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The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama by Philip Lorenz (review)

The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama offers a comparative and richly theorized reading of five key plays of the early modern English and Spanish stage: Shakespeare’s Richard II, Measure for Measure, and The Winter’s Tale, Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna, and Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño. Founded on a wide range of concepts and methodological approaches from modern thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, or Jacques Derrida, together with notions taken from psychoanalytic theory, Philip Lorenz delves into the complex world of early modern discussions of sovereignty, its intersection with political theology and the process of secularization, and, most importantly, how theater problematized these concepts through the production of a rich net of tropes. As the author states in the introduction to his book, “what The Tears of Sovereignty attempts to make visible is a series of co-implications between sovereignty’s baroque stagings and its contemporary (both seventeenthand twentyfirst century) theorizations” (19). The five plays chosen as the object of study are therefore situated into a comparative framework that stresses their connection to issues of power and how it is deeply anchored in the problem of representation, as sovereignty is presented as torn and restored in different ways—the “tears” of sovereignty. The ideas of Spanish Jesuit theologian and philosopher Francisco Suárez constantly emerge throughout the five chapters in which this book is divided as a useful and much-needed dialogue with political thought from the early modern