English, Department of
Department of English: Faculty Publications
Document Type
Article
Date of this Version
Spring 2025
Citation
Published in SEL 63, 2 (Spring 2025): 117–142. doi: 10.1353/sel.2025.a959889
Abstract
Shakespeare’s first tetralogy has been treated as an account of the reinvention of government, especially a Hobbesian reinvention demonstrating how authoritarian government forces order out of chaos. This article argues that, though Hobbesian elements present themselves, Shakespeare employs subtexts available to his time and place to speak of how orderly government is constituted: that is, he relies on accounts of the Fall from perfection into chaos and the return from it through divinely blessed kingship that are present in syncretic readings of Ovid and the Bible. The two subtexts give order to the progress from Fall into chaos and back to divinely ordained rule as a picture of the invention and reinvention of good government.
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Comparative Literature Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, Modern Literature Commons, Reading and Language Commons
Comments
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