ABSTRACT
Half a century after Michel Foucault’s career was launched in the Anglo-Saxon world, with the English translation of Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l’âge classique as Madness and Civilization, his reputation within Shakespeare studies appears to have sunk without trace. In particular, his claim that “in Shakespeare madness occupies an extreme position” that “opens into a tear in the fabric of the world”, because there is “no going back to reason” from Lear’s lunacy or the delirium of Lady Macbeth, has never recovered from Jacques Derrida’s crushing deconstruction of its illusory premise that it is possible to let “madness speak for itself”. However, the fact that this work is now discredited as history, for relying on literary and artistic sources such as Bosch’s Ship of Fools, makes it all the more vital to reconsider what Foucault might yet contribute as a reader of Shakespeare. What can be salvaged for literary criticism from the great wreck of this Ship of Fools? The answer, Foucault’s late lectures suggested, is a critique that identifies the dark affinity between the sovereign and the beast in Shakespeare’s Ubu-esque king: a monster who reveals not madness “outside”, but “within the hollow crown”.
