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Prof. Dr. Hania Siebenpfeiffer: The Queen’s Medialized Body, or Maria Stuart on the Early Modern German Stage

Ernst Kantorowicz's prominent study on the two bodies of the king (cf. Kantorowicz 1954) serves as the starting point for my reflections on the Queen’ medialized body. Based on Shakespeare's Richard III and the Plowden's report, Kantorowicz sketches the double figure of ›body natural‹, the natural ephemeral body of the king, and ›body politic‹, the imperishable abstract political body of the king. While the ›body natural‹ designates the king’s decaying and ultimately mortal body, the ›body politic‹ symbolizes the invisible, immaterial political body of ruling power. It is bound to the material body of the king without being identical with it; rather, a relationship of mutual dependence holds them together in which the natural body functions as a material warrantee of the ›body politic‹, which in turn is only able to legitimize its existence with reference to the king’s natural body. 
Nevertheless, the exact connection between ›body natural‹ and ›body politic‹ remains strangely underexposed. Although Kantorowicz speaks of the body of the king always being twofold, the overlap between natural and political body remains obscure in that it does not systematically pursue the consideration that any ›body politic‹ requires media representation if he is to function as an immaterial body derived from the material. For the natural body to become the ephemeral manifestation of the imperishable ›body politic‹, a third body is required. For this purpose, early modernism invented the ›body media‹, the medialized body of the king (or queen), which constituted a complex field of visibility. Even though, the ›body media‹ is not identical with the illusory body of the late medieval and early modern effigies, which Kantorowicz briefly discusses, but it shares their symbolic representation (cf. Marek 2009). 
In my presentation, I will first subject Kantorowicz's concept of the king's two bodies to a critical re-reading, focusing on the mentioned void of the ›body media‹, the medial (re)presentation of the king and queen as a connecting element between ›body natural‹ and ›body politic‹. With reference to Pierre Legendre's studies on the pictorial significance in the constitution of early modern statehood (cf. Legendre 1994), I will then read the ›body media‹ as the culmination point of early modern monarchical power: Only the medialization of the ›body natural‹ opened up that transformative space in which the natural body became the political body; and only the ›body media‹ produced that field of visibility in which the ruling body could be present without being there. Finally, I will show to what extent the ›body media‹ required public staging in order to become effective. Using the example of German-language Mary Stuart dramas by Komart (1673), Riemer (1681), and von Haugwitz (1683), it will become clear that, in addition to the courtly ceremonial culture, it was most prominently the courtly and public theatre stage on which the ›body media‹ made its appearance thus representing a specific political body in the guise of an actor resp. an actress.