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The king is dead. long live the child?
in a dramatic canon full of the ghosts of dead fathers, william shakespeare offers up tragic protagonists haunted by children. desperate for assurances about his precarious political future, the monarch-murdering usurper macbeth seeks out a second encounter with the infamous witches who prophesied his unexpected assump- tion of sovereignty. macbeth meets Hecate herself and experiences visions of a crowned child, an armed head, a bloody babe, and a glorious future line of scottish kings culminating in king James vi and i of scotland and england.1 Pivotal to Macbeth is the question of what central characters do, or do not, see: gruesome witches, killing instruments, guilt-stained hands, ambulatory trees, and prophetic visions. in act 2, scene 1, macbeth imagines or witnesses the weapon he will later use to slay king duncan. "is this a dagger which i see before me," he famously asks, "The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. / i have thee not, and yet i see thee still" (2.1.1-3). macbeth's mysterious dagger, lady macbeth's blood-soaked hands, Hecate's visions of a bloody babe, a crowned child, an armed head, and a line of seven kings: the famous images that flicker in and out of sight in shakespeare's scottish tragedy i will describe as apparitions not of a state of mind but of the state itself. all are apparitions of sover- eignty. But the most potent, the most under-appreciated apparitions of sovereignty in Macbeth are not the phantom monarchs suggestive of the stuart lineage or the armed head, the latter indicative of what Thomas Hobbes would call sovereignty by conquest. The bloody babe and the crowned child are apparitions of the more fraught phenom- enon, sovereignty by generation, and it is the problematic mechanism by which sovereign perpetuity is produced that these figures address.
shakespeare's works feature other incantatory visions of sovereignty. macbeth's hallucinatory cascade joins the moments in Richard II of John of gaunt's prophetic vision of the ruination of the glorious "sceptred isle" and the duchess of gloucester's invocation of the seven "vials of blood" and seven "branches" of edward iii's progeny, as well as Henry's oft-cited description of the frustrating majesty of the king's two bodies, "twin-born with greatness," in Henry...