“This fortress built by nature for herself”: Material Agency and Political Affect in Richard II

Since Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies (1957), one dominant trend of scholarship on Shakespeare’s Richard II has read the play as an investigation of the question of the king’s sacred or secular political identity. In this paper, I would like to skirt the question of sacred vs secular kingship by reconsidering ways in which materiality—specifically the land—constitutes political identity. Drawing from, on the one hand, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of the assemblage and, on the other, from Jane Bennett’s concept of material affect, I will explore how, in Richard II, Shakespeare offers nonhuman matter a determining role in Henry Bolingbroke’s usurpation of Richard. Finally, I will connect the agency of the land to several key moments of prophetic utterance in they play in order to consider how those utterances articulate the role of the nonhuman and material within political conflict.

Joseph Bowling, The Graduate Center, CUNY