Shakespeare, King, Commonwealth, and Kantorowicz.(William Shakespeare, 'The King's Two Bodies' by Ernst Kantomwicz)(Critical essay)

Lorna Hutson alleges scholars' misuse of The King's Two Bodies, Ernst Kantomwicz's widely read 1957 book about late-medieval and early-modern imaginary personifications of polities' welfare. She critiques the "widespread assumption that English Renaissance drama, and Shakespeare's plays in particular, embody the commonwealth, and its justice, in the sacred person and personal decision-making of the monarch." Kantorowicz's book was not really about this, argues Hutson, but about "the medieval emergence of theological and juristic fictions enabling ways of thinking about the abstraction of the state" that did not necessarily entail that state's imagined mystical placement in the bosom of …