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IN A PATERNE FOR A KINGS INAVGVRATION, James I of England advises his son Charles that the king must be "a great watchman and shepheard . . . and his eye must neuer slumber nor sleepe for the care of his flocke, euer remembring that his office, beeing duely executed, will prooue as much onus as honos unto him."1 James's twofold vision of an overburdened yet ever-wary king belies the simple fact of the body natural's compulsion to sleep, which inevitably suspends the sovereign eye of care. But the king's fatherly advice also suggests the onus of rule could rob the sovereign of his ability to sleep, as he is anxiously consumed by the pressing concerns of state and the demands of the subjects that compose the body politic. James's notion of the trials of sovereign vigilance thus raises the central question motivating this essay's reading of Hamlet and Macbeth: what does happen to the body politic when the sovereign body natural sleeps?
As is well-known to students of early modern European history, political theory, and literary studies alike, the king was held to possess a natural body common to all humans, as well as a mystical "superbody" that perpetuates the life of the state and lends an aura of divine perfection to the sovereign. Just as its physiological counterpart must be cared for, James suggests that the care of the king's numinous body coextends with the care of his political subjects - and that both require steady attention. In the pages that follow, I push the implications of James's metaphor much further, arguing that both Hamlet and Macbeth imagine substantial connections between the bodies of the sovereign and his subjects, routed through the potentially ill or evil effects of sleep on the King's Two Bodies. These tragedies hinge on the violent deaths of sleeping kings and a politically chaotic aftermath, both of which resist the highly wrought fictions of constant vigilance, immortality, and stately perfection that help to legitimate the doctrine of the King's Two Bodies.
Put simply, sleep and insomnia constitute "altered cases"; a concept developed by Tudor jurisprudence to denote the sudden incorporation of the body politic by the newly sovereign body natural, but which I argue elucidates Shakespeare's visions of the...