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THE HOLLOW CROWN(2)

Earlier in the play (Act III, scene II), there is another beautiful monologue showing the first signals of the process of humanisation in Richard; he still sees himself as king, a royal and sacred person, but he now knows he is mortal: ‘Let’s talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs’.  Here he introduces the theme of the crown as a trap of death: ‘for within the hollow crown that rounds the mortal temples of a king, keeps Death his court’. Power and royal pomp are delusions because a king is mortal and has to die like any other men. What makes us human, different from all other creatures, is the awareness of death.



Let us introduce a psychoanalytic concept created by Jacques Lacan, very useful for our purposes; it is called the Mirror Stage, and every baby goes through it between 6 to 18 months of age; according to Lacan, a baby has only a fragmented image of himself until he looks at himself on a mirror. This image is invested with love, but the trick is that although it is a necessary stage to create the bases of an identity in adulthood, an I, that I on the mirror is another (this means it is outside ourselves); later on we all want to be seen and loved as that image on the mirror, arguably because our mother loved that baby on the mirror.

From the perspective of astrology, the highest point of the chart, Mid Heaven and X House, is related to power, responsibility, status and achievement in life, but it is also associated to the mother of the individual. Moreover, the historical Richard II was a Capricorn, a sign associated to those themes of responsibility and power. Richard Nixon, who had a very strong relationship with his mother, was also a Capricorn and he cried as well when he lost his status as a president; all this by his own mistakes and lack of control of the people around him. Afterwards, Nixon had to reinvent his own image.

In Richard II, Shakespeare seems to have had the intuition of the Mirror Stage, especially because Richard was revered as king practically since he was born; he did not know his own image without the investiture of the crown, thousands of people around him worked for him and venerated him every day of his life. Sure, many kings have been betrayed, insulted or executed, but they died being kings; in the case of Richard he stopped being a king. Thus, who was Richard, the man without a crown?

Coming back to Lacan’s theory, the baby’s image reflected on the mirror is invested with love, and this erotic energy keeps feeding the self image throughout life. One consequence of this theory is that when we fall in love with someone, we want that person to love and worship that image of ourselves on the mirror. We are talking, of course, of narcissism. We know that narcissism tends to block our creativity because all our vitality is invested in keeping the fantasy of our ideal I.

The scene of Richard II’s deposition as a king was never performed for fear of offending Queen Elizabeth I who was already old and childless, some even talked of deposing her; but Shakespeare wrote that scene knowing that the Elizabethan audience would understand the references to the myth of Narcissus, Ovid’s poems were very well known at the time. Thus, if narcissism is a paralysing deathly mirror, Richard’s breaking of the mirror might be the liberation of an alienated sense of identity.

There are many hints in Richard’s monologues about this promise of freedom when he becomes a normal, uncrowned individual; but his untimely death obviously represents a failure in the process of individuation, delivering the crown was a consequence of a series of errors and not an act of the will.

The crown, as a symbol of an identity based on worldly power and narcissism, ignorance of the real Self, is a heavy and dangerous equipage to carry. Shakespeare insists on the theme in the second part of Henry IV, the king who deposed Richard, when in a night of insomnia and anxiety, Henry utters: ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown’.(the end)

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THE HOLLOW CROWN(1)

by xavier_astro | 2013-09-17 00:00 | 文学  

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