“And there the antic sits”. Images of death and rebellion in three Elizabethan political plays

The paper is concerned with political aesthetics and myth in Shakespearean tragedies and history plays. The textual analysis will cover the anonymous Jack Straw, Shakespeare’s Richard II and Hamlet, with occasional references to other plays. A close reading focussing on imagery will highlight a pattern that draws together rebellion, death, and comic roles. The discourses surrounding these issues configure as explicitly threatening to power: the rebels’ interchangeability and expendability, as they play the role of literal jackstraws, “crash dummies” who throw themselves at the political order; a vitality unmindful of dysfunctionality, self-annihilation, or death by hanging; the insistence on biological death being identical with life, as the characters arm themselves of their mortality, thus becoming impervious to punishment, and provocative to political orders and their representatives. I submit that “antic Death” can be considered a mythic figure capable of encompassing these concepts. More in particular, the phenomena staged counter a modern type of politics, whose features are “negatives” of those listed above: early modern rulers, aware of their creaturely limits, fashion themselves not as expendable, but as sacred and legitimate; political orders attempt to organise chaotic nature, to harness or freeze its movement into a productive social form; the characters of order make efforts to charge life of meaning and logic albeit their conduct proves to be the result of existential, volitional drives rather than ideologies. Accordingly, early modern orders tend to silence their “antic” alternatives or discredit them before they can deploy their disruptive potential. In conclusion, the article’s aim is to conjecture an alternative – if hardly a political one – to modern political orders given voice onstage.