THE SOVEREIGN AND ITS BESTIAL DOUBLE: A DERRIDAEAN READING OF SHAKESPEARE’S RICHARD III
THE SOVEREIGN AND ITS BESTIAL DOUBLE: A DERRIDAEAN READING OF SHAKESPEARE’S RICHARD III

Summary/Abstract: This paper aims to illuminate ways in which Deconstruction is a productive approach to both performance analysis and staging theatre. The article provides a comparative application of Jacques Derrida’s line of argumentation from The Animal that therefore I Am [more to follow…] (2002) to Shakespeare's play Richard III (1593) and to Romanian director Mihai MăniuŃiu’s production of Richard III (1993). This performance's chief innovative device introduces on stage a character non-existent in the play: the hero’s “Double,” a beast-like creature corresponding to the repeated metaphors in Shakespeare’s text referring to Richard as “evil dog.” Thus, sovereignty is physically embodied on stage simultaneously in two different bodies, one human (Richard) and one bestial (Sovereign’s Double). Thus, Shakespeare's Sovereign inhabits neither the “real” world of Sovereigns nor the fictional world of their metaphorical representations, but, rather, the very threshold between these two worlds—a space of in-betweeness, of “suspended consciousness,” and of becoming. Versions of this paper have been presented at the International Federation for Theatre Research Congress, University of Maryland, 2005; at the Southern-California graduate conference, UCSD 2005; and at the University of California Multi-Campus Research Group in Performance, University of California Davis, 2006.

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