Dead Men Talking

In a recent discussion of responses to looming catastrophe, Timothy Morton writes that literature imagining global warming manages to “fuse elegy and prophecy.” Offering “elegies for a future” apocalypse that is now only emerging as an incomplete process, future-anterior lamentation indulges a “subject position [of] passive enjoyment” (Morton 2010: 254). Critical traditions have read Shakespeare’s Richard II as simultaneously an elegiac evocation of a past order based on sacral monarchy and a prophetic anticipation of a pending crisis for the contemporary form of that order. ¹ Anticipating the approaching train-wreck, one listens to extended, moving evocations of loss and ruin before, during, and after the fact. The play’s pervasive elegiac tone, furthermore, is especially pronounced in the pathos-laden treatment of its largely passive protagonist’s lyrical “subjectivity.” ² The suffering Richard has evinced comparisons with the martyr-monarchs that Walter Benjamin describes in Baroque Trauerspiel (Luis-Martinez 2008), his “conspicuously poetic” language taken to register an inability to reconcile history with transcendence (Moretti 1995: 71). ³