SOURCE: Falco, Raphael. “Charismas in Conflict: Richard II and Henry Bolingbroke.” Exemplaria 11, no. 2 (1999): 473-502.

[In the following essay, Falco focuses on the concept of charisma in his comparative analysis of Richard II and Henry Bolingbroke.]

Shakespeare's Richard II is an anatomy of charismas in conflict. Pure personal charisma, lineage or dynastic charisma, and several kinds of office charisma—to use Max Weber's terms—confront each other throughout the play. These different stages of charismatic authority, according to the Weberian model, reflect a progression (or regression) from revolutionary personal leadership to increased rationalization and finally bureaucratization. Weber maintained that all the modifications of personal charisma have basically the same cause: “[t]he desire to transform charisma and charismatic blessing from a unique, transitory gift of grace of extraordinary times and persons to a permanent possession of everyday life.”¹ The transformations of charismatic authority inevitably result in conflicts since the different forms of charisma are incompatible. In Richard II, such conflicts—in particular between personal authority and permanent, depersonalized authority—contribute to the tragic circumstances, not only pitting leaders against each other but also dividing the sources of each leader's legitimacy. The different kinds of charisma interpenetrate and overlap, producing ambiguous figures of shifting status.

The chief examples are Richard and Bolingbroke. The personally charismatic Bolingbroke rises to power partly through subversion of traditional hierarchy and partly through an appeal to traditional hierarchical and genealogical values. The paradox of this situation resounds in such self-defining speeches as

                                                                      I am a subject,
And I challenge law; attorneys are denied me,
And therefore personally I lay my claim
To my inheritance of free descent.(2)

This passage highlights the near-contradiction of making a personal extralegal claim—a charismatic challenge of the law—and at the same time invoking the traditional authority of genealogical privilege. Unlike such low-born usurpers as Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Bolingbroke can claim a birthright to justify his rise to power, and his ambiguous rationalizations implicitly promise a revolutionary restoration of conservative aristocratic governance as a result of his usurpation of the crown. Treason dissolves into salvific heroism, defiance of law into institution-building, and charisma into traditional authority.

Richard's relation to his own charismatic claim is equally ambiguous, although from a different angle. Ruth Nevo once noted that “behind the regal bearing and the regal gesture is revealed Richard's dismal lack of that inalienable personal power which a later age would come to call charisma, and which alone could carry him through.”³ Nevo is referring to pure or personal charisma, the undiluted form that we see in Bolingbroke at crucial moments. But Richard's true charismatic claim is dynastic, a diluted but effective form of charismatic domination. As a lineage king Richard bases his authority on hereditary charisma and post-feudal convention. Yet, despite his evident belief in the permanence of kingship, Richard too makes ambiguous statements regarding his status, confusing and sometimes enraging his followers, as when the Bishop of Carlisle must admonish him that “wise men ne'er sit and wail their woes” (3.2.178). Richard's kingship keeps disappearing behind his human vulnerability, and his reactions to his fluctuating status are contradictory and manipulative:

God save the king! Will no man say amen?
Am I both priest and clerk? well then, amen.
God save the king! although I be not he;
And yet, amen, if heaven do think him me.

4.1.172-75

One critic has suggested that Richard's ironic comments in this passage give him “a strange detachment from events, so that he seems not to know where reality lies.”⁴ But I would say that his sense of reality is acute: anger and near-hysterical frustration notwithstanding, he treads a difficult line with superb intuition of the group dynamic. His performance is charismatic despite his apparent weakness, personal rather than a product of his office. He is even rebellious in the circumstances, summoning his personal charisma in response to Bolingbroke's sudden legalism. But, like Bolingbroke's, Richard's personal claim is also paradoxical. While he asserts divine auspices (“heaven do think him me”), he also relies for his royal legitimacy on the antitheses of personal charisma—hereditary charisma and traditional authority.

Richard and Bolingbroke are not interchangeable, yet they seem at times to occupy a similar imaginative space, a limbo between improvisational personal power and established traditional rule. Bolingbroke's subjecthood weaves in and out of the smoke of his parvenu kingship, while Richard seems most kingly when stripped of royal trappings, when (to use his own distinction) he is more clerk than priest. In the end both of them must acknowledge the conflict between traditional and charismatic authority, but only Bolingbroke adapts his conduct to balance the antithetical sources of his power. Richard's tragedy, at least in part, is a tragedy of individuation, manifest in his failure to reconcile his lineage claim with his personal impulses.

LINEAGE CHARISMA, OR THE MYTH OF THE VIALS

To analyze the conflict between Richard's personal charisma and his lineage authority—as well as between his person and his office, which is a slightly different relation (though in kind the same)—it is important first to understand the properties and structure of lineage charisma. I will rely primarily on a Weberian definition, but with adjustments to bring empirical data (mostly Shakespearean) to bear on the ideal type. Weber speaks of lineage charisma as a “depersonalization” of pure charisma (Versachlichung des Charisma), literally an “objectification” or perhaps even a “neutering” of a personal gift of grace.⁵ “Depersonalization” is a signal concept, marking the transition in a charismatic movement from the often revolutionary personal management by a central figure to the administration of the movement after the loss of that figure. The need to depersonalize the original charisma and routinize it, making it available as a continuing benefit to the surviving followers, causes inevitable conflicts between forms of authority. Because of later generations' dependence on traditional or bureaucratic authority, or a mixture of the two, depersonalization can lead to a diminution of charismatic authority. Charisma obviously loses its original and originary force when integrated with traditional or bureaucratic authority. Rather than a power of disruption and change, transformed charisma becomes an institution-builder. And lineage, especially aristocratic lineage, is one of its most successful institutions.

“The most frequent case of a depersonalization of charisma,” according to Weber, “is the belief in its transferability through blood ties.”⁶ The charisma of a house replaces the individual inheritance of an original charisma, at the same time diluting it and preserving it into succeeding generations. Logically, charisma cannot be heritable, since a unique gift of grace—and particularly one that manifests itself in the management of unstable social structures—should die with its possessor. Thus Weber explains that charisma is hereditary “only in the sense that household and lineage group are considered magically blessed, so that they alone can provide the bearers of charisma.”⁷ Although charisma provides the supernatural endowment of elite families, the power which that endowment helps to maintain tends to be traditional or legal rather than heterogeneously charismatic. Lineage charisma provides a clear example of this filtering-out process inasmuch as stability and permanence are its chief reasons for being. It depends on depersonalization to obviate the incalculable elements that kept the original charismatic group in disequilibrium, dependent on a unique supernaturally endowed leader.⁸ Lineage replaces the unique leader with the impersonal—and presumably more stable—authority of a family.

But, as Richard II demonstrates, the stability of lineage claims can be challenged, albeit at great cost both to the general political stability and to the myth of hereditary charisma. Lineage and the offenses against it furnish a moral backdrop to the play. Within the first hundred lines of act 1 Bolingbroke calls attention to his blood lines, deliberately separating royal descent from violence. “There I throw my gage,” he challenges Mowbray, “Disclaiming here the kindred of a king, / And lay aside my high blood's royalty” (1.1.69-71). He implies that there is a moral conflict between being a king's cousin and wanting to fight “arm to arm.” Replying to Bolingbroke, Richard puns on the subject of blood descent, at the same time acknowledging the moral gravity of the accusation:

What doth our cousin lay to Mowbray's charge?
It must be great that can inherit us
So much as of a thought of ill of him

1.1.84-86

The king does not overtly refer to Bolingbroke's “disclaiming” of kindred, but the word “inherit,” here meaning “make us heir to,” marks his recognition of the several related subtexts of the challenge: the succession to the throne, the king's unkindred-like treatment of uncles and cousins, and particularly his part in Gloucester's death.⁹ “Inherit” also contains a bit of a dig at Bolingbroke, who is in no position to bequeath anything to Richard, and indeed would very much like the Lancastrian line to have inherited the throne. At a supersubtle level Richard may be taunting Bolingbroke with his possession of the crown, acknowledging the subtexts of his cousin's disclaimer while playfully inverting the roles of bequeather and heir. But the playfulness, if that is what it is, serves chiefly to emphasize Richard's birthright (and Bolingbroke's subjecthood vis-à-vis that birthright). It is difficult to determine whether Richard or Shakespeare is in control of the language in these lines, although Richard seems pointedly conscious of his royal authority. The scene ends with his stern and deeply resonant statement, “We were not born to sue, but to command” (1.1.196); and the punning reversal of “inherit us,” which cannot withstand the finality of Richard's succinct description of his birthright, has the force of a conscious taunt when read in tandem with the king's last remark.

That Bolingbroke invokes the royal blood line only to reject it in favor of his own actions, his unaffined moral agency, provides a clear picture of the conflict between charismas. The lineage charismatic authority represented by Richard will not suffice to accomplish true justice, so Bolingbroke dissociates himself from his “kindred of a king.” Courtesy or public humility may require that he characterize his challenge of Mowbray as morally inconsistent with royal blood. But the implication of Bolingbroke's attitude is somewhat different: he probably dissociates himself from his royal cousin not because arm to arm combat is anathema to kingship per se, but rather because—and this becomes the Lancastrian position—proper justice is alien to Richard's rulership.¹⁰ Satisfaction through personal combat was a vexed ethical issue which Shakespeare often exploited for dramatic purposes. But Bolingbroke's nod to the impropriety of associating the throne with violence seems rather perfunctory. The stronger implication of his statement is that he simply cannot get satisfaction or justice from the present incumbent of the royal seat. From this early scene Bolingbroke casts his personal charisma into conflict with Richard's lineage claims, even though the Lancastrian line itself depends on similar claims to sustain its ascendancy. Bolingbroke declares, “what I speak / My body will make good upon this earth” (1.1.36-37), suggesting that his natural body will provide the source and sole limit of his power—another disclaimer regarding hereditary charisma. Bolingbroke here exhibits the personal charisma with which he will capture both the public imagination and the throne. But his natural-body claim is ultimately disingenuous despite its charismatic force, since, as is soon clear, the ostensible criterion for his triumphant return from France will be outrage over his abused lineage privileges.

As the play progresses the conflict of charismas, or of kinds of charismatic claims, seems to motivate the action. Nothing can stem this conflict, not even the reversal of power. Richard betrays his lineage trust, thereby weakening his only significant charismatic claim. But that very weakening inspires a manifestation of his personal charisma, especially once the challenge to his lineage rights has become a fait accompli at Flint Castle. The conflict between these two antithetical forms of charisma is most pronounced after the deposition. As Louise Cowan has pointed out, “in being deprived of the power of the crown, [Richard] begins to feel himself all the more genuinely a king in the hidden recesses of his soul.”¹¹ Because those around Richard also sense this incipient conviction of genuineness, there is confusion regarding the source of kingly and ex-kingly power. In the end the demystification of Richard's vested authority—accomplished in part by neutralizing his depersonalized charismatic claim—serves only to remystify the myth of lineage charisma, clouding rather than resolving the relation of traditional to charismatic rulership.

The myth of the transferability of charisma through blood ties is the foundational myth of aristocracy. Its prevalence in Elizabethan culture is so wide as to be something of a commonplace, a consensus gentium reaching to every level of society.¹² Shakespeare exploits the myth in Richard II, and, as so often in his writing, also manages a metacommentary on the myth while remaining inside it. Bolingbroke's disclaimer of royal kinship and Richard's taunting use of “inherit” suggest this dual approach. Still more revealing is the itinerary of the imagery of blood ties, the stock and trade of genealogical myth. The first elaboration of this imagery comes from the Duchess of Gloucester. She invokes and superbly mystifies the dynastic blood lines when urging Gaunt to avenge her husband's murder:

Finds brotherhood in thee no sharper spur?
Hath love in thy old blood no living fire?
Edward's seven sons, whereof thyself art one,
Were as seven vials of his sacred blood,
Or seven fair branches springing from one root.

1.2.9-13

This speech is a good illustration of lineage as moral backdrop. The Duchess castigates Gaunt for disregarding the supernatural—and charismatic—unity of the patriarchal blood line. Her image of Edward's blood passed on in seven filial vials, along with the image of the family tree, reflect a working definition of lineage charisma.¹³ The peculiar amalgamation of blood and tree celebrates the myth of the transferability of charisma through blood ties. And Gloucester's death folds back metaphorically into the institutional fiction:

One vial full of Edward's sacred blood,
One flourishing branch of his most royal root,
Is crack'd, and all the precious liquor spilt,
Is hack'd down, and his summer leaves all faded.

1.2.17-20

This is a normative moral allegory, and one which Gaunt will remember. It operates on ascending levels of figuration. At a nearly literal level, Gloucester's blood (inherited from Edward) has been spilled, thus weakening the generational connection; more figuratively, the lifeblood of the nation is lost in the cracking of the vial. The alternating lines of the speech (which suggest a scribal transposition) link sacredness to earthly rootedness. The depersonalization of Edward's charisma could not be more explicit: his blood thrives in seven other bodies, thus preserving the charismatic magic but filtering out the subjectivity of the original bearer.¹⁴

Although the blood-ties myth has a central metaphorical role, Richard himself scarcely alludes to it except in passing reference to his “sacred blood” when proclaiming his impartiality to Mowbray (1.1.119). It is difficult to know what Richard's silence on the subject means. Shakespeare relies on somewhat peripheral, older-generation speakers to re-mystify the past and preserve tradition, the significance of which fact should not be overlooked in regard to charisma. For example, in his pelican speech Gaunt harps on Richard's wantonness while invoking the blood imagery:

O, spare me not, my brother Edward's son,
For that I was his father Edward's son;
That blood already, like the pelican,
Hast thou tapp'd out and drunkenly carous'd.

2.1.124-27

The Duchess's image of Edward's blood as “precious liquor” reappears in revised form here. Richard has tapped it out of the keg and drunkenly “carous'd” it, notionally a wanton grandson ruining the family cellar. Moreover, the image of the young pelican Richard sucking dry his nurturer's blood has a shock value beyond the fact of royal gluttony. Not only has the sacred vial been cracked but also, thanks to Richard's delinquency, the sacred myth of the vials has lost its immutability and coherence. Gaunt's rhetorical manipulation of the myth implies a parallel between fact and figuration, an almost Cratylan contiguity, as if Richard's moral failure had caused a sympathetic faultline in the mythification of aristocratic blood ties.

As the itinerary of the blood-ties imagery leads from the Duchess's myth of the seven vials through Gaunt's rhetorical manipulations in the pelican speech, the mythical status of Edward's blood remains the same. And in this sense Shakespeare operates exclusively from within the myth of dynastic blood ties. But the metaphorical shifts—from sacred vials to quaffed tankards—also suggest a temporary detachment from mythological orthodoxy, a brief experience of myth as malleable fiction. This temporary detachment is what I earlier referred to as Shakespeare's metacommentary, although the term is not crucial. More important is the effect that the inside-outside shift can have on our perception of Richard's lineage charisma.

Both the Duchess and Gaunt historicize the myth of blood-ties, introducing a diachronic element into the synchronic field. But Gaunt's historicization contains an internal contradiction. It pits the hereditary ruler against the hereditary ideal, and, ironically, it enhances the importance of Richard's actions. The king's moral agency and his natural body become necessary to the continuity of his charisma—and to others' experience of him—even though his charisma is supposed to be depersonalized and inherited. I doubt that it is Gaunt's intention to weaken the validity of lineage charisma; his aim seems to be simply to make Richard more accountable to tradition for his actions. But by mutating the myth Gaunt distinguishes Richard's natural body from both the corporate body which he heads and from the lineage charisma which he should unproblematically inherit. The obvious contrast is Gloucester, who in the Duchess's historicization inherits his father's blood without any contingency for action, as is normal in the transference of blood ties. On the other hand, Gaunt's manipulation of the myth tends to suppress the depersonalized quality of Richard's charismatic authority while activating its subjective element.

BODY NATURAL, BODY POLITIC, AND THE CORPORATE AMBIGUITY

The subjective element of Richard's authority, as opposed to what might be called the objective reality of lineage rulership, is manifest in the subtle relationship between the king's natural (or mortal) body and the immortal body politic. I would characterize this relationship as interdependent, even intrasubjective. Subjectivity must be redefined to accommodate the charismatic experience because the natural body of the charismatic leader functions on two levels at once, acting as the center not only of the disposition of individual power but also of the mythification of group power.¹⁵ Richard's gradual isolation from his political cohort provides a glimpse of this double function, confirming rather than annihilating the interdependence of the king's two bodies. It may be true that, in contrast to the ongoing group myth of lineage privilege, Richard's personal magnetism fails to bind his group or to satisfy extraordinary group needs. And it may also be true that as a result of his increasingly subjective outbursts Richard's mind and natural body seem to be separate from his inherited political being. Yet that separation is less than meets the eye—to inflate its definitiveness is, in my view, a sign of Lancastrian optimism. In point of fact, the two interdependent king's bodies constitute a sort of corporate ambiguity.

But corporate ambiguity blurs the clean structural lines associated with de casibus tragedies. In consequence there is a tendency among critics to overpolarize the body natural and the body politic, despite Ernst Kantorowicz's careful tempering of the polarities in The King's Two Bodies. It is indeed tempting to see these two bodies as somehow discrete, one natural and mortal, the other supernatural and immortal. But our conception of kingship in general—and Richard's kingship in particular—suffers if we insist on excessive polarization of the body natural and the body politic. Moreover, if we confuse the opposition between kingship and subjecthood in English discourse for the independence of one from the other, we will incorrectly characterize Richard's subjectivity as an aberration, rather than as an integral, if temporarily unsynchronized, component of his authority. Kingship and subjecthood should be seen as interdependent, both in the wider social sphere and in the king himself. One of many proofs of this interdependence, as Kantorowicz aptly notes, is found in Richard's “duplications” in “the King, the Fool, and the God”: “Those three prototypes of ‘twin-birth’ intersect and overlap and interfere with each other continuously,” he observes, concluding that in the crucial scenes of the play—in Wales, at Flint Castle, and at Westminster—we encounter a “cascading: from divine kingship to kingship's ‘Name,’ and from the name to the naked misery of the man.”¹⁶

This “cascading,” which really is a manifestation of interdependence, is especially visible in the operation and transformations of the king's charismatic authority. Charisma connects kingship to subjecthood ambiguously but inextricably, in consequence affecting the relation of king to subject, of body natural to body politic, and of person to office. In regard to this last connection, Wolfgang Iser recently remarked that Richard II contains a “vehement” clash between person and office in which “the norms by which the ruler's position is defined are made subservient to the quest for the self.”¹⁷ It would probably be better to speak of a “concomitant” relationship, or series of relationships.¹⁸ The absolute opposition of person and office, like that of body natural and body politic, tends to oversimplify the structure of Richard's authority. Such polarized or binary categories obscure the interdependence of the forms of authority that constellate in both poles of the opposition. As the play progresses the lineaments of Richard's authority dodge and shift, as if his subjectivity were spontaneously activated in response to martial defeat, deposition, and imprisonment. Indeed, charismas are in conflict in Richard II not only because Richard's lineage clashes with Bolingbroke's personal force, but also because different forms of charismatic authority coexist in Richard.

Richard himself characterizes the revelation of his subjectivity either as moral weakness or as a species of vocational confusion. For instance, at one point he remarks:

I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends—subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?

3.2.175-77

At another point (as noted above) he asks, “Am I both priest and clerk?” (4.1.173). These are similar questions in that both concern essential identity and both polarize the relations of group leader to group membership. Neither Richard nor anyone else in the play can satisfactorily determine whether he is ever not a king because all questions of royal identity are also questions of group function. Members of the group cannot detach themselves from the group without destroying it, and the group's destruction would on some level mean their own destruction as well.

Because Richard is the head of a lineage charismatic group, his rejection or deposition constitutes a dismemberment of the group, creating an interesting conundrum: how can the lineage group function or even continue to exist without a hereditary leader? The solution is a powerful abstraction: specifically, that there exists an absolute distinction between the office and the person of the king, and that the two can be separated without damage to the permanent glory of the former. This argument resonates in the legalistic justifications for Richard's deposition and, most significantly, in metaphors alluding to the myth of the bodies natural and politic. But Shakespeare is at pains to show that there can be no absolute separation of the two bodies, nor of person and office.¹⁹ If there could be an absolute separation, then the impact of Richard's tragedy would be diluted by the idea that some aspect of his being eludes suffering and death in the abstraction of ongoing “kingship.” Yet nothing of the kind seems to happen. Richard “tastes grief” and the rest of us certainly encounter, in Kantorowicz's phrase, “the naked misery of the man.” Indeed, it may well be a conscious objective of Shakespeare's tragedy to expose the limits, even the futility, of mutually exclusive political categories in human drama.

The categories themselves are quasi-legal fictions. Citing Edmund Plowden's Reports, Kantorowicz illustrates how in English law a king's mortal body could be seen as separate from his immortal political being:

The King has two Capacities, for he has two Bodies, the one whereof is a Body natural, consisting of natural Members as every other Man has, and in this he is subject to Passions and Death as other Men are; the other is a Body politic, and the Members thereof are his subjects, and he and his Subjects together compose the Corporation … and he is incorporated with them, and they with him, and he is the Head, and they are the Members, and he has the sole Government of them; and this Body is not subject to Passions as the other is, nor to Death, for as to this Body the King never dies, and his natural Death is not called in our Law … the Death of the King, but the Demise of the King, not signifying by the Word (Demise) that the Body politic of the King is dead, but that the Body politic is transferred and conveyed over from the body natural now dead, or now removed from the Dignity royal, to another Body natural.²⁰

There is no mention of heredity in this passage, or of the safeguarding of succession. The body politic is simply “transferred and conveyed over from the natural body now dead … to another Body natural.” We can see how such a thesis would support dynastic claims, but also how it might foster confusions, particularly when, as in Richard II (and also King Lear), there is no “Demise of the King” before the body politic is conveyed over. The miraculous transition from dead body to living may confirm the immortality of the mystical body politic but it does little to resolve political and moral crises such as the one that leads to Richard's deposition.

As I suggested at the beginning of this section, the corporate charismatic relationship in Richard II is ambiguous. Partly because Richard is not himself a forceful charismatic figure and partly because his authority derives from diluted forms of charisma such as lineage and kingship, it becomes impossible in the play to separate the bodies natural and politic from their dependence on the mutuality of group function. Richard must be seen as simultaneously a representative of divine order and of what Edward Shils calls “institutional charisma.” Shils explains the origins of the highest authority in this way:

Great earthly power has a manifold, obscure affinity with the powers believed to inhere in the transcendent order. Those who believe in divinely transcendent orders also believe that earthly powers, to enjoy legitimacy, must have some connection with transcendent powers, that rulers are necessarily involved in the essential order of things.²¹

This connection to the “essential order” is a charismatic sanction. It makes the ruler a separate and unique figure, while at the same time establishing his or her dependence on group membership to survive. Likening the ruler to the soul and the ruled to the body, Edward Forset, in A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique, characterizes the functioning mutuality of the ideal monarchy as “the surest bond of human societie”:

so both the ruler should wholy indeuour the welfare of his people, and the sujiect ought (as in loue to his owne soule) to conforme vnto his soueraigne; that both of them mutually like twinnes of one wombe may in the neere and deare nature of relatiues, maintaine vnuiolate that compound of concordance, in which and for which they were first combined.²²

The notion of twins in one womb is difficult to reconcile with the kind of kingship we encounter in Richard II, and not just because Richard has tyrannical tendencies. The king's royal authority rarely if ever seems a matter of concordance with his subjects.

Richard enjoys legitimacy, in Shils's terms, above all through his “connection with transcendent powers”—the blood-ties myth is supposedly the proof-positive of this connection. As Larry Champion points out, the king “touts himself as an embodiment of the religio-political principle of divine right, constantly invoking God and legal doctrine to validate his political power.”²³ He gets a good deal of support from others in this area. Gaunt calls him “God's substitute, / His deputy anointed in His sight” (1.2.37-38), translating the Latin vicarius Dei. And Carlisle asserts transcendental auspices, saying to the apprehensive Richard, “That Power that made you king / Hath power to keep you king in spite of all” (3.2.27-28). Bucked by Carlisle's speech, Richard himself declares his divine charisma:

Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king;
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord.

3.2.54-57

Shakespeare sets these last two speeches against the onslaught of bad news which Richard receives after landing on the Welsh coast. There is consequently something strained about the assertions of divine connection, as if when other forms of authority have failed, when the relation between leader and led has begun to break down, the king and his close followers must invoke the irrational and patently disproved notion that Richard has a privileged connection to the order of things. Everyone protests too much in this scene, with the result that the so-called divine deputation, faced with the fact of revolt, seems little more than hollow rhetoric.

The painful and embarrassing oscillations in act 3, scene 2, between the puffed-up royal Richard and the defeated, “subjected” Richard are reflected in stark contrasts between the immortal body politic of the realm (now escaped from the king) and the feeble natural body of a man who talks “of graves, of worms, and epitaphs” (3.2.145). Kantorowicz argues regarding this scene that “the kingship itself seems to have changed its essence. … Gone is the oneness of the body natural with the immortal body politic.”²⁴ If we take “oneness” to mean interdependence, resting on mutual concordance and group function as legitimating criteria, then Kantorowicz is probably right about the changed essence of the kingship. If, on the other hand, we understand “oneness” to mean a quasi-legal theological autonomy that eschews group function, or is superior to group needs, then I think we are in danger of positing a condition that never really exists in Shakespeare's play.

Despite the apparent autonomy of Richard and Bolingbroke in their decisions, changes in group status have a significant effect on the barometer of their political successes and failures. On the coast of Wales with Richard and his entourage, the barometer falls precipitously as the cohesion of the king's forces breaks down: York has betrayed him, the Welsh army has abandoned him, and he soon learns that his favorites have been executed. Unable to use this moment of severe disequilibrium to his charismatic advantage, Richard himself breaks down, draining what little personal authority he commanded and relying erratically on his diluted lineage claims to confront the overwhelming threat of Bolingbroke's rebellion. Indeed, Richard's palpably self-indulgent narcissism in the scene in Wales, whether we regard it as a cause or an effect of the crisis, is emblematic of “oneness” or theological autonomy hoist with its own petard: the king's poetizing individuality is clear evidence of political isolation (as Carlisle and Aumerle recognize). The veneer of intrasubjective group dependency has peeled off, leaving only the weak king and a few followers loyal not so much to Richard as to the myth that his kingship represents. Richard suffers a detachment from his royal image, and in his desperation counts more heavily than ever on the rhetoric of anointment and divine connection. But the detachment is deadly, not only separating the twin bodies of the king but, more significantly, dividing Richard from the traditional (and somewhat ossified) symbols of his charismatic claim to authority. Thus the decay of group cohesion leads to a breakdown in group meaning itself, heightening the conflict between the kinds of charisma that Richard has relied on and presaging tragedy in the failure of the shared charismatic experience of his rulership.

The breakdown in meaning confuses the question of the king's two bodies, since both the natural man and the political body have significance to the royal supporters. There is a curious irony in this. Richard does not become less a king merely by becoming more a man. Rather, he becomes less a king by relying too much on himself as a symbolic figure—by seeing himself too exclusively as a product of divine anointment—asserting for instance that

For every man that Bolingbroke hath press'd
.....God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel.

3.2.58, 60-61

In other circumstances, coming from a different monarch, such language might be inspiring. In Richard's mouth, and given the present logistical difficulties, it is pathetic and absurdly impractical (as Aumerle tries to suggest earlier in the scene). The recourse to symbolic rather than personal authority reveals a gap between the needs of Richard's group members and their leader's ability to fulfill those needs.

Missing from Richard's authority is the institutional charisma with which the modern ruler maintains power. Although Richard, “in the Elizabethan sense, is secure” in his indisputable lineage claim to the throne, he nonetheless loses his rights (and life) in confrontation with a superior charismatic movement.²⁵ Paradoxically, his best defense would have been not less but more diffusion of charismatic authority. Richard lacks a corporate organization in which he as the incumbent in the role of authority would be “enveloped in the vague and powerful nimbus of the authority of the entire institution.”²⁶ This would constitute institutional charisma, a diffused form of charismatic organization considerably more stable than lineage charisma since it demands a wider membership:

it is not a charisma deduced from the creativity of the charismatic individual. It is inherent in the massive organization of authority. The institutional charismatic legitimation of a command emanating from an incumbent of a role in a corporate body derives from membership in the body as such, apart from any allocated, specific powers.²⁷

The only membership Richard actually shares is that of his lineage group. But while the aristocratic bond of the blood-ties myth has enormous force in early modern culture, as does the providentialism with which it is associated, in pragmatic political terms the lineage group is too easily fragmented and reduced in size. Richard himself causes the first cracks in his lineage bond when he steals the dead Gaunt's estate, a mistake whose far-reaching implications York immediately recognizes: “Take Herford's rights away,” he warns, and you will “Be not thyself. For how art thou a king / But by fair sequence and succession” (2.1.195, 198-99). Shakespeare exposes the fragility of dynastic charisma in this episode, particularly its group vulnerability. Richard is both the author and the prisoner of this vulnerability. He has neither the personal resources nor the political necessity (until it is too late) to achieve the legitimation of power derived from membership in a corporate body “apart from any allocated, specific powers.” Such a form of corporate authority will have to wait for modern monarchs, or so we infer from Richard's tragic isolation. Perhaps Bolingbroke is the first evolutionary mutation toward that new ideal, a creative charismatic individual who is also the harbinger of institutional charisma.²⁸

BOLINGBROKE AND GROUP FUNCTION

Critics have often described Bolingbroke as a Machiavellian politician, a practitioner of realpolitik.²⁹ His attitude toward the crown as a material possession, rather than as a magical, divinely imbued symbol of anointment, seems to confirm such a view. But we should bear in mind that Bolingbroke too depends on otherworldly auspices. In fact, he is not so much a normal male figure in the play as he is a charismatic experience. His supernatural authority simply has not yet been ossified into a set of symbols, as Richard's has, so that Bolingbroke's followers can count on an identity between the aims of their leader and the meaning of his charismatic rebellion.

The most striking example of Bolingbroke's personal charisma comes from Richard himself. The king claims to have watched the banished duke setting out from London toward foreign exile. “Ourself and Bushy,” he announces,

Observ'd his courtship to the common people,
How he did seem to dive into their hearts
With humble and familiar courtesy;
What reverence he did throw away on slaves,
Wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of smiles
And patient underbearing of his fortune,
As 'twere to banish their affects on him.
Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench;
A brace of draymen bid God speed him well,
And had the tribute of his supple knee,
With “Thanks, my countrymen, my loving friends”—
As were our England in reversion his,
And he our subjects' next degree in hope.

1.4.23-36

Richard's speech contains equal parts of jealousy and contempt, although it is difficult to say how worried he really is about Bolingbroke's becoming “our subjects' next degree in hope.” The burden of Richard's description is Bolingbroke's craftiness, his calculated and (to Richard's mind) patently insincere populism. Yet even Richard, who sneers at the duke's “supple knee,” seems quietly awed by the way in which “he did seem to dive into their hearts / With humble and familiar courtesy.” The sources of this passage in Froissart, Holinshed, and Daniel all describe the people's behavior toward Bolingbroke.³⁰ In contrast, using Richard's bias as a fulcrum, Shakespeare describes Bolingbroke's “wooing” of the masses, as though the duke somehow engineered the group bond. There is more threat and perhaps more delusion in the Shakespearean version, and therefore greater capacity for drama. But no amount of royal bias can mask the group experience of Bolingbroke's charismatic presence. Richard's negative characterization of the people's response to the departing duke only underscores the bond between Bolingbroke and his followers—“‘my countrymen, my loving friends.’”

Yet the threat of Bolingbroke's charisma and of its potential to bring on a popular revolt is never quite fulfilled. Despite his evident popularity, the duke succeeds not as a populist but consummately as an aristocrat. “As I was banish'd, I was banish'd Herford,” he says on returning from exile, “But as I come, I come for Lancaster” (2.3.112-13). The followers upon whom he depends are also aristocrats, and he casts his rebellion in terms of shared privilege and family rights. “Wherefore was I born?” (2.3.121) he asks York, who has just accused him of “gross rebellion and detested treason” (2.3.108). Bolingbroke invokes the protection of the lineage charismatic group, describing an analogous situation in which Aumerle might have been deprived of his rights and inheritances: “Had you first died, and he been thus trod down, / He should have found his uncle Gaunt a father” (2.3.125-26). Fatherhood, blood-ties, and dynastic charisma all meet in Bolingbroke's justification as the duke marshals the most powerful myths of his milieu to organize a group of followers, finally declaring himself a subject who challenges law: “And therefore personally I lay claim / To my inheritance of free descent” (2.3.133-34).

As so often in the play, different kinds of charisma conflict in the Bolingbroke experience. His rebellion justifies itself as an instrument of the retrenchment of traditional authority, whose laws and tenets Richard has abrogated in stealing Lancaster's property. At the same time, however, Bolingbroke displays a magnetic personal charisma, a disruptive force which is essentially antagonistic to traditional authority. It is to this latter disruptive force that York responds in condemning the man who would “Be his own carver, and cut out his way, / To find out right with wrong” (2.3.143-44). The balancing of these conflicting forms of authority distinguishes Bolingbroke as a leader. His abilities come to light in crises of group cohesion, a fact that supports Thomas Spence Smith's observation that some charismatic groups may be unable to function without an element of decay. Such groups thrive in dissipative structures, and their leaders, like Bolingbroke, capitalize on the entropy of the social structure to achieve and maintain ascendancy.³¹ But Bolingbroke publicly eschews socially dissipative situations, representing himself as the hero of homeostasis. His rebellion paradoxically offers political stability, official respect for lineage authority, and a return to traditional rulership. The governmental chaos which he helped foment—and which parallels Richard's emotional state—provides Bolingbroke with the opening to appear “as a double-visaged Janus, projecting himself on the one hand as the omniscient repository of ancient wisdom and on the other as the new man of the people.”³²

The double visage and its political implications are particularly clear in Shakespeare's main source. According to Holinshed, Bolingbroke addressed Parliament after Richard's deposition with these words:

I Henrie of Lancaster claime the realme of England and the crowne, with all the appurtenances, as I that am descended by right line of the blood comming from that good lord king Henrie the third, and through the right that God of his grace hath sent me, to recouer the same, which was in point to be vndoone for default of good gouernance and due justice.³³

Even in the Chronicles the figure of Bolingbroke thrives on the threshold of different kinds of charisma that are not so much in conflict as in hopeful tandem. In this passage he invokes both his lineage and his personal charismatic claim. He offers to restore “good gouernance” and “due justice,” in Weberian terms fulfilling extraordinary social needs by transcending the sphere of everyday routines. This he will accomplish “with the helpe of my kin, and of my freends,” an acknowledgment of group function, or more precisely, the cooperation of two different groups: one the product of lineage connections, the other of personal bonds. In claiming the crown, Bolingbroke calls attention to his charismatic leadership while simultaneously presenting himself as a scion of traditional authority, a legitimate hereditary ruler.

Ironically, the contradiction implicit in these appeals to different forms of authority works to Bolingbroke's tactical advantage. In Holinshed's account Bolingbroke stands up in a literally kingless meeting of Parliament: Richard has refused to attend the session and in his absence the “speciall commissaries” list his crimes against the realm and “depriue him of all kinglie dignitie and worship, and of any kinglie worship in himself.”³⁴ They depose him in absentia with his personal resignation to take place the following day. At this point in the proceedings the Parliament and indeed all England have no head. An extreme crisis of political disequilibrium faces the assembled house, providing the ideal moment for an intervention of charismatic management:

Immediatlie as the sentence was in this wise passed, and that by reason thereof the realme stood void without head or gouernour for the time, the duke of Lancaster rising from the place where before he sate, and standing where all those in the house might behold him, in reuerend manner made a signe of the crosse on his forhead, and likewise on his brest, and after silence by an officer commanded, said vnto the people there being present these words following.

The duke of Lancaster laieth challenge or claime to the crowne.³⁵

Bolingbroke's response to the situation—even if we reckon the crisis to have been stage-managed for him³⁶—places him at the focal point of the dissipative government structure, a heroic institution-saver.

The duke solemnly invokes his genealogical descent, but the valence of his authority favors personal charisma, a form of leadership “specifically salvationist or messianic in nature.”³⁷ This valence, necessary to Bolingbroke's political survival, results from the weakness of his lineage claim. Although he can trace his bloodline beyond Edward III to Henry III, and although he is at the same first-cousin level as Richard in the kinship group, he is not the first son of a first son and therefore does not have the same mystified claim to the family's charismatic endowment.³⁸ Consequently he must count on integrating a combination of destabilizing elements with the highly stable idea of a kingly office to effect the political homeostasis he implicitly promises when he “laieth challenge or claime to the crowne.”

Despite his personal charisma, or because of it, Bolingbroke remains a genealogical compromise. Thus in reading Richard II it remains impossible to decide whether Richard can justifiably be deposed, whether “God's substitute” can be replaced by someone chosen on earth. This problem supplies the content of the play's political debate. Richard himself provokes the issue when he is brought before Bolingbroke for his abdication. “God save the king!” he exclaims blackly, “although I be not he; / And yet, amen, if heaven do think him me” (4.1.174-75). But, both in the deposition scene and generally throughout the play, Shakespeare does more than merely oppose the anointed and the unanointed. Bolingbroke's charismatic presence has the force of a divine gift—if not a Tamburlainian superiority then at least a fresher sanction than Richard's lineage claims. As Weber suggests in one of his more extreme characterizations of pure (i.e., personal) charisma, “Instead of reverence for customs that are ancient and hence sacred, [charisma] enforces the inner subjection to the unprecedented and absolutely unique and therefore Divine.”³⁹ Although, as we have seen, Bolingbroke pays reverential lip service to old and sacred customs, his disruptive, revolutionary mission demands of his followers what Weber calls an “inner subjection” (innere Unterwerfung) to the divine.⁴⁰ Consequently Richard's anointed status must confront the divinity of his challenger's charismatic auspices.

Moreover, because Bolingbroke has better administrative skills, not to mention a better strategic imagination, he manages his charismatic claim more perceptively, taking less for granted regarding his followers' duty to him. We might say (with due acknowledgment to Pierre Bourdieu) that Bolingbroke possesses charismatic capital, and that experiencing his charisma means sharing in a process of its distribution. Perhaps it is worth recalling in this context that Saint Paul speaks of distribution when describing the human manifestations of the nine charisms. In the Geneva Bible Paul claims “there are diuersities of gifts” (I Cor. 12:4), but the term “diuersities of gifts” is in fact diaeresis de charismaton in the Greek New Testament and divisiones gratiarum in the Vulgate. The Greek diairesis means a dividing-up, just as the Latin divisio suggests both dividing and distribution of available material. This sense is lost somewhat in the word “diuersities” in that the notion of difference occludes the connotation of distribution. But the Bolingbroke experience restores the original notion of charismatic distribution which tends to be effaced by such diluted forms of charisma as those associated with lineage and office. Simultaneously conserving and disrupting the social equilibrium, Bolingbroke measures his individual power against group satisfaction and enhances his personal aggrandizement with the distribution of charismatic capital.⁴¹

Bolingbroke's word for this distribution is “love.” At the end of act 2 he meets Northumberland in Gloucestershire and travels with him to link up with other allies. Northumberland is unctuous, apparently enthralled by Bolingbroke's very presence:

                    I bethink me what a weary way
From Ravenspurgh to Cotshall will be found
In Ross and Willoughby, wanting your company,
Which I protest hath very much beguil'd
The tediousness and process of my travel.
But theirs is sweet'ned with the hope to have
The present benefit which I possess,
And hope to joy is little less in joy
Than hope enjoy'd.

2.3.8-16

These words seem uncharacteristically effusive for Northumberland. His hyperbole echoes the language of courtly love: he “protests” that Bolingbroke's company has “beguil'd / The tediousness and process of my travel,” the hendiadys doubling not only the difficulty but also presumably the “present benefit” which he possesses—hope and joy combined in “hope enjoy'd.” There is little doubt, I think, that Shakespeare means for us to recognize this scene as a demonstration of Bolingbroke's magnetism, the root and controlling factor of his charismatic authority. An undercurrent of religious, and maybe amorous, devotion resonates in the words “hope” and “joy,” and in Northumberland's fantasy that Ross and Willoughby, like the biblical Magi, are travelling in “sweet'ned” anticipation of the epiphany to come when they will meet the savior-duke.

Bolingbroke's return fulfills the salvationistic promise of the charismatic bond, satisfying his followers' charisma hunger and instantly reorganizing the symbolic order around his charismatic mission.⁴² His followers, of whom Northumberland is emblematic, begin to experience their own unattainable ambitions through Bolingbroke's leadership—a group phenomenon Smith, following Heinz Kohut, refers to as “transfers of omnipotence to idealized self-objects, … manifestations of the hunger for powerful figures.”⁴³ Northumberland promptly fits the returning duke into an idealized symbolic scheme. His lover's enthusiasm, hinting at the aim-inhibited libidinal ties of group cohesion, animates the scene and provides the proof of Bolingbroke's ability to satisfy extraordinary needs and to feed charisma hunger while managing the functional disequilibrium of a rebellious movement.

Bolingbroke's response to Northumberland's enthusiasm is properly humble (as un-Tamburlainian as it could be): “Of much less value is my company / Than your good words” (2.3.19-20). This is the Bolingbroke of the supple knee, acknowledging the interdependence of his relationship to Northumberland. His magnanimity continues when Harry Percy rides up, at which point we glimpse an exchange of vows between political lovers. After his father has introduced the duke, Percy begins:

PERCY.
My gracious lord, I tender you my service,
Such as it is, being tender, raw, and young,
Which elder days shall ripen and confirm
To more approved service and desert.
BOL.
I thank thee, gentle Percy, and be sure
I count myself in nothing else so happy
As in a soul rememb'ring my good friends,
And as my fortune ripens with thy love
It shall be still thy true love's recompense.
My heart this covenant makes, my hand thus seals it.

2.3.41-50

Talk of happy souls, true love, hearts, and hands echoes the language of courtly fin'amors.⁴⁴ Moreover, as H. R. Coursen has pointed out, Bolingbroke also invokes the “reciprocal nature of the feudal oath,” promising to reward Percy as “my fortune ripens with thy love.”⁴⁵

It has often been noted that the promises made here are later condemned by Hotspur as the “candy deal of courtesy” (cf. I Henry IV 1.3.251-55). But the feudal character of the meeting in Richard II, and of the reciprocity implied, confirms the charismatic status of Bolingbroke's authority. Feudal relations tend to have a charismatic basis insofar as fealty eschews economic rationality. Knights depend on their lords' pleasure for their survival; rewards and spoils come from an irrational relation between their oath and the king's good will. The bond between Percy and Bolingbroke has traces of this kind of irrational economic conduct, this charismatic management of payment.⁴⁶ Thus the unspecific, easily misinterpreted promise to give “thy true love's recompense,” while speeding Bolingbroke on his way, also causes problems later when the routinization of his charismatic movement has begun in earnest.

The magnanimous duke repeats the same vague promises to Ross and Willoughby, with the same emphasis on their love:

                                                                                All my treasury
Is yet but unfelt thanks, which, more inrich'd,
Shall be your love and labour's recompense.

2.3.60-62

“Your presence makes us rich,” answers Ross. “And far surmounts our labour to attain it,” chimes in Willoughby. For the third time we hear the same attitude toward Bolingbroke's “presence” and an identical staging of his charismatic experience. Through it all Bolingbroke continually speaks of love as a service rendered which deserves recompense. He vows to distribute the capital he gains, presumably both material and honorific, as his fortune “ripens” and fills his treasury with more than “unfelt thanks.” In this sense, as I mentioned above, Bolingbroke manages the accumulation and distribution of what might be called charismatic capital. The duke may speak airily of such tangibles as exchequers and fortunes, treasury and enrichment, but at this point in the play his value to his followers is primarily symbolic.

Bolingbroke's value as a bearer of charismatic symbols remains more or less in suspension throughout Richard II. The strain of routinization does not occur until the Henriad. Given the conflicting forms of authority which Bolingbroke exploits in his rise to power, it is no wonder that his charismatic idealization increasingly suffers damage as he establishes himself as a traditional ruler. But that conflict is not the tragedy of Richard's play, if indeed it can ever be termed a tragedy at all.

Notes

1. Max Weber, Economy and Society, 2 vols., ed. Günther Roth and Claus Wittich, with various translators (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 2:1121.

2. Richard II, Arden edition, ed. Peter Ure (London: Methuen, 1956; repr. 1984), 2.3.132-35 All subsequent references to the play appear in the text. References to Ure's commentary appear in the notes.

3. Ruth Nevo, Tragic Form in Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 65.

4. Louise Cowan, “God Will Save the King: Shakespeare's Richard II,” in John Alvis and Thomas G. West, eds., Shakespeare As A Political Thinker (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1981), 75.

5. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie, 2 vols., ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1956), 2:679.

6. Weber, Economy and Society, 2:1136

7. Ibid.

8. See Thomas Spence Smith, Strong Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 185. Smith has noted that in Weber's theory “social life beyond the charismatic circle was founded on ways not of retrieving charisma but of preventing its return, or, perhaps more accurately, of filtering it out” because rationality and traditionalism “were incompatible with the radically dependent, subjectively fused, unstable and incalculable forms of personal charisma.” This is not the place to discuss Smith's theory, except perhaps to note that he sees charismatic group function as the management of a nonequilibrium system, exactly the sort of social interaction in which Richard falters and Bolingbroke flourishes.

9. The anonymous play called Woodstock also contains a kinship pun in its opening scene. An incredulous Duke of York exclaims, “God for thy mercy! Would our cousin king / so cozen us, to poison us in our meat?” (1.1.8-9). By equating “cousin” with “cozen,” the passage frankly associates cheating and betrayal with kinship. Indeed, both words are spelled “cussen” in the manuscript of the play, as seen in Wilhelmina Frijlinck's transcript of Egerton MS 1994 (Malone Society, 1929). A. P. Rossiter modernized the spelling in his edition, Woodstock, A Moral History (London: Chatto & Windus, 1946).

10. But it should be noted that dueling and personal combat among aristocrats or courtiers were discouraged in Elizabethan England, and therefore (anachronistically) Bolingbroke's dissociation of the throne from personal combat would have had some legitimate justification. See Eleanor Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), 13-17.

11. Cowan, “God Will Save the King,” 73.

12. See Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 23-25; Anthony Wagner, Pedigree and Progress: Essays in the Genealogical Interpretation of History (London: Phillimore, 1975), 45; and also my Conceived Presences: Literary Genealogy in Renaissance England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 6-8.

13. Cf. Ure, Arden edition, 17 n13-21, on the notion of the family tree.

14. The Duchess's mystification of Edward's blood may have its source in Woodstock 1.1.37-45.

15. A full discussion of subjectivity and charisma in Richard II is beyond the scope of this essay. But it should be noted that, although Richard cannot be said to demonstrate a continuous interiority, it is also inaccurate to characterize his subjectivity in the sharply polarized terms of some recent criticism. See, e.g., Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985), especially 33-34 and 39-40; also, Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). In reviling “essentialism” and “liberal humanism,” these critics (among many others) posit both an evolutionary model of the “unified subject” (Belsey's term) and an either/or pattern characterizing a protagonist as either a continuous interiority or a discontinuous collocation of exterior impressions. But the either/or pattern fails to account for the ambiguous status of group identity and intrasubjective dependence, as is evident in both Bolingbroke's and Richard's relations with their followers. Moreover, the evolutionary model of subjectivity is unconvincing. As Alan MacFarlane showed about twenty years ago, in The Origins of English Individualism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), the evolutionary historical model of judging the emergence of individualism does not have much credence in England. By extension, we should be skeptical about the sudden emergence of subjectivity, let alone about the putative dark ages of its nonexistence.

16. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 27.

17. Wolfgang Iser, Staging Politics: The Lasting Impact of Shakespeare's Histories, trans., David Henry Wilson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 69.

18. I borrow the notion from Nicholas Brooke, who remarks that “Shakespeare does not [in Richard II] … make a simple distinction between the man and the office: the office is the necessary concomitant of the man”; Brooke, Shakespeare's Early Tragedies (London: Methuen, 1968), 133. In a similar vein, Philip Edwards observes that only as Richard's authority slips away does the king “begin to learn the true nature of his person and his office, that true nature being the identity of those two things”; Edwards, “Person and Office in Shakespeare's Plays,” Proceedings of the British Academy 56 (1972): 100. Perhaps Brooke's “concomitant” is a better word than Edwards's “identity,” but the fundamental point is the same: only at the risk of destroying the concept of kingship can we separate person and office.

19. It should be noted that Weber speaks of office charisma (Amtcharisma) as a form of depersonalization distinct from lineage charisma; office charisma, he explains, is transferred from person to person “through artificial, magical means instead of through blood relationship” (Economy and Society, 2:1139). In a sense, therefore, lineage charisma adds a third or middle term to the polarizing opposition of person and office—and also perhaps to the two-bodies concept. We might compare Louis Marin's concept of the image or portrait of a king as his “sacramental body.” See Portrait of the King, trans. Martha H. Houle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 14:

    the king has only one body left, but his sole body, in truth, unifies three, a physical historical body, a juridico-political body, and a semiotic sacramental body, the sacramental body, the “portrait,” operating the exchange without remainder (or attempting to eliminate all remainder) between the historical and political bodies.

    I am grateful to an anonymous reader for Exemplaria who recommended Marin's study.

20. Kantorowicz, King's Two Bodies, 13. Kantorowicz depends heavily on this passage, but it should be noted that not everyone agrees with the importance of the “two bodies” concept in England. For example, Richard F. Hardin has objected that Kantorowicz's thesis “bears more directly on Continental than English history,” and that we should be skeptical about its application to Elizabethan drama; see Hardin, Civil Idolatry: Desacralizing and Monarchy in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 24. In an earlier study Marie Axton had noted that in Elizabethan England “‘The king's two bodies’ was never a fact, nor did it ever attain the status of orthodoxy; it remained a controversial idea”; Axton, The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), x. Axton adds that this controversial idea came to prominence in the sixteenth century especially among lawyers and chiefly in response to the succession crisis. The notion of a natural body distinct from the body politic was substantially a forensic point, part of a larger argument used to oppose Elizabeth. (In addition to his Reports, Plowden also wrote an influential manuscript treatise supporting the right to the English throne of Mary Queen of Scots; see Axton, 19). Hardin acknowledges Axton's documentation of the “two bodies” concept in the period, but disagrees with her interpretation of the evidence (see 210 n25). Hardin's skepticism is salutary. Moreover, there is the question of whether Kantorowicz's model is too indebted to medieval sources. But, despite the uncertainties, I am still inclined to accept Axton's general conclusion that the notion of the king's or queen's two bodies was sufficiently in circulation to have been fair game for Inns of Court dramatists as well as for Shakespeare and other professionals.

21. Edward Shils, The Constitution of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 131.

22. Edward Forset, A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique (London, 1606), 3-4. Forset's notion of the ideal monarchy owes a good deal to Saint Paul's discussion of the nine charisms, or gifts of grace, in 1 Corinthians 12. Cf. Forset's Preface: “The like comparison [of the body natural to the body politic] is most divinely enlarged by a much better Orator, and in much more important poynt of the inseparable union of the members of Christ with their head, and of the necessary communion of their distinct gifts and works amongst themselves” (no page number). The Pauline text links the most famous use of the human body as a metaphor for a political entity to the original discussion of charisma, a juxtaposition that should resonate in any criticism of Richard II.

23. Larry S. Champion, “The Noise of Threatening Drum”: Dramatic Strategy and Political Ideology in Shakespeare and the English Chronicle Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), 101-2. H. R. Coursen notes that “[t]he historical Richard—more than had monarchs before him—insisted on anointment as the sacramental action that confirmed his absolute right to rule”; Coursen, The Leasing Out of England: Shakespeare's Second Henriad (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982), 35. Holinshed's extensive treatment of Richard's coronation seems to bear out this idea; Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 6 vols. (London, 1807), 2:713-15.

24. Kantorowicz, King's Two Bodies, 30.

25. John Palmer, Political Characters in Shakespeare (London: Macmillan, 1948), 138.

26. Shils, Constitution of Society, 131.

27. Ibid.

28. Compare C. Stephen Jaeger on the conflict between what he terms charismatic and intellectual culture in The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950-1200 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), especially 4-9; see also his recent article, “Charismatic Body—Charismatic Text,” Exemplaria 9 (1997): 117-37. In neither study is Jaeger concerned with group function per se, but his notion of the preservation of charisma in art (“Charismatic Body,” 121) as well as his discussion of “enfabulation” (ibid., 132) are interesting to consider in connection with the separation of a charismatic leader from the symbols of his or her charismatic movement. On the other hand, the polarization of charismatic and intellectual culture leads Jaeger to doubtful assumptions regarding the transition from one form of authority to another; and I think that he aestheticizes charisma unnecessarily in his view of the human body as a work of art in charismatic culture.

29. Cf. Champion, “Noise of Threatening Drum,” 146 n10.

30. Ure, Arden edition, 43 n24-36.

31. Smith, Strong Interaction, 110-11.

32. Ann Ruth Willner and Dorothy Willner, “The Rise and Role of Charismatic Leaders,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 358 (1965): 87. The quotation does not appear in the context of Richard II.

33. Holinshed, Chronicles, 2:865.

34. Ibid., 2:864.

35. Ibid., 2:865.

36. In Samuel Daniel's version Bolingbroke brings the charges himself: “And all these faults, which Lancaster now brings / Against a King, must be his owne, when hee, / By vrging others sinnes, a King shall be.” See Civile Wars 2.98, in Daniel, The Complete Works, 5 vols., ed. Alexander Grosart (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), vol. 2.

37. Robert C. Tucker, “The Theory of Charismatic Leadership,” Daedalus 97 (1968): 743.

38. He mentions Henry III because with his reign begins the unbroken accession to the throne of first sons, until Richard who is a grandson: Henry III, 1216-72; Edward I, 1272-1307; Edward II, 1307-1326; Edward III, 1326-77.

39. Weber, Economy and Society, 2:1117.

40. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 2:666.

41. On conserving and disrupting, see Charles Camic, “Charisma: Its Varieties, Preconditions, and Consequences,” Sociological Inquiry 50 (1980): 20.

42. On charisma hunger see Smith, Strong Interaction, 169.

43. Ibid., 174-75; cf. Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self (New York: International Universities Press, 1971), 302.

44. Cf. Tamburlaine's battlefield meeting with Theridamas, Part I, 1.2:224-31. My interest is in the contribution of aim-inhibited libidinal ties to group function. For a different approach, attempting to discern uninhibited homoerotic ties in the masked language of the Henriad, see, e.g., Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualties (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 145-75; and also Valerie Traub, “Prince Hal's Falstaff: Positioning Psychoanalysis and the Female Reproductive Body,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 456-74.

45. Coursen, Leasing Out of England, 78.

46. The concept of irrational economic organization is central to Weber's ideal type of pure charisma, in particular in contrast with bureaucracy. Charisma can either reject owning or making money, as among mendicant friars, or, as in the case of pirates or political heroes, charisma may in fact seek booty. “The point,” Weber emphasizes, “is that charisma rejects as undignified all methodical rational acquisition, in fact, all rational economic conduct” (Economy and Society, 2:1113). But the rejection of rational economic conduct, while providing the charismatic leader with vital nonequilibrium components for the management and control of his or her followers, also threatens to destroy the movement. As Weber concludes, “Every charisma is on the road from a turbulently emotional life that knows no economic rationality to a slow death by suffocation under the weight of material interests: every hour of its existence brings it nearer to this end” (2:1120).