ABSTRACT
The chapter makes a comparison between two tendencies in the interpretation of Ernst Kantorowicz’s depiction of “the king’s two bodies,” namely, the body natural and the body symbolic. Under one interpretation, which can be found in the sovereignty doctrine of Carl Schmitt, in actual practice the natural body absorbs the symbolic one, and the sovereign (“he who decides the exception”) becomes, at least potentially, absolute. In the other, the symbolic body retains the role of above all providing continuity and legitimacy for the successive natural bodies, which in that respect remain wholly subordinate to it. The distinction is illustrated with examples drawn from Shakespeare’s Richard II and two Henry IV plays, in which misconceived attempts to subsume one of the king’s bodies to the other, by Richard II and Henry IV, are both depicted as a kind of usurpation and the right relation between them prefigured by the role of Prince Hal.
