s Richard is not only strategic but contagious, spreading to his follow-ers and signaling a caution that, in Shakespeare’s version of his downfall, willemerge to refuse, rather than enact, the smooth execution of justice.

On display in his tarrying is an orchestration no less choreographed thanBolingbroke’s, but differing in its fundamental logic: it denies its audience accessinto fictional, analogical relief. Yet his theatricality implicates the body thatmust be at the foundation of his well-received opening act. As York notes,Bolingbroke is himself a “well-graced actor” who has just made his exit, as ifhinting that beneath Bolingbroke’s movements is a breathing, irreducible bodylike Richard’s, closer to dust than to shows of divinity. Henry’s majesty resultsfrom the same basis of movement, the manipulations of an actor’s body on astage that, when examined head-on and made explicit, infuriate an audienceclamoring for fabrication. As in Froissart, Richard’s tarrying is contagious,threatening to infect the new monarch’s theater and reveal it as simply elaborate,stagey inaction. By calling attention to Bolingbroke’s theater, however, Richarddoes not expose any weakened artifice. Instead, he turns a chronology where theend is clearly in sight, and in which the onlookers are complicit in its construc-


43 Jean Froissart, The Chronicles of Froissart, trans. John Bourchier, 6 vols. (London: DavidNutt, 1902), 3:240.

tion, into one where the present’s facticity comes into focus. The play repeatedlyhints at the fragility of Henry’s political manipulations collapsing into the reve-lation of a slow, exasperating set of movements as apparently insignificant asRichard’s: sometimes a gage is just a gage. Even Henry himself occasionallydemonstrates a Richard-like ability to turn his own axioms into contingen-cies—the sealed letter supposedly indicting Aumerle becomes irrelevant; thetrip to the Holy Land never happens. The procession implicates theater as thecrucible in which the revelation of irrelevance becomes known: sometimes aking is just an actor. But pace Kastan and others, the king is not merely an actorand thus weak: acting, as Richard shows us, can still be conscripted as a way toreveal its own irrelevance, which Paul reclaimed as the origin of his spiritualexcess, rather than as a furtive cover-up of hollowness.

The slow-moving Richard links this gratuitous action to the space of thetheater in which Richard II must take place, where we watch actors make exitsand entrances so as to play the phenomenological trick of fulfilling apparentpromises of narrative. He turns Bolingbroke’s actorly “as if ” into his own Pauline“as not.” In this sense, Richard’s procession extends the mode of performancethat began in the moments following his deposition, in which he becomesacutely attuned to his status as actor:

Nay, all of you that stand and look upon me,Whilst that my wretchedness doth bait myself,Though some of you, with Pilate, wash your hands,Showing an outward pity, yet you PilatesHave here delivered me to my sour cross,And water cannot wash away your sin.

(4.1.237–42)

Here, he casts himself and his audience as unwilling performers in a passionplay, although an intensely disappointing one, since he has forgotten his scriptedlines. Northumberland presents him with the appropriate text, the official arti-cles of deposition to be read. “Mine eyes are full of tears; I cannot see,” respondsRichard (l. 244):

. . . if I turn mine eyes upon myself, I find myself a traitor with the rest;For I have given here my soul’s consentT’undeck the pompous body of a king,Made Glory base and Sovereignty a slave,Proud Majesty a subject, State a peasant.

(ll. 247–52)

Northumberland prods him to read (to Richard’s “what more remains?” heresponds, “No more, but that you read” [l. 222]) but the imposition of textual,


archival logic, where the future is literally scripted, eludes him. Richard persists asbodily remnant incapable of assimilation into the sealed letter of the law, but still—following Paul’s own distinction—insistent on the unseen letter of his heart.44

As Richard’s delays in reading the articles suggest, a fundamental pact isembedded in the play’s depictions of theatrical space: the promise of the passageof time. The revelation of theater’s complicit creation of temporality occurspowerfully in a scenario framed, like Richard’s procession, as a form of specta-cle, when the anxious Queen Isabel steals away in 3.4 to witness the gardener’sextended metaphor about proper horticultural and monarchical rule. In movingto the side, hidden from view, she appears to take literally Bushy’s earlier advicethat so preoccupies Žižek, to “look awry” at the source of her terror, in this casethe news of her husband’s downfall.45 The Queen’s hidden spectatorship tacitlyframes itself as a form of entertainment, albeit a masochistic one, because it fol-lows her deferrals of proffered distractions. She declines playing bowls, thendancing, then storytelling, and finally singing. Struck with melancholy, theQueen seems paralyzed until she proposes an activity that motivates her: whenthe gardener and his workers enter, she commands her retinue to “step into theshadow of these trees” since she is sure “They will talk of state, for everyonedoth so / Against a change; woe is forerun with woe” (3.4.25, 27–28). She electsto see some brief, invisible, possibly instructive theater, woeful though it may be.The dialogue she witnesses presents a long series of comparisons, first implicit,then explicit, between the proper maintenance of a garden and that of a king-dom. The gardener orders his assistant to “Cut off the heads of too fast-grow-ing sprays / That look too lofty in our commonwealth” (ll. 34–35). The gar-dener’s man then protests the uselessness of keeping

law and form and due proportion,Showing, as in a model, our firm estate,When the sea-walled garden, the whole land,Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up.

(ll. 41–44)

The analogic technique collapses shortly thereafter, following a series of autum-nal and macabre images, when the gardener decodes his own allegory, explain-


44 The “letter of the heart” stems from Paul’s awareness of his own letter writing. This dual-ity of codified strictures, on the one hand, and immaterial faith, on the other, also stretches intothe very medium of its conveyance, as Paul writes in 2 Cor. 3:2–3. We could view the epistlesthemselves as a frontier of text collapsing into performance: written in ink, they must disappearinto a more internal mode of faith.

45 Christopher Pye mobilizes the idea of anamorphosis along aesthetic and psychoanalyticallines in his study of the “vanishing point”; see The Regal Phantasm: Shakespeare and the Politicsof Spectacle (New York: Routledge, 1990).

ing that the recently pulled-up weeds are “plucked up, root and all, byBolingbroke— / I mean the Earl of Wiltshire, Bushy, Green” (ll. 52–53). Thereferents exposed, talk turns to a relatively direct relay of news regarding theKing, with the gardener stating, with a light play on words, “Depressed he isalready, and deposed / ’Tis doubt he will be” (ll. 68–69).

When the Queen comes forward to reveal herself as unseen witness to thisextemporaneous show, she asks a potent question: “Why does thou say KingRichard is deposed?” (l. 77). The gardener apologizes but reaffirms her suspi-cion: “Little joy have I / To breathe this news; yet what I say is true” (ll. 81–82).Except that he did not say Richard was deposed—he said he would be and thathe was currently “depressed.” The misprision seems minor, since his depositionhas been framed as inevitable, but the limits of that inevitability are preciselythe stakes of the deposition scene, in which the actions of Richard’s unkingingmust be executed through decrees, speeches, and formal investiture. TheQueen’s mistake creates a narrative hiccup: looking and hearing awry, she hasseen her husband’s anamorphic demise, not the portrait that the gardener putforth. As Madhavi Menon has demonstrated, that portrait, even heard cor-rectly, does not make narrative or moral sense given the logic the play contin-ually asserts elsewhere: are we really to perceive Bolingbroke, the ostensiblehero, as a weed that deserves to be cut down before he gathers strength toreturn and dethrone Richard?46 The gardener carefully crafts a theatricalscene, akin to Bolingbroke’s well-graced walk and drumless advancement, thatnearly passes as historical record, and we witness, like Isabel, its deliberate exe-cution, perhaps even becoming seduced by its rhetorical facility. But the recordproves to be a malleable fiction that can be undermined, however slightly, bythe fissures made visible through a sudden interruption of its seemingly inex-orable syllogism. The gardener, performing a swift miniature of the play’s finalfuneral elegy, attempts to incorporate the Queen into his system of imagisticassignation, monumentalizing her with a planned “bank of rue, sour herb ofgrace” (l. 105). The “grace” the gardener wishes on the Queen must be, ironi-cally, situated, conditional, ritualized, and sealed with a modest signifier in aliterally earthly covenant.

When read as a Pauline mode of performance, though, grace enters the scenebefore the rue is planted, when the logic of the gardener’s signification falls apartin the brief moment of mishearing that unhinges the metaphorical, literary pro-duction of a future. We find implicated in this moment the possibility of a fault


46 Madhavi Menon, “Richard II and the Taint of Metonymy,” ELH 70 (2003): 653–75. ForMenon, metonymy operates as the agent of discord that shatters the metaphorical RosettaStone set forth by the gardener. This metonymy signals a wider critical tension in tying itself toRichard’s obscured and obscuring sexuality.

line extending from the gardener’s pageantry to the stage onto which Richard IIconstantly asserts its own symbolic importance. Such breaks in the mimeticfabric on and of the stage recall the theatrical technique of the “gest,” as conceivedby Bertolt Brecht, philosophical kinsman to Benjamin. The gest attempts todistance the audience from the Aristotelian pull of empathy, allowing “accep-tance or rejection” of stage characters “to take place on a conscious plane, insteadof, as hitherto, in the audience’s subconscious.”47 Like the messianism that turnsus from the pull of historical teleology, Brecht’s gest injects artifice amid embod-iment, with a jarring realization of both aesthetic fakery and the psychicprocesses that accept representation as reality. When situated onstage in theseepisodes, Paul’s de-conditioning of promises removes the body from its positionwithin a progression of significations leading to the future; it mishears, mis-takes, and de-temporalizes the human figure by recalling it to its fundamentalhome on a stage and breaks the essential contract of that stage—that we believeits fictions to be real—to expose fundamentally meaningless movements inspace. As such, the play embeds within itself a critique of representational pol-itics and mimetic fabrication as always dependent on the unnecessary and gra-tuitous performance that Richard himself embodies. We might say Richard’sremainder also operates as a disconcerting, threatening reminder.

Surely many plays, particularly Shakespeare’s, heighten their theatrical self-awareness with techniques that foreshadow Brecht’s aesthetics. But Richard IIsuggests the perversion of a straightforward distancing effect by framing theatri-cal performance as linked inextricably to disappearance. If Brecht seeks to exposetheater’s essential materiality, Richard II attempts to expose its essential absence.And a progression toward absence, as I have been arguing, is drastically differentfrom the revelation of mere theatrical manipulation. Given its metatheatricalbent, Richard II’s messianic performance tilts its staginess toward disappearanceto set up an absurd, if logical, conclusion: within a play so attuned to its owninherent inefficacy as theater, the promise of “nothing” promises its own dissolu-tion, as if attempting the return to a bare stage. His soliloquy in prison offers theclimax of this progression, identifying the entire tangible realm of theater as agratuitous but necessary element of transmission from the suspended presentinto a necessarily unknown future. Still somewhere between “ay” and “no,” theimprisoned non-non-Richard proposes to populate the cell with figments of hisimagination, extending his interior world into a bare room:

I have been studying how I may compareThis prison where I live unto the world;


47 Bertolt Brecht, “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting,” in Brecht on Theatre: The Developmentof an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), 91–99, esp. 91.

And, for because the world is populousAnd here is not a creature but myself,I cannot do it. Yet I’ll hammer’t out.My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul,My soul the father, and these two begetA generation of still-breeding thoughts;And these same thoughts people this little world,In humours like the people of this world,For no thought is contented.

(5.5.1–11)

The speech depicts his cell as a dramatic scene. The children of thought, likecharacters, are born from the soul and brain, seeking bodies to enact them.By figuring creation as a scene of disappearance, rather than presence,Richard becomes both the explicit remains lingering within the relentlesslyfictive world of the new kingdom and the automorphic progenitor of newabsences. An imprisoned pariah alone in a room imagining nonexistent chil-dren—this is an apt embodiment of the remnant, the concept from Romansthat supplies Agamben’s title. Richard imagines this Pauline promise ofnothing, in a time of between-ness, as a scene of, and within, the theater.These unseen agents, as manifestations of grace, recall the earlier nonexist-ent army that Richard attempts to summon to combat nonexistent childrenwhen he first hears of betrayal:

Yet know: my Master, God omnipotent,Is mustering in His clouds on our behalfArmies of pestilence, and they shall strikeYour children, yet unborn and unbegot,That lift your vassal hands against my headAnd threat the glory of my precious crown.

(3.3.85–90)

And he has called for the production of nothing with his desire to transformhimself into a tale told by a fireside in France, or another tale of dead kings, ora melting snowman, or empty bucket. The prison scene answers these wisheswith a fantasy of total disembodiment—a fantasy that happens to be real, sincetheater must be founded on disembodiment.

By insisting on a mode of theater that is, on one hand, a field of insubstanceand, on the other, undeniable materiality, Richard also links his Pauline strug-gle to an epistemological conflict in early modern drama. Theater was com-monly, and cunningly, labeled nothingness, as with the comic endings of BenJonson that “give” the audience nothing: in The Alchemist, Face promises togrant to the audience the money he has earned if they will only clap—a congame, of course, since he will cease to exist at that point, being only a charac-


ter.48 Theatrical materiality’s ambiguous status also characterizes accounts ofantitheatrical fear that situate the playhouse as a site both overly insubstantial,with rumors of demonic possession, and overly fleshy, with the gendered anxi-eties about boy actors actually seducing patrons. Polemicists such as PhilipStubbes and Stephen Gosson attempt to locate theater’s vices in the revelationof unseen spiritual force while at the same time loathing, as Stubbes puts it withgusto, “such wanton gestures, such bawdie speaches, such laughing and fleering,such kissing and bussing, such clipping and culling, Suche winckinge andglancinge of wanton eyes, and the like.”49 Richard, a corpse who births invisiblecharacters, stages the horizon of these two seemingly intractably separate vec-tors.50 It makes sense, then, that offstage music, unseen and intangible, answersRichard’s exasperation by mirroring his own troubled state. This unexplainedcue does not keep time, and neither does Richard, who rehearses over andover—repeating with a difference—the kinging and unkinging of his finalmoments, his “ay” and “no,” in awe of their futility:

Thus play I in one person many people,And one contented. Sometimes am I king;Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,And so I am.

(5.5.31–34)

Locating music on the border of being and disappearance, he links himselfagain to the flickering in-between state afforded by performance, as when hecompares himself to Helen of Troy, one of the early modern stage’s most well-known phantasms, in his deposition:

Was this face the faceThat every day under his household roofDid keep ten thousand men? Was this the faceThat like the sun did make beholders wink?

(4.1.281–84)

I read Richard here as more sympathetic to the succubus that impersonatesHelen (and, by extension, the young boy who may have played the succubus


48 See Ben Jonson, “The Alchemist” and Other Plays, ed. Gordon Campbell (New York:Oxford UP, 1995). Face tells the audience that he will put himself “On you, that are my coun-try; and this pelf / Which I have got, if you do quit me, rests / To feast you often, and invitenew guests” (5.5.164–66). Jonson’s plays frequently end with a last-minute assertion of theatri-cal presence, as if anticipating the drama’s immediate disappearance.

49 Phillip Stubbes’s Anatomy of the Abuses in England in Shakspere’s Youth, A.D. 1583, ed. FrederickJ. Furnivall, 2 vols. (London: New Shakspere Society / N. Trübner and Co., 1877–79), 1:144.

50 Brian Walsh similarly builds on the theater’s capacity for invoking the lack of somethingthrough its presence; see Shakespeare, the Queen’s Men, and the Elizabethan Performance ofHistory (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 139.

playing Helen) and challenges Faustus, and his audience, to distinguish histor-ical resurrection from demonic impersonation. Like Helen’s effigy, Richard hasbeen reduced to something empty but powerful, irrelevant but affective.51

By revealing the slippery mechanics of the stage, and their complicity inmaintaining the ruse of presence and temporality, the deposed, tarrying, disap-pearing Richard has ironically assumed the fate that York had earlier feared forthe exiled Bolingbroke—that he will

take from TimeHis charters and his customary rights;Let not tomorrow then ensue today;Be not thyself, for how art thou a kingBut by fair sequence and succession?

(2.1.195–99)

Reading Richard II alongside Paul, we can recover from this blank futility thesuggestion of an alternative time and space that by definition cannot be shownin its own medium. The nonexistent children Richard conjures in prison signalthe impossibility of the future to become realized through the means of hisbody alone, even if his body is willfully unneeded in the newly prescribedorder: on stage, the impossible looks invisible. This conundrum finds unex-pected harmony with one of contemporary theory’s most powerful analyses oftemporality’s ruse, Lee Edelman’s No Future. The remainder of Richard indi-cates the lack of a realizable future within the mimetic world of the stage, andby extension the mimetic world of politics that, Edelman suggests, constructsitself on the illusion of narrative. Politics as such becomes “a name for the tem-poralization of desire, for its translation into a narrative, for its teleologicaldetermination. Politics, that is, by externalizing and configuring in the fictiveform of a narrative, allegorizes or elaborates sequentially, precisely as desire,those overdeterminations of libidinal positions and inconsistencies of psychicdefenses occasioned by what disarticulates the narrativity of desire.”52 Themaintenance of desire’s narrative, furthermore, depends on the abjection of oneasocial figure in particular—the queer—who when expressed in popular fic-tions finds an abnegating and excessively detemporalizing power.53 Richard


51 For an intriguing reading of the Helen-succubus scene as it relates to “conjuring,” seeAndrew Sofer, “How To Do Things with Demons: Conjuring Performatives in Doctor Faustus,”Theatre Journal 61.1 (2009): 1–21.

52 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke UP, 2004), 9.53 Edelman labels this figure the “sinthomosexual,” who is burdened with “denying the

appeal of fantasy, refusing the promise of futurity that means each tear, however mean, inreality’s dress with threads of meaning (attached as they are to the eye-catching lure we mightsee as the sequins of sequence, which dazzle our vision by producing the constant illusion of

presents an especially apposite emblem of the future’s queer effacement, notleast because a persistent homophobia has dogged his character through muchof its history, from accusations of effeminacy to implied sodomitical relation-ships between the king and his closest favorites.54 To recover messianism in theplay, however, builds on Edelman’s influential thesis by amending his descrip-tion of queerness, that it “exposes sexuality’s inevitable coloration by the drive:its insistence on repetition, its stubborn denial of teleology, its resistance todeterminations of meaning (except insofar as it means this refusal to admitsuch determinations of meaning), and, above all, its rejection of spiritualizationthrough marriage to reproductive futurism.”55 This arsenal of disruptive tech-niques characterizes the king’s modes of disidentification with the narrativethat bears his name, but, as I have shown, his attentiveness to Pauline per-formances provides spirituality’s radicalization rather than its rejection. Thepower recovered in Richard’s blank charters is a refutation of an intelligiblefuture, not of the future at all. Richard’s queerness allies with James Kuzner’snotion of the “unbounded” subject, one whose vulnerability and relinquish-ment of autonomy signals a form of life that threatens the coherence of thestate.56 In directing the actions that demonstrate his own gratuitousness,Richard shows that the theater, that classic marker of artifice, is the idealmedium in which this incoherence can be (un)staged. He marks the potentialdisappearance of the present by absurdly, though potently, suggesting a possi-bility of action that cannot be constrained by the stage or by the appearance ofteleology that the stage symptomatizes.57

Time and again, Richard II argues for theater’s inconsequence, but time andagain, it does so in a carefully constructed theatrical scene, one that links itselfthe conditions of the play’s own realization. If Richard exposes a form of graceinherent to a well-executed failure of performance, he allows us to interpret theconclusion of his soliloquy, which he muses over in brief doggerel, as moreaffirming than pessimistic:


consequence)” (No Future, 35). For an application of Edelman’s theories to Shakespeare, see“Against Survival: Queerness in a Time That’s Out of Joint,” Shakespeare Quarterly 62 (2011):148–69.

54 Laurence Olivier called Richard “‘an out-and-out pussy queer, with mincing gestures tomatch’” (quoted in Menon, 667).

55 Edelman, No Future, 27 (emphasis added).56 James Kuzner, Open Subjects: English Renaissance Republicans, Modern Selfhoods, and the

Virtue of Vulnerability (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2011), 4, passim.57 For a subtle reading of how fictional spaces can reflect, rather than deny, a teleological

image of the sovereign, see Graham Hammill, The Mosaic Constitution: Political Theology andImagination from Machiavelli to Milton (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012), 257.

But whate’er I be,Nor I nor any man that but man isWith nothing shall be pleased till he be easedWith being nothing.

(5.5.38–41)

His earlier realization that Richard must “nothing be” reappears here as a releaseof identity, rather than a statement of defeat. Richard exists in the tensionbetween those words, “being” and “nothing.” I read “nothing” literally as “no-thing,” or more accurately “no-no-thing.” Richard is not a thing before the law,but instead a remnant that does not conform, a gratuitous bit that engages thesame performance over and over until something fundamentally alien to thepresent can be awakened. So too, then, is the repetitive act of theatrical embod-iment “no thing,” formless but dependent on mobilizing forms. But Richard’sbeing persists in affirming a kind of life: he is neither mere matter, nor a rejectedscrap. He becomes a nothing that lives, a story that is performed; in short, hebecomes an actor. By placing the essential conditions of the early modern the-ater, where insubstantiality and presence collide, within the political narrativethat such theater produces, Richard II suggests theater’s power in the act of itsown disenfranchisement—the very pact that Paul repeatedly demands in hisown carefully scripted de-formation. In line with this reclamation of theatrical-ity, I have built on Edelman’s work to suggest that Richard’s rejection of politics,by way of his rejection of presence and time, comprises the paradoxical mani-festation of political intervention. He issues a challenge to the conditional andassured promise of a future—the future seemingly imbued by the mimetic andpoetic craft that the sovereign assures—by asserting that there is no future, atleast none understandable under the claims of radical self-abnegation. Richard,onlooker to insubstantial sight and listener of unresolved melody, is both frus-trated and moved, as are we, the actual audience to a play that itself neverresolves. The theater we witness becomes meaningless, but as a result, it cat-alyzes itself into the gap between one world and the next. The blank stage thatsends tremors through the narrative of Richard II is also its foundation, and ithints at a kind of liberation so radical that we cannot conceive of it as a lie,empty pageant, or void, but instead as a force that illuminates its effects, how-ever briefly, in the charged uselessness of the present.


\"What more remains?”: Messianic Performance in Richard II

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