Explicit tragoedia. The Undressing of the King’s Body. Xerxes, Constantine XI Palaeologus, Richard II

Three pictures, three personae – Xerxes, Constantine XI Palaeologus, Richard the Second – staging three divestments of the royal body: three times, on the augmented stage of the tragic theatre in Athens in 472 BC; in London in 1599; and on 29 May, 1453, in Constantinople, in the last theatrical act of the last Byzantine emperor, in which the monarch strips himself naked and, deprived of his double, icastically shows the end of royalty. The monarchy thus ends three times. The battle of Salamis, in Aeschylus’ Persians, is presented (anti-historically, but that does not matter here) as the absolute end of the Persian monarchy. No matter how far-fetched and anti-historical the representation is, what Aeschylus presents on stage is the end of Persian monarchic power (“no one obeys the Sovereign any more [...] all Persia is buried”). The queen breaks her promise and does not appear onstage again to return her son-king the new robe: Xerxes is naked. The death of Constantine XI sanctions the end of the Second Rome and of the millennial Roman empire: Constantine Palaeologus understands the importance of the symbolic struggle and, on his last day in Constantinople, stages the figurative death of the monarch’s divine body. Richard II, with his divestment emphasised by perfect ceremonial gestures and formulas, stages the inverted ritual of kingship: “It is bankrupt of his majesty” (Richard II). For three times, Western theatre – both tragic and historical – blatantly stages the death of the king’s divine body and the end of kingship itself. Yet the ghosts of royalty can return to disturb the world, from past and future, from near and far. The death of the king’s divine body and the end of monarchy demand to be continually presented and performed, as the glow of kingship is resilient. Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and the scenario of the last day of Constantinople aptly present the allure and danger of royalty: the splendour of kingship becomes epiphany in the instant in which it implodes, in the last glow of its end.