Monarch’s Multiple Bodies: Implementing Body Politic Metaphor on Present-Day North American Stages

Abstract

The paper seeks to explore the strategies instrumental for the implementation of the body politic metaphor that had been active in Western culture since classical antiquity in the plays authored by present-day North American dramatists (Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play, USA, 2010, and Timothy Findley’s Elizabeth Rex, Canada, 2000). Drawing upon the concept of the “king’s two bodies” (E. Plowden, E. Кantorowicz, М. Аxton, А. Мusolff, L. Montrose and other New Historicists), the author sets out to demonstrate that in S. Ruhl’s dramatic cycle the metaphor serves to indicate the inextricable links between the concepts of power, the sacred, and the theatrical, whereas Т. Findley uses it to study the ontology of sex and gender in political and theatrical contexts. It is argued that the age-old somatic metaphor conceived in the archaic layers of human psyche manifests its viable receptive potential through its efficient functioning in the early 21st century cultural artifacts.