ABSTRACT
The violence that exposes both the lady in the blazon and the severed head on the stage refuses the "metaphysics of the inner body" according to which "the truth always lies within, in the interior, hidden by a surface sheath, which one has to penetrate". The crisis of synecdoche manifests in a dwelling on the spectacle of fragmentation that posits the material world as recalcitrant to the unifying discourses of kingship and nationhood. In the epideictic project of the blasonneurs and the Histories as staged in The Wars and The Plantagenets, the crisis is manifested as competing narratives. The material conditions of the theater, therefore, body forth the fundamental dislocation suggested by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio: the broken linkage between the part and the whole, and the inability of the part to invoke a salutary and explanatory context.
