ABSTRACT
William Shakespeare establishes his revisionary and original dramatic authorship in the rewritten recollection of a scene of diplomatic misrepresentation. As it happens, several of Shakespeare's plays ask a similar question as they probe dramatic as well as diplomatic representation and authority. The Henry VI plays have a provocative way of demonstrating that: their ambassadors, the Duke of Suffolk and the Earl of Warwick, shift from representing to creating and even usurping kings. Hamlet's revision of his own diplomatic commission is an act of re-authorship that leads to the diplomatic destruction of kings. The distinction between substantial authority and shadowy representation is once more confounded as the identity of the absent king collapses into that of his present representative. The role of diplomatic relations in determining statehood has indeed been recognized in the theories of the state now commonly employed in international law. The constitutive theory views legal statehood as fundamentally decided by international recognition.
