© W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2015 DOI 10.1179/1041257315Z.00000000077

Richard II and the Unforgetting MessiahDoug EskewColorado State University—Pueblo, USA

Critics have long agreed that Shakespeare’s Richard II is deeply related to the Christian messiah, but they rarely think beyond a simple acknowledgment of the fact that Richard is a “Christ figure.” This essay argues that critics have failed to acknowledge fully Richard’s messianic character because they have operated without a fully informed theory of the messianic — a theory that questions the trustworthiness of standard historical narratives and narra-tive arcs. Richard’s analogical self-forgetting issues from a traditional theol-ogy handed down from Aquinas. A diverse set of writers — from Vida to Agamben — have described these modes of self-forgetting and analogy as the work of the messiah. This essay argues that Shakespeare deserves inclu-sion in this group.

keywords Shakespeare, Richard II, the messianic, political theology, Aquinas, Benjamin, Agamben

In book five of Vida’s Christiad (1535), the poem’s hero, hanging tormented in cru-cifixion, experiences something on the order of atheistic doubt. As Vida imagines it, Christ “feared this infamous kind of bitter death. His soul was in turmoil, and his courage faltered, when he brooded on the excruciating torments and sorrows to come” (495–98). From these fears and torments, Christ cries out a version of the lama sabachthani: “Highest father,” Vida’s hero asks, “why have you forsaken me in this last ordeal?” (502–3). Vida goes on to flesh out the canonical narratives in a way that pushes the boundaries of theological decorum. In his view, Christ cries out “as if [veluti] forgetting he was God” (494, emphasis added). In explaining the lama sabachthani by way of analogy, Vida summons a commonplace explanation for uncharacteristic behavior: one acts uncharacteristically because one has forgotten oneself. Such a mode of explanation, by way of an analogical as if, helps the reader to think the unthinkable. By saying it was as if God believed himself abandoned by God, readers can entertain the notion that God did abandon God, or even that there had been no God there in the first place.1

exemplaria, Vol. 27 No. 4, October 2015, 307–328

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Shakespeare’s King Richard II cries out and forgets himself in a manner similar to Vida’s Christ, and this forgetting likewise enables readers to think the unthink-able. Standing on the coast of Wales and hearing that the Welsh forces have gone to Bolingbroke, Richard falls into a fit of despair because he thinks he has been for-saken. Aumerle counsels, “Remember who you are” (3.2.78), which enables Richard to rebound: “I had forgot myself. Am I not king?” (3.2.79).2 Unlike Vida, whose Christ encourages his audience to think the unthinkable about God’s belief in God, Shakespeare’s Richard encourages his audience to think the unthinkable about its own belief in history and confirms (as Vida also suggests) that there is something divine in forgetting. In this essay, I argue that critics have failed to acknowledge fully Richard’s critique of history, and its associated divine forgetting, because they have operated without a fully informed theory of the messianic. Critics have long agreed that Richard has a relation to the Christian messiah, but because of a theo-retical limitation, they have been unable to think beyond a simple acknowledgment of the fact that Richard appears as a “Christ figure.” What a theory of the messianic affords us is a way of thinking that has been, for standard criticism, unthinkable: to question the trustworthiness of standard historical narratives and their pretense of adequate memory. Moreover, as much as the play allows audiences to think beyond ideological boundaries, this kind of analogical thinking is important for the play the-matically. It is not just Richard who, as a self-forgetting king, may think and act dif-ferently; traditional theology handed down from Aquinas suggests a similar strategy by way of a kenotic as if. A diverse set of writers — from Vida to Agamben — has brought together these modes of self-forgetting and analogy as the work of the mes-siah. Shakespeare, I will argue, deserves to be included in this group.

I begin with moments in which Richard boldly thinks of himself as if he were God to argue for his messianic features. Richard’s pretensions to godhead are, indeed, precisely what scholars have long criticized, seeing his self-comparisons to God as evi-dence of his morally corrupt and distinctly un-Christlike extravagance. Ewan Fernie, for instance, asserts that Richard “assumes too much divinity for himself” (71) when he imagines his return from Ireland, “rising in our throne, the east” (3.2.46), turning aright everything that has gone wrong. James Siemon sees Richard’s lament of his “Three Judases, each one thrice worse than Judas” (3.2.128) as an “extreme utterance [that] suggests [Richard’s] own self-centered failure to observe ‘law, form, and due proportion’” (190). And Timothy Rosendale argues that when Richard arrives upon the Welsh coast from Ireland and claims to his jittery supporters that “Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm from an anointed king” (3.2.50–1), the king displays his “corrupt and failed absolutism”; the way that Richard treats the kingly unction as if it were something more than just a ritual sign exemplifies “his systematic hermeneutic collapsing of sign and referent” (128; cf., Norbrook). In one sense, I agree that Richard’s transgressive actions are important to the play, but I disagree that they are obviously morally or linguistically problematic. I will argue that, when perceived through the paradigm of the messianic, the king has a strong case for making his comparisons to the Christian deity.

I do not argue that Shakespeare represents Richard as having a complex under-standing of the messianic on which he consciously models himself. Richard is no wise messiah acting with purpose toward a redemptive goal. He can seem, for instance,

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foolishly bipolar in going back and forth between proclaiming himself the giver of life (“As a long-parted mother with her child / … greet I thee my earth” [3.2.8–10]) to proclaiming himself always already dead (“mock not flesh and blood / With solemn reverence” [3.2.167–68]). Instead, I am arguing that Shakespeare gives us a much more complex and untidy mode of thinking about Richard’s kingship. When Richard entreats his companions to “sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings” (3.2.151–52), we have within our view the divinely appointed king himself speaking of how kingly succession is not divinely appointed. Shakespeare’s maneuver is here much like Vida’s “as if”: as Vida’s divine Christ both does and does not lose his faith in God, so Richard both believes in his own divinity and denies there is anything divine in being king. This kind of messianic figure stands apart from Ernst Kantorowicz’s description of kingly “gemination,” which finds a stable economy between the divine and the human (24). It also stands apart from Kantorowicz’s description of an almost clichéd narrative structure for Richard’s trajectory from king at the play’s beginning, to fool in its middle, and to God thereafter, “with Man’s wretchedness as a perpetual companion and antithesis at every stage” (27). Rather than positing a structurally coherent progression built upon a stable economy of the king’s two bodies or a structurally incoherent and corrupt morality, the present essay argues that throughout the play Richard embodies a messianic simultaneity, not a narrative of progressive apotheosis. Richard’s unsettling back and forth, I will argue, displays a messianic sense of self, especially when we consider it with respect to what Vida reveals about the self-forgetting messiah.3

Shakespeare never uses the term “messianic,” a term that was not, in fact, avail-able in English until the eighteenth century. Nor does he use the term “messiah,” a term that was rarely used in early modern English except in specialized theological literature. He did, however, use the term “anointed,” which is related to messiah in that the latter is a transliteration (by way of Greek and Latin) of māšīaḥ, the Hebrew word for one who is anointed. Similarly, the Greek word for one who is anointed is χριστός, the basis for the English term “Christ.” Resonances of both messiah and Christ may, therefore, be heard when Bishop Carlisle terms Richard “the figure of God’s majesty, / His captain, steward, deputy elect, / Anointed, crownèd” (4.1.116–18) and when Gaunt terms him “God’s substitute, / His deputy anointed in his sight” (1.2.37–38). Of course, Richard recognizes the similarity between himself and the Christian messiah; we see this recognition throughout the play, including in his previously quoted claim that “Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm from an anointed king … The deputy elected by the Lord” (3.2.50–53).

Inasmuch as the term “messianic” gathers its own specialized uses in more recent accounts of political theology,4 I will argue that Shakespeare’s characterization of Richard II fits well in this newer critical tradition.5 Specifically, I focus on accounts of the messianic that emphasize its kenosis, its self-emptying of divinity, which allows for the imposition of decidedly a-theistic (or human) qualities that at the same time remain dialectically related to its theistic (or divine) qualities. A central figure for the articulation of this messianic kenosis is the Apostle Paul, who is not only himself emptied of both Jewish and Greek identifications (“There is not Jew nor Greek … For all you are one in Christ Jesus” [Gal. 3.28]),6 but so, too, is his messiah, whom he characterized as a God and king who “exinanited [emptied, ἐκένωσεν] himself, taking

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the form of a servant, made into the similitude of men, and in shape found as man. He humbled himself, made obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross” (Phil. 2.7–8). Such a portrait of messianic kingship — of a humble, tortured, and ultimately empty divine ruler, finds its most vivid expression in the moment of self-forgetting inherent in the lama sabachthani.

Unlike scholars who assume Shakespeare and his audiences would have agreed with the Lancastrian-biased chroniclers — the victors’ version of Richard as arrogant, overreaching, and despotic — I will argue that Shakespeare’s text points to a differ-ent view of Richard’s character, one conceived remarkably like Walter Benjamin’s view of the messianic in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” This similarity is perhaps unsurprising, for one of Benjamin’s points was that the religious con-cept of a Jewish messiah could be found in many political contexts. In rejecting the material and political desires of the English people and, especially, of the nobility, Shakespeare’s Richard rewrites his rule in terms of a “messianic cessation of happen-ing” (Benjamin 265) — a standstill in the historical trajectory that has been written by the victors for the purpose of their own continued victories. This paradigm of the messianic integrates a number of distinctions we often take for granted. As Richard notes, the arc of history can be seen both as the lives and orderly succession of mon-archies and as nothing more than “sad stories of the death of kings” who always die “murdered.” A messiah is uniquely situated to embody the simultaneous status of the victor’s divine order and the victim’s forgotten defeats.

* * *

Over forty years ago, James Calderwood noted that Shakespeare imagined King Richard’s despair as messianic in its resemblance to “Christ’s passion”: “when seem-ingly dispossessed of divinity and reduced to an unsymbolic dying animal, Christ cries out as one abandoned of God” (165). Calderwood claims that a “nobler, more Christlike Richard” might pull off such a resemblance, but compared to Christ’s role as “redemptive Logos,” Richard's messianic qualities are “mere noise, a rustle of air” (166). According to Calderwood, when compared to Christ Richard not only owns an “embarrassing unlikeliness of character and conduct” (165), he also does not care for those below him and therefore cannot bridge the gap between human and divine. “Of [Richard’s] bonds to his subjects,” Calderwood said, “he is largely oblivious; of his ties to God he has no doubt” (165). This critical position — that Richard overemphasizes his connection with the divine at the expense of his connection with the people — is correct enough. What troubles me about Calderwood’s evaluation is that as consistent as it is with the ideals of kingship, it is inconsistent with those of a messiah.

The Christian messiah was not, after all, well connected to his public and its opin-ions. This state of disconnection was a primary point of his earthly existence: Christ was despised and rejected of men, was denied by his followers, and was betrayed by at least one of them; and even the people of Jerusalem chose to save Barabas’s life over his. There is, moreover, no reason to think any population would have done differently for a figure who had actively rejected their material and political concerns, telling them not to worry about their basic needs, money, and possessions, or about

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the ethnic, religious, and political affiliations of their neighbors. For holding these unpopular positions, the Christian messiah was destroyed in an orgy of popular vio-lence. At the height of that destruction, the only tethering he had left, his connection to God the Father, was broken by that very Father. This is the messianic “isolation” G. K. Chesterton spoke of — an isolation so dire that it is “too difficult for human speech.” Chesterton, like Vida and Shakespeare, must speak of the unutterable in terms of “as if” seeming. Thus, for Chesterton, the best way to articulate that which cannot be said, or thought, is to say that in the moment Christ cried out the lama sabachthani, “God seemed for an instant to be an atheist” (256–57, emphasis added; see also Žižek, “Job”).

To think the unthinkable — such it is in theology and in Shakespeare studies. I am reminded here of Richard Strier’s notion of “resistant structures” and in particular the unthinkable territories from which critics are forbidden. Strier describes those moments when a perfectly reasonable solution to a critical problem is present but that solution nevertheless remains ideologically distant. Problems occur for critics because they do not have a chance to think about reasonable solutions before an overarch-ing “Grand Scholarly Generalization clicks in” (179). One scholarly generalization in Richard II criticism is (to quote Calderwood) that Richard’s “unlikeness of character and conduct” (165), his undisciplined, extravagant, and criminal actions, prevent us from comparing such a king to the Christian messiah. Indeed, many generations ago in our shared critical history, the fact that Richard compares himself with such effete flourish to the Christian savior is exhibit one in making the case that he is duplici-tous, and even diabolical, to the core. It is this tradition that, according to Madhavi Menon, allowed Laurence Olivier to identify “King Richard ‘as an out-and-out pussy queer, with mincing gestures to match’” (667).

Even Charles Forker, whose grasp of the play is without peer, cannot imagine the correspondences between Richard and the Christian messiah has any real force. In his edition of the play, Forker dismisses the idea of Richard as messiah even as he sees and articulates that very comparison. Situating Richard within the context of early modern English politics is not generally problematic for Forker, and he notes that Shakespeare keeps in play historically “contradictory traditions” (24). One tra-dition is Lancastrian — the tradition from which most of the chroniclers wrote and that imagined “Richard [as] a weak, incompetent and despotic king, extravagantly self-indulgent, deaf to wise counsel, dominated by corrupt and selfish favourites and altogether ruinous to his country” (24). The other tradition is Yorkist, which imag-ined “the youthful Richard was more victim than villain — a generally devout and well-meaning monarch” (24). Forker finds both of these opposing traditions at work in the play, and his is a fairly standard reading of a many-minded Shakespeare who practices the Elizabethan via media. Shakespeare, he claims, “manipulate[s] audience responses in such a way as to keep approval and disapproval, or sympathy and aliena-tion, in a more or less constant state of flux” (27). The complex and contradictory positions one must inhabit as a player in an economic or political field is unprob-lematic here; yet theological complexity and theological contradiction do seem more distant. Thus Forker observes a “certain doubleness of perspective” with regard to the king is “rooted in … sacramental theology,” such that Richard “contrives to assert the sacred inviolability of his office while simultaneously divesting himself”

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(35, emphasis added). Furthermore, Forker allows that there is “a certain theological validity” to the “analogy between the dethroning of an anointed sovereign and the Passion” (36, emphasis added). Forker makes accurate observations but at the same time invalidates those same observations with the distancing effects of the adjectival certain. In many ways, the aim of the present essay is to bring out the suggestive force of this “theological validity.”

The standard reading of the opening of the play sees Richard’s dealings with Bolingbroke and Mowbray as bumbling in his attempt to have it all ways at once, to serve both as adjudicator and as perpetrator. There is something pathological in his attempt to set aright the accusers at the same time that he bears ultimate responsibility for the murder of Gloucester. Richard’s sentence — that Bolingbroke and Mowbray must “Forget, forgive” (1.1.156) — is the kind of odd and ineffectual judicial action one might expect from such an odd, undisciplined, and corrupt mon-arch. A messianic paradigm is, however, consistent with Richard’s sentence, in that it dismisses the concerns of property, reputation, and talion justice for an emphasis on agapeic peace. One might correctly point out that Richard is no figure of agape, for he wants the men to forget and forgive in order to cover up his own complicity in Gloucester’s murder. This double position as both messianic judge and actual per-petrator makes no strictly linear, rational sense. Yet Shakespeare’s play is perfectly in line with such double perspectives, questioning the idea of coherent justice and decorum. For instance, York conjures up the notion of linear succession in the hope that Richard will act with all rational decorum. “Take Hereford’s rights away,” he tells Richard,

and take from TimeHis charters and his customary rights:Let not tomorrow then ensue today;Be not thyself, for how art thou a kingBut by fair sequence and succession? (2.1.196–200)

If you take away Bolingbroke’s property rights, York says, then you might as well take away Time’s rights to the temporal realm. Tomorrow won’t follow today. You (Richard) won’t be king, either, because that’s how you got into your position — “by fair sequence and succession.” Shakespeare, however, contrasts this official reading of history by depicting Richard standing on the Welsh shoreline and recalling that the crown is not easily passed from one monarch to another. The “sad stories of the death of kings” include slayings in battle, poisonings, and depositions. Richard claims that these kings were “all murdered” (3.2.156). Hyperbole or no, the business of becoming and remaining king was a bloody one — certainly not just and fair.

Note that what stood in for succession in Richard’s own case included becoming the nominal king at the age of ten and remaining the focus of his uncles’ strata-gem throughout his childhood and into his coming of age. Indeed, the murder of Gloucester seems to have been committed on Richard’s behalf to retain the suppos-edly orderly line of succession, for Gloucester had led a successful rebellion against Richard and, before his death, had apparently plotted further rebellions. More obvi-ously, of course, the play itself exemplifies yet another successful break in orderly succession — a break that, as Shakespeare suggests in Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 and

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Henry V, Bolingbroke and his son continue to pay for down the line. As King Harry tells us in Henry V, he has recently moved Richard to a new grave where he claims to have “bestowed more contrite tears / Than from it issued forcèd drops of blood” (4.1.278–79). Harry pays for “Five hundred poor … / Who twice a day their withered hands hold up / Toward heaven to pardon blood” (280–82). And he has built two chapels where the priests “Sing still for Richard’s soul” (284). If we wanted to be linear about Harry’s status, we could say that he came to the kingship by no fault of his own. Yet because the kingly “sad stories” admit a simultaneity beyond “fair sequence,” we understand, along with Harry, that his rule is always misbegotten and illegitimate. York is correct: the ontological position of king makes no sense with-out the ideology of “fair sequence.” And yet Shakespeare and his kings suggest that there is no linear justice, no sequential fairness, and no drawn-out providence. For Richard (and Harry), order and justice have collapsed. Richard bears, messianically and simultaneously, the position of peacemaker and murderer, and he does so in a single breath: “Forget, forgive.”

Forgetting and forgiving neatly encapsulates the twin impulses, divine and human, of the messianic. Forgiving, while divine, assumes that one remember a past tres-pass, while forgetting, a specifically human mode, makes forgiving unnecessary. This contradictory dyad informs Benjamin’s appraisal of the messianic. For him, the mes-sianic is focused on historical time — what is remembered of the past and how one might forgive yet still resist oppression. The problem is that historical time — linear perspective on history and rational narrative structure of historical memory — is rigged. According to Benjamin, when we accept history’s argument, we accept that time marches on in a discernible arc of causation, one event leading to another. When we unskeptically read history, we accept the victors’ version of events. We accept, moreover, that linear causation is knowable and that it sets the standard for our sense of rational, coherent discourse. These narratives furthermore tend to speak of a glory that continually buries the victors’ degradation of the defeated. Of course, the “past” is not what happened — it’s a narrative made up of a selected set of data in which the victors appear to be supremely (and naturally) important.

Benjamin compares the composition of history to a state of emergency, for in a political state of emergency, as in the composition of history, a sovereign entity decides what counts — what’s exceptional, what rises above everything else and matters — and what remains as the forgotten muddle of the everyday.7 If history itself is one grand state of emergency, Benjamin proposes that it cannot be opposed or defeated without “a real state of emergency” (259), something like the hitting of a reset but-ton, of a sovereign figure suspending the rule of law in order to purify and reinstate that very law. According to Benjamin, therefore, the historical materialist looks for moments of “a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past” (265). The historical materialist “takes this [moment] as his point of departure” and

stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the con-stellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the “time of the now” [Jetztzeit] which is shot through with chips of Messianic time. (265)

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In this kind of revolutionary criticism, the historical materialist refuses to go along with the rigged system and retells the past in terms of a discovery of a present oppres-sion and in doing so fuses it with an otherwise anachronistic past. Such a fusion makes no sense to the structures of rationality; such a fusion is precisely what is meant by a Hegelian aufheben. The sublation brought about through this time of the now brings together past and present, preserves them, elevates them, and cancels them.8 A figure who has messianic power is not tied to remembering in terms of a traditional historical narrative, nor is the messiah tied to forgetting that narrative. The messiah remembers the oppressors’ story in order to oppose it and forgets it in order to construct a time of the now in which action might be taken on behalf of the victims. The messiah both forgives past atrocities to make room for positive action and does not forgive in order to activate justice. It is from this messianic vantage that we might evaluate King Richard’s seemingly odd instruction to forget and forgive, addressed both to his political enemy, Bolingbroke, and his advocate, Mowbray. Such an instruction makes no sense to any reasonable criteria of kingly action, but it does make sense in terms of an “inoperative” messianic.9

We can easily read this kind of messiah in the Christian holy texts, where Christ, who is seen as God, cries out to God that he has abandoned him. Two of the synoptic gospels, Matthew and Mark, record this cry and do so in a remarkable way. While the rest of the New Testament is written in Koine Greek, these words are given to us both in Greek and in the Aramaic dialect spoken by Jesus and other first-century Jews. In both texts, the messiah’s tortured cry is first presented in transliterated Aramaic — Ηλι ηλι λαμα σαβαχθανι — and then translated into Greek.10 For premod-ern theologians, the central problem of the lama sabachthani was not the appearance of the Aramaic for this tortured cry. The central problem was the way God seemed to lose faith in himself. In order to explain this contradiction, mainstream theologians focused less on the mystical paradox and more on a linear, rational arrangement of the divine and the human in the figure of the Christ. For most theologians, the solu-tion was found in the hypostatic union — the union that explained the relationship between Christ’s divine and human natures.

Looming large in the religious tradition was Aquinas, whose Summa Theologica made a distinction between human and divine natures in terms of passible (passibilis) and impassible (impassibilis) — that which is capable and incapable of suffering. As much as God was fully present within the suffering Christ, his divine aspect was inca-pable of the suffering itself. Moreover, Aquinas argued, because of the hierarchical nature of the hypostatic union, the Father could not have forsaken the Son. Although the divine was impassible, “Christ’s Passion,” he said, “belongs to the suppositum of the Divine Nature by reason of the passible nature assumed” (3.46.12). The divine nature, in assuming the human nature within itself (ad se sumere [3.3.1]), manifests its control-ling property and exhibits the hierarchical nature of the union. The human is fully taken into the divine but remains distinct from it. At stake here is how the divine could have assumed the human and still allow it to suffer. The Rheims New Testament provides an answer that is consistent with the Summa: the divine aspect “repress[ed] itself for the time” such that the human aspect “felt no comfort thereof at all, but was left to die in extreme pain as a mere man” (84). Thus, although the Father did not and could not have forsaken the son, he did “suppress” his comfort, allowing the Son to feel as if.11

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Calvin likewise imagined that the Father did not forsake the Son but described a simultaneous anguish and comfort, for “amid all [Christ’s] agony, he ceases not to call upon his God, while exclaiming that he is forsaken by him” (2.16.12). Like Aquinas, Calvin imagined that the “twofold nature in Christ” is to credit for his not being forsaken, yet his perspective on the twofold nature is radically different from the Scholastic view. Rather than seeing the divine assuming the human being, Calvin imagined the two natures were “conjoined” (2.14.1). Rather than a hierarchical con-ception of the relationship, Calvin proposed a linear one. In being conjoined, the persons of Christ could undergo separate yet simultaneous experiences of a common reality. The Rheims scholars found the reformed perspective a “detestable blasphemy of Calvin and the Calvinists,” because it meant that Christ suffered more than just the physical pains of crucifixion. According to them, Calvin’s Christ “sustained in soul and conscience the very fears and torments of the damned” (83), which signified the very state of being forsaken. For the Roman Church, Christ could not have been for-saken because his human nature was always assumed or taken into the divine. From the reformed perspective, there was no blasphemy, in part because it didn’t find the linear relationship problematic. Even though the Father had not assumed the Son, the Father was in this sense always with him. In a grand kind of tough love, the Father allows the Son to suffer with an eye on a sure and ultimate redemption.

I pursue these two ways of seeing the relationships between the Roman and Calvinist perspectives, because both of them speak to Shakespeare’s King Richard. First, there are the similarities: both views share a belief that the lama sabachthani came about from the torment of the cross. For Aquinas, the torment came from the body alone. For the Calvinists, it was “not only the bodily pain of death” but additionally “the burthen of sin … and the curse of God due unto sin … and the punishment thereof” that “enforced him that was God to complain that he was for-saken of God” (Fulke 57). From both perspectives, then, this suffering makes the Son both feel forsaken and compels him to articulate that feeling. Moreover, both share a psychological perspective that imagines one might say uncharacteristic things while undergoing torture.12 Theorists on both sides are nevertheless careful not to claim that thoughts of being forsaken resulted in the lama sabachthani, even though this is precisely what the psychology they rely on suggests. They state that torment led to Christ crying out a despair of being forsaken, even as they simultaneously elide the commonplace explanation of the origins of that despair.

Throughout the early modern record, we find this explanation of uncharacteristic speaking or action in terms of forgetting.13 Angel Day, for instance, notes that exces-sive drink “driveth a man to forget himself, enforceth him oftentimes to commit that which otherwise might very evil beseem him” (143). Conversely, we find fictional characters encouraging other characters to remember themselves. In Sidney’s Arcadia, Musidorus harangues Pyrocles to “remember what you are, what you have been, or what you must be” (134). Shakespeare’s King Richard III encourages his army, tell-ing them to “Remember whom you are to cope withal” (5.6.45). Likewise, Aumerle encourages Richard II to “remember who you are” — to which, as I have noted above, Richard replies, “I had forgot myself; am I not king?” From one perspective, it might seem appropriate for the king who forgets himself to be a “not-king” — precisely what Gaunt calls him: “Landlord of England …, not king (2.1.113). Such

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a logic finds an analogy in the point made by theologians concerning Christ: only a not-god, a not-king-of-kings could have forgotten his divinity; thus, Christ, an actual king of kings, could never have forgotten himself. However much he appears to have forgotten himself, he couldn’t have because, well, he couldn’t have. The theologians’ reasoning is precisely circular: Christ was divine, and therefore he couldn’t have for-gotten himself because that would mean he wasn’t divine. By contrast, when Richard forgets himself, we might see it as yet another instance of this false king revealing his unfitness for office. Indeed, with Richard, we might even think that moments such as these reveal a self-consciousness underlying all the bluster about his divine rule — an acknowledgment that he has known all along that divine kingship constitutes false consciousness and that at the moment of his greatest torment, underlying doubts take over. When Richard stands on the Welsh coast and fails to display any sense of regal bearing, when he forgets the ideology of orderly succession and instead speaks of forceful usurpation and deaths of kings, many critics thus see confirmation of the view that he was an unfit ruler.

From another perspective, we may tease out the differences between the Roman and Calvinist views and find a deeply theological basis for the messiah’s self-forgetting and its status as if. From the reformed point of view, the relationship between the Father and Son is linear and absolute: Christ actually suffers the sins of the world (even though he hasn’t really been forsaken). From the Roman perspective, Christ only suffers as if he has taken on the sins of the world (even though he couldn’t have been forsaken). In this second tradition we may find the seeds of Vida’s veluti and its relationship to Shakespeare’s self-forgetting king, for by this alternative logic, Richard can be both king and unking, he can both remember and forget, he can both suffer and stand beyond suffering. Whereas the reformed perspective poses a static solution — the nondialectically related, conjoined series of divine and human — the Roman view presents a dynamic hierarchy whose analogical solution to the problem of the lama sabachthani is an openly metaphorical as if.

Graham Hammill, discussing Hans Blumenberg, points out that such metaphori-cally abundant systems encounter a “problem of metaphorical mediation” (85–86) in which metaphors, often literalized, are used to solve the problems created by the use of other metaphors. According to Blumenberg, the Schmittian “state of exception” is not a structurally necessary condition that arises out of the theological foundation of the modern state; rather, it is a metaphorical solution to a metaphorical prob-lem: a literalized metaphor of the sovereign stands in for the absent and literalized metaphor of the logos. Blumenberg’s solution, according to Hammill, is to take the lack of foundation on both levels as positive terms, as an “enabling feature” that “allows for the development of new answers where old ones are rejected or found to be lacking” (89). If the structure of the modern state really were, as Schmitt would have it, a secularized form of foundational (“true”) religious structures, there would be no solution to political dilemmas other than some form of sovereignty. If, however, the foundation were metaphorically constituted and its solutions similarly metaphorical, the very fact of such multilayered contingency would allow for novel solutions to its problems. Thinking, therefore, on multiple levels of unliteralized metaphor — thinking, for instance, in terms of as if — presents an occasion for thinking the unthinkable.

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Such antifoundational theology fits well with St. Paul’s notion of messianic kenosis — the self-emptying that allows for a dynamic simultaneity of kingship, memory, and suffer-ing. Like Paul, Benjamin imagines a deeply rooted simultaneity in the messianic. History for the messiah simultaneously concerns remembrance and forgetting, which alone make for the possibility of redemption. In order to redeem past atrocities, the messiah must acknowledge them — must acknowledge that which has been forgotten and must forget that which has seemed to be everything. The messiah knows the detailed narrative of the victor but also acknowledges the lurking unknown that can never attain the status of memory. As Agamben puts it, what is lost to history is despite the work of scholars, “infinitely greater” than that which remains. Even for the individual, one’s memory can only hold the tiniest fraction of the data one’s mind has processed. “In every instant,” he pronounces, “the measure of forgetting and ruin, the ontological squandering that we bear within ourselves far exceeds the piety of our memories and consciences.” Yet that which is forgotten “is at work within us with a force equal to that of the mass of conscious memories.” If we attempt to re-remember the forgotten, Agamben argues, we play into history’s trap, for “While [the forgotten’s] history may be written with differ-ent tools than that of the dominant classes, it will never substantially differ from it.” The “status of all knowledge and understanding” not only depends on remembering, it also depends on its mutually informing core of forgetting. That which is remembered, therefore, “remain[s] in us and with us as forgotten.” The resulting status of this memory-forgotten complex is the “unforgettable” (Time 40). Agamben’s unforgotten is, to my mind, the application of messianic cessation applied to the matter of memory. Indeed, for either the Christian messiah or a messianic king to allow himself to be placed within the remembered historical narrative of the victorious oppressor would be antithetical to the cause of the oppressed — it would pose insurmountable problems for the cause of redemption. It would be similarly antithetical to the cause of the oppressed for one to allow himself to be placed within the forgotten lore of the oppressed, for that category is always already defeated.

Agamben argues that the fundamental articulation of messianic historicity can be found in the New Testament letters of Paul, especially in the way that the messianic can hold in “tension” otherwise contradictory nature of historical time (Time 24; cf. 140–1, citing Taubes 70–76). In the messianic “zone of absolute indiscernability” (25), one finds both a category and its opposite. This kenotic relation is, according to Agamben, the very condition of the messianic, and can be discerned in Paul’s usage of the formulation as not (ὡς μὴ). For example, in 1 Corinthians, Paul urges that, in this time between the ascension of the messiah and his imminent return, the members of the ecclesia do X as not X. Thus: “the time is short; it remaineth that they also which have wives, be as though they had not; and they that weep, as though they wept not; and they that rejoice, as if they rejoiced not; and they that buy, as though they pos-sessed not” (7.29–30). Thus, in this short remaining time, Paul urges the members of the Corinthian church to live married as if not married; act joyful as if not joyful; and participate in the economy as if not participating in the economy. Agamben aligns Paul’s as not messianic with Benjamin’s “time of the now” in the way Paul speaks of a contracted time that brings past and present together.

There is a corollary relationship between Paul’s as not and Vida’s as if. In order to make sense of the lama sabachthani, Vida speaks of Christ acting not from some

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inner reality but from some sort of fiction. We might even acknowledge, as Agamben does, the importance of fiction on “the level of the ontological. … Because he is not anything in himself, man can only be if he acts as if he were different from what he is (or what he is not)” (Time 37). Not only does Vida engage these contrary unions of reality and fiction, divine and human; he specifically treats the categories of belief and unbelief, imagining his God as if he were atheist, as if he didn’t even believe in himself — as if, that is, he forgot himself to the extent that he no longer believed in his own existence. Of course, an atheist God is unthinkable for most people. Vida’s as if functions in a way that makes a bridge between what might otherwise be unthink-able into the realm of the thinkable. The unthinkable in messianic terms is the uniting of opposing categories; in terms of King Richard, the unthinkable brings together perpetrator and judge, foolish despot and wise ruler, corrupter and redeemer. The messianic does more than Shakespeare’s typical gesture in which paradoxical qualities are simultaneously active. In Richard II, the hero’s messianic qualities render history in terms of something new, something unthinkable, of fiction as if it were reality.

* * *

I have made much of Richard’s command that Bolingbroke and Mowbray “forget, forgive,” but I have as yet had little to say about this locution in context. “Wrath-kindled gentlemen,” Richard tells the dukes, “be ruled by me”:

Let’s purge this choler without letting blood.This we prescribe, though no physician:Deep malice makes too deep incision;Forget, forgive, conclude, and be agreed;Our doctors say this is no time to bleed.Good uncle, let this end where it begun.We’ll calm the Duke of Norfolk, you your son. (1.1.152–59)

Richard is, at least metaphorically, concerned about the excess of choler in the two nobles, which has resulted in their hot tempers. Of course, one way to “purge” such heat is to let blood — either under the care of a physician or, as Bolingbroke and Mowbray wish, in combat. Richard worries that the “deep malice” will not be limited to the lists and will end up in troops on the field, a “too deep incision.” Bolingbroke and Mowbray must, therefore, “be ruled by” Richard. As he says, he was “not born to sue, but to command” (1.1.196). He will personally “calm” Mowbray; Gaunt will “calm” his son. Yes, Richard commands for the two to forget and forgive, but those things are contingent upon Mowbray and Bolingbroke submitting themselves to their superiors, for Richard gives no other remedy for their distemper. Beyond a linear series with “and” as a coordinating conjunction, in terms of verse, the phrase “forget, forgive” is in apposition to “conclude and be agreed.” This second phrase, after the medial caesura, elaborates on the first, telling the two nobles to put an end to their hostilities (“conclude”) and treat each other well (“be agreed”).

The elaboration works in at least two simultaneous ways. First, it works by paral-lelism, so that conclude elaborates on forget, and be agreed elaborates on forgive. Forgetting is, therefore, figured as a manner of limitation, of enclosing, and putting

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to an end (concludere = com + claudere, “to shut”), while forgiving is figured as a manner of coming together (ad + gratus, “please, grace”). Second, the elaboration works by chiasmus, so that conclude elaborates on forgive and be agreed on forget. Forgetting, then, makes for being agreeable, and forgiving is that which limits. Just as forgetting and forgiving are mutually informing, so, too, are the terms that elabo-rate on them. What the elaboration teaches us is that forgiving and forgetting bring together the forces of limitation and openness. Thus, by forgetting or forgiving, one could close down a problematic state of affairs to a nominal extent, but by the rela-tionality outlined by Agamben and Benjamin, we can note that that is not enough on their own. Bolingbroke, for instance, could forget Mowbray murdered his uncle, and he could forget Mowbray’s insults; nevertheless, without a forgiving embrace, the memory is still active, even if it is absent. If Bolingbroke were simply to forgive Mowbray’s offenses without actively forgetting them, on its own the forgiving would not be possible, the resentment would remain at work even if absent. An instructive etymology for these paradoxical relationships comes from a word that does not occur in the play — the Latin word ignosco. Agamben notes that ignosco (in + gnosco) does not mean, as one might assume, “to not know” or “to be ignorant,” but rather “to forgive” (The Open 91). As such, ignosco contains both forgetting and forgiving, inseparably, and echoes Christ’s imperative, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23.34, emphasis added). Because forgiving and forgetting are bound up with one another, both manners of elaboration (by parallelism or by chi-asmus) make sense: to forget is to forgive and to forgive is to forget. Moreover, these terms for both limiting one’s animus and treating another well are bound together: to conclude is to be agreed and to be agreed is to conclude.

We should note as well that in Christ’s messianic imperative that his Father “forgive them,” he makes his request (or command) to the ultimate, divine authority, appeal-ing, in a way, to the transcendental signified much as Richard wishes for Bolingbroke and Mowbray to follow his command because he was “not born to sue.” Yet when the intemperate dukes refuse to “be ruled,” Richard allows them their wish for a trial by combat, giving over his divine rule for the “rule” of violence. There, at the lists at Coventry, Richard does command, beginning with his sudden deus ex machina, which suspends the combat. He exiles the combatants, he says, to prevent civil war: “our eyes do hate the dire aspect / Of civil wounds ploughed up with neighbours’ sword” (1.3.126–27). But in another sense, he seems to act messianically: descending from his elevated throne before the lists, he enters the floor of human violence and suspends the rule of law in order to purify and reinstate that same rule of law.

While his sentence has been discussed among his “council” (1.3.123), it has a decisionist flare, a force beyond law. Rather than a messianic gesture toward equal forgiveness, Richard enacts an equal punishment in exiling both his potential enemy, Bolingbroke, and his supporter, Mowbray. Many critics think that by giving Mowbray the harsher, lifetime sentence, Richard wants to keep him from confess-ing that he, the king, had ordered Gloucester’s murder.14 This standard explanation is perfectly sufficient, even if it is not attested in the chronicles or other historical documents.15 Interestingly, the most likely historiographical source for this scene, Lord Berners’ translation of Froissart, includes the striking suggestion that Richard and his council are motivated by a sense of fairness, for the people are keen to revolt

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if their favorite, Bolingbroke, is exiled and the king’s favorite, Mowbray, remains at home and in power. By this account, Richard banishes both nobles not from double-dealing and manifest unfairness but because he wishes to display fairness itself and equitable justice.

Looking to motives is not, however, sufficient for the kind of analysis I perform here. Motives are, to a certain extent, beside the point, not just because Richard is a dramatic character and is, therefore, not a motivated human being, but because I am analyzing configurations of messianic activity, not rational causes behind them.16 Thus in terms of the messianic, we might imagine such bilateral exile works to call into question the zero-sum stakes of typical modes of justice. Why should we place high value on the designations of justice if we cannot be sure of any human ability to know what justice looks like? Gaunt, at one point, admits that the banishments can be viewed, metaphorically, from differing perspectives, counseling his son to “Think not the King did banish thee, / But [as if] thou the King” (1.3.256.12–13). Moreover, Richard’s manner of descending to the floor of human violence does resemble the Christian messiah who, having come down to the earth, finds himself unjustly pun-ished and asks his remembering, knowing Father to forgive his tormenters precisely because they are profoundly ignorant and forgetful.

The messiah’s request and its implicit, radical, a priori forgiveness may seem at odds with ideas of human justice that assume an overarching, rational power, even a providential power, at work in human affairs. Richard’s “divine” authority here seems unjust, and it is unjust to standard accounts of justice. We should recall, how-ever, the Pauline account of messianic redemption through crucifixion, which the apostle calls the “foolish[ness] of God” (1 Cor. 1.25). Paul calls it “foolish” in part because it does not conform to human expectations, especially expectations of justice. The expectation had been that the messiah would conquer enemies, instate zero-sum justice for the “good” and the “evil,” and establish a strong kingship that preserves these modes. Countering these expectations, Paul states that “the foolish things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the wise; and the weak things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the strong” (1 Cor. 1.27). For Richard to act messianically would, almost by definition, require him to rule foolishly. As I noted above, I am not arguing that Shakespeare depicts Richard as aware of his mes-sianic status. The king does, however, fit this kenotic paradigm: foolish, weak, and despised like the crucified messiah who seems to forget even himself, who seems to become an atheist, and who, in his forgetful revolt, urges God toward a radical state of forgiveness.

According to Kantorowicz, it is upon returning from Ireland and sitting on the Welsh shoreline, that Richard first begins to occupy the position of the fool, which we might revise as a position of a messiah. Most critics, however, see Richard as being foolish from his first moments on stage when he commands warring nobles to forget and forgive, only to devolve upon his return into a childish “wavering between anger and self-pity” (Abrahams 46). To this strain of criticism, Richard thereafter gains an equally foolish but somehow better identity as a poet, especially beginning with the abdication scene. Kantorowicz sees a more traditional narrative process, claim-ing that Richard begins the play ruling from a kingly “objective truth and god-like existence,” falling to a transitional “nothing, a nomen” (29) on the Welsh shore, and

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falling further into the position of a “fool” at Flint castle and in the “half-sacramental abdication scene” (34). Richard begins a rising progress in that de-coronation, in the end becoming something of a God of the prison cell. For Kantorowicz, the foolish-ness of Richard has merit only in comparison to, and as a component of, his progress to godliness. “Nothing could be more miserable,” he says, “than the God in the wretchedness of man” (34). For a messiah, however, the foolishness of Richard, as the foolishness of God, is a basic component of redemption. We furthermore do not need to see Richard’s abdication as half-sacramental any more than Christians see their messiah’s greatest sacramental act — suffering the death of the cross — as only half-sacramental. In terms of the messiah, the passion is fully sacred because, as Paul asserts, it is completely foolish.

This messianic brand of simultaneity has no more spectacularly poetic articulation, no more complex manifestation than Richard’s famous, all-inclusive statement of abdication: “Ay, no; no, ay; for I must nothing be” (4.1.191). Richard’s ambivalence at this point in his de-coronation comes in response to Henry’s question, “Are you contented to resign the crown?” (4.1.190). Richard’s answer is yes and no and that he knows (or “no”-s) that, having given up the crown, there will be no more I (or “ay”) from him. As I argue below, the intricate poetics of this line not only present Richard’s ambivalence with regard to giving up the crown but also, and more impor-tantly, use caesurae, iambic emphases, and homophonics to cast both affirmative and negative views on subjectivity (I/ay), epistemology (know/no), and ontology (the line-ending “thing be”).

The line begins with two chiastic feet. In the first foot, “no” receives emphasis; in the second “ay” receives it:

figure 1 First two feet, emphasis and chiasmus.

While the emphases supply rhythm, in concert with chiastic structure, they addition-ally display a dialectically contrasting affirmation and negation. In the first foot, the negative “no” is emphasized over the affirmative “ay.” In the second foot, the affirmative is emphasized over the negative. These two contrasting feet are further dialectically related through the chiastic structure. With the homonymic doubling of ay/I and no/know, the two feet suggest that the question of de-coronation addition-ally involves the subjectivity of the king (what will happen to his “I”?) and the level of his knowing (does he only “know” “no”?). Here we see something of a historical figure questioning his tragic subjectivity at the moment of anagnorisis. Richard comes to tragic knowledge of his situation at the same time that he knows it is tragical.17

These first two chiastic feet are separated from the rest of the line by the medial caesura, and what happens after the caesura can appear somewhat incoherent. Another view imagines that the second half of the line performs a recapitulation and development of the first half. Note how the first two emphasized syllables of this second half of the line reverse and repeat the first two emphasized syllables of the first

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half of the line: “no … ay … I … no.” These first four emphatic syllables also repeat the first four syllables of the initial two feet, “Ay, no. No ay,” but do it in reverse:

figure 2 First four feet, emphasis and chiasmus.

figure 3 Dialectical coherence.

But of course it does not stop with Bolingbroke, any more than the passing on of the kingship (by fair succession or by murder) stopped with Edward II or Henry IV. And indeed the regal influence of non-kings proceeds apace as well: from the insurmount-able influence of Richard’s father, the Black Prince, to Richard’s own unforgotten haunting of Henry V.

Inasmuch as Richard’s position corresponds to these poetics, critics tend to be steadfast in insisting that he is pathological. M. M. Mahood, for instance, claims that the line “suggest[s] … tormenting indecision [or an] overwrought mind that finds an outlet in punning” (87). Richard is floundering here, by the typical logic, and his complex associations display pathology. As Tom Bishop sees it, “No one present, including Richard, seems to know from moment to moment where the scene

It’s not just a single chiasmatic ambivalence but a second chiasmus that, in bringing back the original “ay no,” suggests there is no end to these mutually constituting rela-tionships between yes/no and know/I, because they continue to exert force even after they have been sublated into this postcaesural context and, even, into the fifth foot — the final “-thing be.” This fifth foot is a remainder that takes on the excesses of the preceding feet — their affirming syllables, their negating ones, the homophonic, sug-gestive force of their intricate dialecticisms and chiasmata. All of these dialecticisms tumble forward via the conjunction (“for”) and the imperative (“must”), tumbling finally to that final term of being. As the groundwork of all the preceding terms, this “be” casts its steady dialectical shadow back onto all that has led to it. At the same time, it sets forward its relation to the succeeding line, which enforces the necessary imperative (“for … must”): “Therefore no no, for I resign to thee.” The dialecticism of the “Ay, no” line comes to rest here on “thee” (Bolingbroke):

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is going, or how to find any coherent authority to arbitrate what seem inextricably conjoined cross-purposes” (42). Yet as Richard himself later notes, half-mad, half-wise in his prison cell, the world is itself fully lacking in linear coherence, as is man, the world’s microcosm. Richard imagines his thoughts have been bred by contrary impulses within himself — his reasoning brain and his unreasoning “female” soul. With such antithetical parentage, they, like the people of the world, are humorally discontented. Even the very word of God, he suggests, lacks consistency, “the word itself / Against the word”:

as thus, “Come, little ones”And then again,“It is as hard to come as for a camelTo thread the postern of a small needle’s eye.” (5.5.13–17)18

How, Richard considers, could coming to the kingdom of heaven be as easy as a child coming to Jesus and yet as difficult as a camel coming through a needle’s eye? And of course Shakespeare sets up the contrast of judgment readers of the play still ponder: is Richard imperfectly innocent or responsibly guilty? The current essay is about this contrast of judgment, though the answer it gives to such a question does not take one side or the other. The reason is that time and again Shakespeare chooses compression over coherence. Readers who seek coherence miss the point, as coherence visits its own kind of injustice upon the text by attempting to stretch out what is otherwise simul-taneous and paradoxical, to make sense of the three persons of Christian monotheism and its “triune” God. Total coherence sees justice in the arc of history. It seeks out a Kantorwiczian apotheosis or, in Philip Lorenz’s phrase, a seamless mediation of analog-ical gaps in which “the similarity upon which the old king-Christ analogy … is broken: the king is no longer like God” (113). This unweaving of the king’s two bodies is the point for many commentators, but Richard spends many of his final thoughts consider-ing how unsettling these paradoxes are and how discontent the state of being human is:

whate’er I be,Nor I, nor any man that but man is,With nothing shall be pleased till he be easedWith being nothing. (5.5.38–41)

These almost-last words and their emphasis on “nothing” recall Shakespeare’s other spectacular “nothing”s (Cordelia’s, Edgar’s, Hamlet’s) and recall Richard’s spectacu-lar, “Ay, no. No ay; for I must nothing be.” The calculus of dialectically related antithesis presents not just nothing, but a kenotic nothing — one that, recalling Lupton’s account of the kenotic impulse in her paradigmatic “citizen-saint,” employs a “Hegelian sense of an Aufhebung that lifts what it destroys” (47). As I emphasize above, this is a nothing that completes being.

There is something left, however, for the play: the task of killing Richard and Bolingbroke’s repugnant embrace of that task, his unsettling settlement. Scholars tend to see Bolingbroke’s embrace as a victory for political pragmatics. John D. Cox sums up the scholarly generalization when he asserts, “Shakespeare presents the problem of monarchical succession as a problem of maintaining political stability by maintaining political dominance from one reign to the next” (139; see also Grady 58–108). For

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Cox, Richard has lost his “power” because he has “misused … time” (142); that is, he has “misused” the providential imperative to “fair sequence and succession.” To be sure, Cox acknowledges that the play presents “the limits of political realism” (152) in that Richard comes to deep “self-recognition” (153) before his death in a way that Bolingbroke, in all of his pragmatism, never will. Even so, to pack Richard’s positions throughout the play in terms of self-discovery is to limit his actions to the individual self and thus to set them far away from the political, social, and historical. As Zenón Luis-Martínez notes, the play questions the assumption that Bolingbroke’s pragma-tism wins the day, for “the sorry privilege of historiography belongs not to those who take action but to those who experience the lamentable truths of history” (693). Bolingbroke’s language at play’s end sounds much more complex, more dialectically attuned — much more like Richard’s, you might say — for in accepting and reject-ing Exton’s delivery of the murdered unking, Bolingbroke both hates the fact of the murder as he loves it: “Though I did wish him dead, / I hate the murderer, love him murderèd” (5.6.39–40). He acknowledges that having Richard dead is to his benefit at the same time that it brings mourning and lament — mourning and lament that are, for Luis-Martínez, Richard’s characteristic affective modes and that will continue at least into the reign of Henry V.19

A stronger case for the victory of realpolitik comes from Anselm Haverkamp, who argues that it is law that wins the day, for the theological force of kingly divinity forever falls away the moment Richard gives up the crown and thereby reveals the metaphysics of kingship to be nothing more than representational seeming. With this revelation, King Henry is able to fully embody the legal position of the sovereign. For Haverkamp, Shakespeare is the singular figure for revealing this distinction, because it is “only on the stage” that the king can be above the law, and it is the stage that makes clear this position is constituted through the power of representation. “This shows,” Haverkamp claims, “exactly in the sense in which Hamlet shall call himself an agent ‘of show,’ in the paradoxical performance of [Richard’s] self-deposition” (317). That is, because the play has revealed, through representation, the victory of finite authority over the infinite, Shakespeare reveals that same infinite power to be the power of representation itself. Furthermore, Haverkamp suggests that the play reveals the illogic of the meeting of the finite and infinite when its final lines display the secularly installed king speaking of religious motives and ontologies. This king, in announcing that he will mourn for Richard, in effect “declares the dead king’s imitation of Christ a theatrical arcanum” (321). In other words, we understand the king’s revelation of the theological ruse because the play has already revealed rep-resentational power to be the only force at the core of theology. I would agree with Haverkamp that the play reveals fiction-making at the core of religious ontology. I would disagree, however, with the assumption that the categories of the finite and the infinite fully constitute the play’s epistemological horizons. Indeed, my argument here has been that Shakespeare’s play problematizes that narrow choice rather than reaffirms it.

Much of what I have sought to do in the present essay has been to point out the problem of interpreting messianic figures without a theory of the messianic. I have argued that such a theory would allow us to think what has been, for standard criti-cism, unthinkable. I have argued as well that Shakespeare’s King Richard II allows

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audiences to think the unthinkable. It is not just Richard who, as a self-forgetting king, may think and act differently; traditional theology handed down from Aquinas suggests a similar strategy through a kenotic as if. Finally, I have argued that when we read the play through a more sophisticated account of messianic activity, it no longer seems to follow standard narrative arcs. My reading suggests that Richard’s activity, like Benjamin’s messiah, questions standard accounts of both dramatic and histori-cal narratives. Through a revolutionary perspective that redoubles past and present, Shakespeare recognizes a force of forgiveness and forgetting that challenges history.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Dawn DiPrince, Gregory Foran, Don Geiss, Rodney Herring, Jonathan P. Lamb, Julia Lupton, Vimala C. Pasupathi, Timothy A. Turner, and the editors of and anonymous readers for Exemplaria.

Notes1 See Lorenz on the structure of analogy and the way

it “allows one to theorize the nature of the relation between finite and infinite being” (104). Lorenz cor-rectly notes that the “‘analogical gap’ between finite and infinite being” constitutes “the structural place of the exception — outside time, space, and the law” (108).

2 All citations of Shakespeare refer to the Norton edition.

3 On memory and forgetfulness in early modern texts, see Barish and especially Sullivan, which is invalu-able for its account of the “opportunities forgetting affords over its costs” (21). Despite overlapping interests with Sullivan, the present essay covers dif-ferent ground. I emphasize the trope of self-forgetting as a tool used to talk and think about the otherwise unspeakable and unthinkable position of the messianic.

4 Rust defines the current discourse focused on politi-cal theology via Haverkamp (who in turn quotes Schmitt) as one in which the “socio-ideological sur-face [of political theology] is the historical function of a translation or commerce between theology and politics whose notorious definition is Carl Schmitt’s thesis that ‘All significant concepts of modern doc-trine of the state are secularized theological con-cepts’” (175; citing Haverkamp 314; Schmitt 36).

5 On the Pauline configurations of Renaissance cul-ture and messianic configurations in Shakespeare’s plays, see Lupton, Citizen-Saints. Lupton’s emphasis on the redemptive meeting between the “creaturely” and the otherworldly includes consideration of the messianic, though her paradigmatic figure is the “citizen-saint,” a “hybrid between sacred and secu-lar forms” that not only calls attention to the “per-ennially imperfect process of secularization to which modern states and their subjects should all aspire”

but also “calls forth a positive ethical potential … beyond the limited fields of national and sectarian belonging” (4). For Lupton’s description of the messianic, see Thinking with Shakespeare, espe-cially 230–46. Current interest in the messianic arises out of a larger, originary discourse on polit-ical theology, most significantly that between Benjamin, Schmitt, and Kantorowicz and more recently extended by Agamben (especially in Time), Taubes, Reinhard, Santner, Žižek (espe-cially in “Neighbors”), and others. On the mes-sianic in Shakespeare studies, see also Gallagher, Harris, Jackson, Joughin, Kneidel, and Samolsky.

6 Quotations from the New Testament cite the Rheims translation of 1582. For this and other early modern texts, I have silently modernized spelling and, where appropriate, inserted punctuation.

7 Benjamin’s interest in the state of emergency results in part from his reading of Schmitt. On the Benjamin–Schmitt dialogue, see Agamben, State of Exception 52–59; and Weber.

8 I borrow my verbs here from Arendt’s footnote to Benjamin’s seventeenth thesis, which defines auf-heben as having a “threefold meaning: to pre-serve, to elevate, to cancel” (265).

9 For Agamben on an “inoperative” messianic, see The Time That Remains 95–104. See also Sherman, who applies Agamben’s notion of a remnant inoperativity to Richard by way of per-formance studies. For Sherman, “the nothingness of theater [is] an alternative to ideological struc-tures of meaning-making.” Richard’s theatrical nothingness stands “as the promise of another order beyond his forces to demonstrate but that must be demonstrated nonetheless in an enact-ment that fulfills itself only by failing” (26).

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10 For the Greek text, I quote Estienne’s Textus Receptus of 1550.

11 Calling Vida’s veluti a “simile of forgetfulness,” Gregory claims the as if is theologically inconsist-ent and blames the supposed inconsistency on the poetic imagination in which “the oscillation in the poet’s mind … shifts back and forth between imagining the mortal Jesus of Nazareth and the immortal Second Person of the Trinity” (87). I disagree and find the inconsistency entirely fitting.

12 As lacking as this explanation is, it’s certainly bet-ter than other ones. Dickson argues it was due to the Father’s relative greatness that Christ spoke of being forsaken: he “crieth forth, Why hast thou forsaken me? not by way of quarreling, but by way of admiring the terribleness, and abhorring the bitterness of Divine Wrath” (341). Yet per-haps the most insufficient explanation comes from Augustine, who claims the lama sabach-thani was primarily an elaborate literary allusion. While Christ’s cry is without a doubt alluding to Psalm 22 (the Septuagint translators rendered the cry of the psalm in precisely the same Greek as the author of Matthew), Augustine makes this the motivating factor, claiming that Christ “was somehow trying to catch our attention, to make us understand, ‘This psalm is written about me’” (229).

13 Dolven discusses this kind of self-forgetting both in terms of Stoic moral philosophy and Platonic conceptions of learning as remembering (113–15).

14 See Blank, who argues that Mowbray’s reaction to “his exile as a kind of linguistic imprisonment” (339) suggests that Richard is trying to keep him silent.

15 See Ure’s edition of the play, footnote to 1.3.125–38, which summarizes Mowbray’s banishment from several early modern historical accounts; and Bullough for the sources themselves.

16 For an instructive way of seeing the difference between perspectives that feature motivated his-torical agents and those that feature abstracted configurations, see Coolidge. Coolidge points out

that when Paul is concerned with uniting Jew and Greek, he is in part concerned with an ideological divide between a Jewish idiographic (inductive) sense of history and a Greek nomothetic (deduc-tive) sense (15–19).

17 We should recall that the play’s first printing calls it a tragedy. The First Folio codifies it as a history.

18 The Norton/Oxford text has the Folio reading here, “the faith itself / Against the faith.” The Oxford editors imagine that the change from “word” to “faith” “is probably an authorial revi-sion to avoid the repeat of the Duchess of York’s earlier” “the word itself against the word” (Wells and Taylor 313; 5.3.120). Ure points out that “word” is much more precise than “faith” (169); and Forker suggests this lacking of precision was the price one paid for censorship (504). I find myself persuaded by the majority (Ure, Forker, Gurr) and here depart from the Norton/Oxford in using “word.”

19 Halpern has recently argued that King Richard and his posture of mourning provide a “stinging intellectual critique of kingship” (75). While I accept Halpern’s argument, I would note that Richard does more than critique kingship. As Luis-Martínez notes, Richard’s sadness and lam-entation “[grant] the perspective and … the rhe-torical vehicle through which the courses of history are discerned and represented” (679) in the play. In this sense, Richard’s mourning rewrites history; it even rewrites authority itself. Fenves points out that the problem with relating mourning to messianism is one of relating two kinds of violence. Violence associated with mourning can be viewed in the “near total devas-tation” of a theatrical scene — this kind of violent revenge acknowledges its basis in others and the mournful, eternal return of debt and payment. Messianic violence is more radical in that it desires to do away with debt and a “relation to the other” (269, 270). Fenves is keen to remind us of Benjamin’s interest in the kenotic outcome, exemplified by Hamlet’s final words, “The rest is silence” (5.2.356).

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Notes on contributor

Doug Eskew is an Associate Professor at Colorado State University, Pueblo. His work, which focuses on Shakespeare, political theology, rhetoric, and socioeconomic class, has appeared in Cahiers Élisabéthains, Early Modern Literary Studies, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly.

Correspondence to: Doug Eskew. Email: doug.eskew@csupueblo.edu