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The aim of this paper is to delineate the representation of kingship in Tudor and Stuart England and its articulation in Shakespeare's political drama, through the examples of Richard II (1599) and King Lear (1606), two illustrative plays of the respective eras. Conceived of as two-bodied, the sovereign is, from early medieval 1 On Edward the Confessor's healing powers, in England and in Normandy, see Frank Barlow ed.,

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The victimisation of femininity and overvalued status of masculinity are predominant features of the social environment both of ancient Greece and Elizabethan England. Euripides' Bacchae and Shakespeare’s Macbeth explore this process of antagonism between the sexes as well as the dynamics of inversion : the virilisation of women, the feminising of men, the blurring of mother-son, wife-husband relationships. The punishment of Agave by father-born Dionysos, and the defeat of womanish Macbeth at the hands of «Not of woman born» Macduff illustrate the social transcendence of masculinity and hold up the ideal of an all-male society unpolluted by any feminine, obnoxious contact.

Sélima Lejri is similarly interested in the coexistence of long-established folklore beliefs in demonism and witchcraft and the emerging scientific etiologies propounded by the physicians of the time. Lejri shows that it is thanks to Edward Jorden’s A Briefe Discourse of A Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603) that the interpretations of demonic vexation started to give way to the rational alternative of hysteria. It was then that Shakespeare’s interest in the medical theories of physiology, mainly humorism, became palpable. This testifies to the considerable influence of Timothy Bright’s or Edward Jorden’s ideas. Within this context of early modern scientific ‘revolution’ that ushered in the end of witch-hunting and gave large credit to reason over superstition, Shakespeare’s representation of the female body in his Jacobean plays bears the contemporary stamp of his new sources of information. It is Shakespeare’s response to such contemporary scientific theories that Lejri’s chapter aims at tackling through the particular example of Hysterica Passio, a feminine disease much discussed at the time and explicitly referenced in King Lear.