From Plucking to Purgation: Negative Transcendence in Shakespeare’s Political Drama

Abstract

<p>This paper re-examines Shakespeare's representation of power and authority through an analysis of two words: "pluck" and "melt". It argues, first, that Shakespeare's equation of power and plucking works to unmask authority's appropriative propensities. And second, that Shakespeare raises an alternative to extant sovereignty, which I term "melting". Although his plays incorporate Tudor political theology, they also unground the masterful sovereign through processes of loss, negation, and dissolution. Drawing on Theodor Adorno's "Negative Dialectics", the paper reads Shakespeare's drama as a negative mode of political thought that can, at times, imaginatively transcend early modern absolutism.<br></p>