Office and Duty in King Lear: Palgrave Shakespeare Studies

1 Introduction.- 2 The Majesty of Kingship: Spectacular and Sacred Sovereign Power.- 3 “The Bloody Proclamation to Escape”: Edgar and Romantic Outlawry.- 4 Dividing Between Daughters.- 5 Lear’s Redemption.- 6 Conclusion: Lear’s Shadow, Office Today.- Index.

Dr Alexander Thom is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of English, University of Leeds, UK. His postdoctoral research focuses on the displaced in English Renaissance drama. This book is based on his Midlands3Cities AHRC doctorate, which was awarded in 2020 by the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK.

This book advances five original readings of Shakespeare's King Lear, influenced by Giorgio Agamben, but tempered by primary research into Jacobean literature, law, religion, and philosophy. To grasp Lear’s encounter between politics and identity, the play demands a wider understanding of the religious influence on political thought. As Lear himself realises, sovereignty is an extreme, glamorous example of a deeper category: sacred office. Lear also shows duty intersecting with a hierarchy of bastards, outlaws, women, waifs, and monks. This book introduces concepts like petit treason, civil death, and waivery into political theological studies, complicating Agamben’s models. Goneril’s treason shows the sovereign’s consort and children are consecrated lives too. Lear’s crisis of "self-knowing" stages a landmark critique of office. The promise of his poignant speech before the prison is foreclosed by Shakespeare's invention: an officer dutifully murdering Cordelia. This book’s conclusion, through Hannah Arendt, reconsiders Lear’s persistent association with the Holocaust.

Reconstructs the theological origins of the officer as a conduit for a higher power Argues that office, as a moral problem, is the central theme of King Lear Presents King Lear as a landmark expression of the perils of living within office