| The dissertation reads four logics of representation of sovereignty at the end of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in Shakespeare's Richard II and Measure for Measure, Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna, and Calderon de la Barca's La vida es sueno. Viewed together, I argue, this constellation marks an historical shift as sovereignty moves from a concept requiring a representational logic of substitution and physical symbolism of the body, to its modern form, prepared for by Francisco Suarez's Metaphysical Disputations , in which the body-of-power becomes increasingly abstract, fragmented, and disseminated in space. Each of my four chapters is organized around a key trope, from metaphor in Measure for Measure and Fuente Ovejuna, to the increasing complexity of sovereignty's dependence on analogy in Richard II, the decomposition of this structure performed in Suarez's 28th disputation, and, finally its re-constitution in the form of allegory in La vida es sueno. The figure of the 'tear' in my title refers both to an epistemological rupture (the tearing) as the concept moves into the seventeenth century and also the condition through which the new form of sovereignty is viewed as it crosses the threshold of modernity. |
