Rois sans royaume

Shakespeare's theatre testifies to the gradual questioning, throughout the 16th century, of the medieval concept of the divine right of kings. The two histories devoted to the reigns of Richard II and Richard III, terminus a quo and terminus ad quem of the Wars of the Roses, focussed, to say the least, on the political mistakes of the two sovereigns, whatever their claims to legitimacy might have been. At the turn of the century, Hamlet was the allegorical representation of a kingdom deprived of its legitimate ruler. Shakespeare's vision of kings without kingdoms and/or of kingdoms without kings underscored the inevitable conflict between the age-old belief in the divinity of kings and the modem concept of sovereignty. It may be said to have foreshadowed the social and political upheavals of the 17th century which were to change “the corpus mysticum of the realm” (Ernst Kantorowicz) into pre-revolutionary concepts of the state