14 Evans MCS 4/1/06 9:15 am Page 198 Sir Orfeo and Bare Life RUTH EVANS The purpose of this chapter is to argue for a different context for – and hence for a different reading of – the anonymous early fourteenth-century Middle English lai known as Sir Orfeo.1 This context is the cultural history of homo sacer: the ‘sacred’ man, or outlaw, who may be killed with impunity but not sacrificed.2 Subject to the law and yet paradoxically outside it, this figure haunts our modern political landscape: he is the prisoner of indeterminate legal status detained under the UK and US anti-terrorism acts of 2001 in Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib or Belmarsh Prison. As the representative of ‘bare life’ – that is, simple biological existence rather than a particular way of life – his body is politicized through being captured within the sovereign ban. I will argue that in Sir Orfeo we see the beginnings of the modern configuration whereby, in the words of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, ‘the realm of bare life – which is originally situated at the margins of the political order – gradually begins to coincide with the political realm’ (Agamben, Homo sacer, p. 9). Heurodis, Orfeo and the grotesque ‘taken’ in the Fairy King’s castle are all abandoned in a no-man’s-land of living death. Through their predicaments the poem imaginatively explores how sovereign power constitutes itself through the production of a politicized body that is excluded from – and yet included in – the political order. My reading is in part made possible by Stephen Knight’s work on the ‘political unconscious’ of Middle English romances, although I understand that ‘unconscious’ not so much in socio-historical as in ethico-political terms.3 I also use Agamben’s work to trouble the vexed boundaries between the medieval and the modern. What Foucault describes as ‘biopower’ – ‘a power organized around the management of life rather than the menace of death’ – is not, argues Agamben, a purely ‘modern’ political phenomenon but is found variously configured in much earlier texts and cultural formations – including medieval ones.4 Sovereign 14 Evans MCS 4/1/06 9:15 am Page 199 Sir Orfeo and Bare Life 199 power has always been tied to bare life but that tie has remained hidden. Sir Orfeo is part of that hidden history. Sir Orfeo is not of course an ethico-political tract, but a vernacular lai.5 It is frequently praised for its ‘charm’ and ‘lyric simplicity’.6 Oren Falk describes it in less cloying (but no more satisfactory) terms as ‘a sugarcandied, bowdlerized version of the familiar Orpheus and Euridyce story’.7 It does not offer a theory of kingship, still less a theory of the political tie uniting sovereign power and bare life.8 But it is nothing new to suggest that socio-political issues inform the poem.9 Orfeo has been read as a rex inutilis (‘useless king’/roi fainéant: a medieval literary motif that links Orfeo with several late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century sovereigns, including Edward II) and, in his role as a harpist, as a type of David, the royal figure upon whom many medieval kings modelled themselves.10 Falk’s essay situates the poem in the context of contemporary tensions surrounding the sensational deposition and assassination of Edward II in the late 1320s. Others have seen Sir Orfeo dealing more generally with a king’s feudal bond with his subjects or figuring the traditional analogical relationship between the state and marriage.11 The poem also participates in the late medieval tradition of ‘king-and-subject’ romances, in which either the ruler wanders in disguise amongst his subjects (as in Shakespeare’s Henry V) or a peasant offers hospitality to the ruler – the forerunners of those modern urban legends in which an ordinary member of the public unwittingly entertains the queen.12 But none of these readings has taken up Carl Schmitt’s 1922 proposal that ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception’.13 Agamben follows Schmitt in arguing that the ‘fundamental activity’ of sovereign power is to produce a state of exception, but he maintains that it does this by inclusively excluding (by analogy with the linguistic ‘exception to the rule’) bare life within its sphere of influence, and specifically through ‘banning’ it (p. 181). Most of the poem’s critics have seen kingship as an intrinsic value (the ‘true nature of kingly duty’, A. S. G. Edwards puts it14), not as a relation. But Orfeo’s self-exile in the forest reveals the close proximity between the body of the king and the body of the banned man. In Agamben’s words, ‘that which is excluded from the community is, in reality, that on which the entire life of the community is founded’.15 Both king and outlaw represent states of exception; both have passed into a zone of indistinction between nature and culture. Similarly, the quest for psychological motives for Orfeo’s actions misses the poem’s multi-layered exploration of the symmetry between homo sacer and sovereign. William Connelly, for example, argues that ‘In his grief [Orfeo] upsets the divinely ordained political order of the world over 14 Evans MCS 200 4/1/06 9:15 am Page 200 The Cultural Politics of Romance which he rules, leaving his kingdom under the uncertain rule of a steward who might or might not honor his loyalty to Orfeo’ (emphasis mine).16 Orfeo does indeed suffer when the Fairy King abducts Heurodis: ‘O we!’ quap he, ‘allas, allas! Leuer me were to lete mi liif Pan pus to lese Êe quen mi wiif’ (ll. 176–8) And the poem’s narrative syntax, with its doubling of the classic romance structure of exile, risk and reintegration into the social order, has suggested to many readers a strong emotional link between the loss and recovery of a wife and the loss and recovery of a kingdom (a link insisted upon in the rhyme ‘mi liif/mi wiif’).17 Yet Sir Orfeo does not probe psychological motives or produce complex effects of interiority.18 It is not interested in analysing the psychoanalytic structures of mourning or abjection. Rather, it stages the political and sexual meanings of abandonment, actively disclosing what sovereignty would rather repress: its dependence on a constitutive outside that is simultaneously an inside. In so doing it strongly links – as Agamben’s curiously depersonalized study does not – politics and affect.19 Sir Orfeo is an extraordinarily moving poem. It offers an experience, or rather a series of experiences. I want to argue that we can best think of its politicization of the body in terms of experiential and historical understandings of abandonment. For Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘abandoned being has already begun to constitute an inevitable condition for our thought’.20 Dereliction – to be cast out and yet to be subject to a law (like Oedipus, Moses or Christ)21 – is in many ways the central obsession of the poem. In Heurodis’s distress at being condemned without due legal process to a living death in the otherworld and in Orfeo’s anguished response to her loss, the poem vividly imagines, within a specific historical and cultural context, the affective impact of a political tie: what it means to be abandoned on the threshold between nature and the law. The Ban The ‘bare life’ that sovereign power makes the object of its decisions is both out-lawed and held within the law, through a relation that Agamben refers to by its medieval term: the ban. ‘He who has been banned’, he says, ‘is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable’ (p. 28). 14 Evans MCS 4/1/06 9:15 am Page 201 Sir Orfeo and Bare Life 201 The Middle English semantic ranges of ‘abandonen’ and ‘bandoun’ bear witness to the paradoxical nature of the ban. To be abandoned (MED abandonen v. 1) to ‘Cristes feith’ (as in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis 8.1834), is to give oneself up to devotion but not to be released from Christ’s jurisdiction. To ‘ben in (at) bandoun’ (MED n. bandoun, from OF bandon) is to ‘be in (someone’s) power or under (his) control; be dominated by (sb.); be in bondage’, like the courtly lover at the mercy of his sovereign lady.22 The Fairy King bans Heurodis when he demands that she return permanently to his kingdom. In expelling her from the community, he exposes her to his violent and arbitrary law. His threat – that if she does not return the following day to the ‘ympe-tree’ (grafted tree) to ‘liue wip ous euermo’ (l. 168), then she will be fetched away and torn limb from limb – effectively displays his sovereign power by producing Heurodis as homo sacer. She can be killed with impunity by the fairies – Zif êou makest ous ylet, Whar êou be, êou worst yfet, & totore êine limes al’ (ll. 170–2) – yet her death will not be a sacrifice because her life no longer counts: no guilt is attached to whatever the Fairy King or his minions might do to her. This distinction is important, because Heurodis has been seen (rather like Griselda in Chaucer’s ‘Clerk’s Tale’) as a Christ-figure. As Felicity Riddy notes, Orfeo’s anatomization of her brutally changed body parallels descriptions of the Crucifixion in contemporary lyrics: Êi bodi êat was so white ycore Wiê êine nailes is al totore. Allas, êi rode êat was so red Is al wan as êou were ded. (ll. 105–8)23 But what Heurodis shares with Christ is the politicization of the body, not religious sacrifice. The contrast between her past and present state, reinforced by the rhetorical balance of the strongly metrical and endstopped rhyming couplets, suggests not sacred transcendence but the production of a body at its limit. Orfeo notes that she is not actually dead but precariously suspended in a liminal state that only resembles death: ‘as pou were ded’. His use of the subjunctive suggests that it is impossible to tell if Heurodis is inside or outside the law: her exceptional status as a ‘limit-figure of life’ signals the Fairy King’s sovereignty.24 What the poem realizes so brilliantly through its deployment of supernatural elements is not chaos (Neil Cartlidge sees it as ‘one of a long series of texts to exploit the disorienting suggestiveness of the fairies’ Otherworld as a figure for 14 Evans MCS 202 4/1/06 9:15 am Page 202 The Cultural Politics of Romance some sort of experience of entropy’), but the violence of sovereign law that holds life within its ban by abandoning it.25 Less obviously but just as importantly, the poem reveals how Orfeo and his steward are related through the ban. Orfeo’s return to the court, disguised in beggar’s clothes as ‘an harpour of hepenisse [heathen land]’ (l. 513), is read by many critics as completing the poem’s pattern of (Connelly’s words) ‘dual loss and dual recovery’, with the ‘moving display of the steward’s love’ forming ‘the true emotional climax of the poem’.26 After Orfeo’s thrilling musical performance, his steward recognizes the harp and asks the ‘beggar’ where he got it. Orfeo bluffs that he found it ten years ago, next to a man ‘totorn smale’ (l. 538) by lions and being devoured by the sharp teeth of wolves. Exclaiming that the man must have been his lord, the (ostensibly) distraught steward faints, proving himself to be ‘a trewe man’ (l. 554). But then the narrative takes an unexpected turn. Instead of a joyful scene of revelation – your dead king lives! – Orfeo continues to maintain his imposture. ‘3if ich were Orfeo pe king’ (l. 557), he says (revealing his sovereign status, yet concealing it behind the subjunctive), and had these things happened to me, and had I returned . . . He then imagines two possible narrative outcomes: & ich founde êe êus trewe, . . . Êou schust be king after mi day. & Zif êou of mi deê hadest ben bliêe Êou shust haue voided, also swiêe. (ll. 569–74) The stern final pronouncement seems both unnecessary (the steward has already proved himself to be loyal) and discordant (it breaks the mood of joyful homecoming). But the menace in Orfeo’s words alerts the court and the poem’s audience to the political tie that hovers in potentiality between the sovereign and his subjects. Even while Orfeo has been absent, he has held the steward in his ban. It is this affirmation of the sovereign’s power to decide on the state of exception that forces the court’s acknowledgment that he is their king: Êo al êo êat êerin sete Êat it was king Orfeo vnderZete (ll. 575–6) For Falk, the court is constrained to recognize Orfeo’s identity because he is not only a ‘true king’ but a ‘true bard’.27 By exploiting the linguistic potential of the subjunctive to call attention to the discrepant awareness of the audiences inside and outside the text, the extratextual poet links his own rhetorical bravura with that of Orfeo. But Orfeo’s skilful manipulation of the hypothetical construction also reinforces the idea that 14 Evans MCS 4/1/06 9:15 am Page 203 Sir Orfeo and Bare Life 203 sovereignty suspends itself as potentiality, ‘maintaining itself in a relation of ban (or abandonment) with itself in order to realize itself as absolute actuality’ (p. 47). The subjunctive is a figure for how sovereign identity consolidates itself as authoritative only through a process of intrasubjective negotiation that oscillates between actuality and potential. The bodies of beggar-outsider and king-insider are not separate but intimately related: what is outside is simultaneously produced as inside. Orfeo in the Wilderness: The Body Politic and the Politicized Body Orfeo’s imposture superimposes one bodily identity on another. But in what sense? In his landmark 1957 book The King’s Two Bodies, Ernst Kantorowicz famously argues that the medieval king has both a natural body, subject to the ravages of time, and a ‘mystical body’ or body politic, which never dies.28 These two bodies are graphically represented within the poem as separate and yet conjoined when Orfeo forsakes his kingdom and retreats into the wilderness with only his harp, to ‘liue per evermore / Wip wilde bestes in holtes hore’ (ll. 213–14). On the one hand, he is transformed from a royal personage ‘pat hadde ywerd pe fowe & griis [who had worn variegated and grey fur – that is, fur that has been worked upon by culture]’(l. 241) into a semi-bestial creature: Al his bodi was oway duine For missays, and al tochine. . . . His here of his berd blac & rowe To his girdelstede was growe. (ll. 261–67) Shrunken and with an absurdly unkempt beard (the opposite of regal fur), Orfeo’s natural body is slowly decaying. But in so far as he retains his consummate skill in harping – the poem’s chief signifier of culture – he preserves what Kantorowicz calls the perpetuity of dignitas. When ‘pe wilde bestes’ gather about him ‘for ioie’ (l. 274) at his harping, and when he wins back Heurodis as his prize in an otherworld talent contest, the man that the Fairy King contemptuously refers to as ‘lene, rowe, & blac’ (l. 459) is nevertheless in effect asserting: ‘Le roi ne meurt jamais’ [the king never dies]. But for the poem’s gentry audience in the 1330s, still shocked by the extraordinary events of January 1327 when Queen Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer forced the king’s abdication during Parliament at Westminster, Sir Orfeo offers not a confirmation of the endurance of the king’s ‘mystical body’ but a critique of the extent to which Edward II relied upon the dual personage of his regal authority in order to abuse it: 14 Evans MCS 204 4/1/06 9:15 am Page 204 The Cultural Politics of Romance ‘The prestige of the English monarchy had never sunk so low as in 1327’, observes Ormrod.29 Agamben, however, posits that in the later Western middle ages there was a ‘darker and more uncertain zone’ than that of the juridical doctrine of the king’s two bodies, one in which ‘the body of the sovereign and the body of homo sacer . . . can no longer be told apart’ (pp. 94, 96). In this light, Orfeo’s wilderness transformation is less a version of the division between the king’s two bodies than a representation of the ‘special proximity’ between sovereign and outlaw that is also seen (argues Agamben), in the relationship between the king and the werewolf in Marie de France’s twelfth-century lay Bisclavret.30 Orfeo too becomes a type of werewolf: the medieval ‘wolf’s head’, who has been banned from the city but who remains bound by its laws.31 Excessively hairy and forced to ‘digge & wrote’ (l. 255) in the ground for his food, Orfeo inhabits a ‘zone of indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast, nature and culture’ (p. 109). When he plays the harp he reveals his nearness to the wild beasts: Into alle êe wode êe soun gan schille Êat alle êe wilde bestes êat êer êep For ioie abouten him êai teê . . . & when he his harping lete wold, No best bi him abide nold. (ll. 272–80) But this proximity is only temporary: the beasts are repelled when he stops playing. Like Robin Hood, Orfeo-as-bandit embodies the figure of homo sacer who is the object of sovereign decision. Kingship – about which, as Ormrod says, ‘almost everyone living in late medieval England may be assumed to have had some opinion’32 – is represented in the poem not as the exercise of absolute power over the dispossessed or the rule of culture over nature, but as a transition point between culture and nature. Moreover, Orfeo’s body in the wilderness does indeed seem, like the paradoxically sacred body of homo sacer and like Heurodis’s otherworld body, to have ‘entered into an intimate symbiosis with death without, nevertheless, belonging to the world of the deceased’ (l. 100). Orfeo’s condition is eerily paralleled by that of the living dead that he sees interned in the castle of the Fairy King: Êan he gan bihold about al & seiZe ful liggeand wiêin êe wal Of folk êat were êider ybrouZt & êouZt dede, & nare nouZt. Sum stode wiêouten hade 14 Evans MCS 4/1/06 9:15 am Page 205 Sir Orfeo and Bare Life 205 & sum non armes nade & sum êurth êe bodi hadde wounde & sum lay wode, ybounde, & sum armed on hors sete & sum astrangled as êai ete & sum were in water adreynt & sum wiê fire al forschreynt . . . (ll. 387–98) Bizarrely frozen in the postures in which they were ‘taken’, these are not sacrificial martyrs but political prisoners. ‘ÊouZt dede, & nare nouZt’, this ‘waxworks of the undead’ (in Alan Fletcher’s memorable phrase)33 displays the fact that kingship resides in the production of lives that no longer count, of bodies ‘ybounde’ (like the unfortunate madman) by the Fairy King’s sovereign ban, left to their fates (‘ful liggeand’) but retained ‘wiêin êe wal’ of the law and the strict anaphoric structure of ll. 391–8. Their maimed and limbless forms trouble corporeal boundaries, inscribing at the level of the body their exceptional political status and the sovereign violence of the otherworld King. Orfeo shares their fate to the extent that when he retreats into the wilderness he considers his life worthless, simply telling the court: When Ze vnderstond êat y be spent Make Zou êan a êarlement & chese Zou a newe king. (ll. 215–17) The poem most forcefully demonstrates the affective impact of his selfabandonment in the so-called ‘recognition scene’. Orfeo and Heurodis lovingly face each other across an invisible barrier, rapt in their mutual gazing but unable to speak to each other: Zern he biheld hir & sche him eke, Ac noither to oêer a word no speke. (ll. 323–4) Divided by their separate worlds of silence, Orfeo and Heurodis experience (and the poem stages that experience for the reader) not only sovereignty’s violent prohibition but also the traumatic possibility that language itself (the vernacular, newly authorized in the early fourteenth century to speak for itself) may fall into an abyss. After the queen is ushered away in tears by her ladies, Orfeo exclaims: Allas! [. . .] now me is wo. Why nil deê now me slo? Allas! wroche, êat y no myZt Dye now after êis siZt. Allas! To long last mi liif 14 Evans MCS 206 4/1/06 9:15 am Page 206 The Cultural Politics of Romance When y no dar nouZt wiê mi wiif, No hye to me, o word speke. (ll. 331–7) In longing to be killed (‘Why nil dep now me slo?’), Orfeo assumes that he, the king, could be killed with impunity. His life is so wretched, so held within the sovereign ban (one ironically imposed by himself as well as by the Fairy King), that he could be killed without it being judged martyrdom or regicide. It is unclear from the unusual use of ‘dar’ who or what prevents their mutual speaking.34 But the reciprocal force of the verb – which applies the ‘no speaking’ injunction equally to both Orfeo and Heurodis – and the breach between form and syntactic unit in ll. 336–7 (the sense is not contained within the rhyming couplet but crosses the boundaries between one couplet and the next) reinforces the paradoxical meaning of abandonment as both inclusion in, and exclusion from, the law. ‘Icham in hire baundoun’35 Ironically, this scene of mute recognition suggests a reciprocity in the relationship between Orfeo and Heurodis that is at odds with what the scene otherwise poignantly represents, namely (in Lacan’s famous formula) ‘there is no sexual relationship’.36 The poem initially presents the sexual bond between Orfeo and Heurodis as the opposite of courtly love’s cruel power-play. Like Arveragus and Dorigen in Chaucer’s ‘Franklin’s Tale’ (another English lai), neither partner is ostensibly ‘constreyned by maistrye’ (V.764). But one of the curious effects of the Fairy King’s abduction of Heurodis is to transform her into the inaccessible and inhuman Lady-Object of courtly love.37 It is as if the recognition scene offers an anamorphic representation of what cannot be shown directly within the poem’s economy of mutual married love: that Heurodis has sovereign power over Orfeo. From this perspective, Orfeo’s desire to die typifies the fusion of erotic longing with suffering that characterizes late medieval vernacular expressions of courtly love. Orfeo is like Arcite, the outlawknight in Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’, freed from prison but held, love-sick, within Emelye’s sovereign ban: lene he wex and drye as is a shaft; His eyen holwe and grisly to biholde, His hewe falow and pale as asshen colde, And solitarie he was and evere allone (I.1362–5).38 Like the ‘lene’ and ‘drye’ Arcite, Orfeo is also ‘lene’ and ‘tochine’ [chapped]. His body, like Arcite’s, mimics the classic Ovidian signs of love: 14 Evans MCS 4/1/06 9:15 am Page 207 Sir Orfeo and Bare Life 207 bodily wasting, pallor and solitariness. Despite its surface syntax, Sir Orfeo is subtended by the structure of courtly love. Orfeo’s ten-year exile is a form of fin amor’s thematics of delay, through which sexual fulfilment is endlessly deferred. Similarly, the Fairy King acts as a jealous rival (lauzengiers) to Orfeo, separating him from the object of his desire ‘by all kind of evil powers’.39 Yet Heurodis too is an exile, and both Orfeo and Heurodis are homines sacri in relation to the god of the otherworld. But Orfeo is also homo sacer in relation to Heurodis. Indeed, Agamben argues that ‘sadomasochism’ (one guise of courtly love?) is ‘precisely the technique of sexuality by which the bare life of a sexual partner is brought to light’ (134). In this sense the poem both realizes and unsettles powerful medieval analogical relationships between the political and sexual spheres: husband as ‘head’ of the wife in the domestic body that is marriage; king as head of the body politic of the realm. In fact, it is around 1300, shortly before the poem was composed, that the secular marriage metaphor – the image of the prince’s marriage to the corpus mysticum of his state – became popular.40 In my reading, Orfeo and Heurodis’s sexual partnership is fully politicized, and Orfeo is produced as bare life as much by Heurodis’s sovereign decision as by that of the Fairy King. Gender also operates in the poem’s dynamics of risk and recovery. In Orfeo’s situation we hear an echo of, and a challenge to, the classical figure of the devotus, ‘who consecrates his own life to the gods of the underworld in order to save the city from a grave danger’.41 Like the devotus (a figure for homo sacer), Orfeo’s willingness to expose his own bare life (which he does in sympathy with his wife’s), his willingness to enter the space of death, enables the eventual restoration of the good life to his kingdom. As a woman, Heurodis represents zo[P], the simple fact of living, which is traditionally located in the home and excluded from the city. Orfeo’s recovery of his lost queen is a further twist to the poem’s politicization of bare life: when he brings her home she symbolically represents the inclusion in the polis of the previously excluded zo[P]. Sovereignty in History Sir Orfeo is the first extant version of the Orpheus legend that presents Orfeo not as the figure of classical myth but as a king, ‘in Inglond an heiZe lordying’ (l. 26), and moreover a king descended from two kings, ‘king Pluto’ and ‘king Juno’ (the latter probably a scribal slip, but nevertheless a revealing one). The company Sir Orfeo keeps in the Auchinleck manu- 14 Evans MCS 208 4/1/06 9:15 am Page 208 The Cultural Politics of Romance script suggests an emphasis on those elite and popular notions of kingship that strongly emphasized, in Ormrod’s words, ‘the historical and mythological past and the assessment of each ruler by direct comparison with his predecessors’:42 item 36 is David the King; item 33 King Alisaunder; item 43 King Richard; item 26 Of Arthour and Merlin (both Edward I and Edward III associated themselves with the militant Arthur). Sir Orfeo also speaks directly to the turbulent political events around the date of its composition, but as Falk argues, it is not a political allegory of these events.43 The poem’s outlaw motif, for example, may represent anxieties about the rising levels of banditry in England in the 1320s, levels that declined after the 1340s.44 (In his study Robin Hood: An Historical Inquiry John Bellamy sets the outlaw’s actual career within the reign of King Edward II.45) In ideological terms, Sir Orfeo reassures its London gentry audience that kings do not wilfully abuse their power and that they may even voluntarily give it up for the sake of restoring the wholeness of the kingdom. But I am arguing something different: that the poem stages the process whereby sovereignty constitutes itself as a political category and the extent to which it is bound to bare life. In this light, Edward II is not the ‘martyr’ that some have claimed46 but, like the exiled Orfeo, the very figure of homo sacer: neither sacred, nor a martyr, but utterly expendable – as Isabella and Mortimer in fact treated him. Conclusion My intention has been to show how Agamben’s work makes sense of features in Sir Orfeo that have often resisted interpretation: the testing of the steward, Orfeo’s self-exile; the Celtic motif of the living dead. Moreover, the poem’s understanding of sovereignty is politically radical: the tie between the sovereign and homo sacer is no longer of the order of the secret but is rather defamiliarized and exposed. But what is the challenge here for a medieval cultural studies? Firstly, there is the question of how to do justice to the ‘singular’ properties of a literary text (a question that Agamben ignores in Homo Sacer but which he abundantly confronts in Language and Death) while also placing that text within a history of political philosophy. But the ‘literariness’ of Sir Orfeo is integral to its staging of abandoned being. A medieval cultural studies must not only reclaim the aesthetic for the political, but insist upon their shared histories.47 Stephen Knight did exactly that in his 1966 essay on Sir Orfeo, when he deliberately championed the poem as a work of art, one that sets 14 Evans MCS 4/1/06 9:15 am Page 209 Sir Orfeo and Bare Life 209 ‘considerable store on writing in a way, which is, of itself, beautiful and therefore admirable.’48 The essay appeared in a radical magazine aimed at students, Balcony, designed to counter a Leavisite takeover in Knight’s then department at the University of Sydney. The essay’s political intervention was to flout the Leavisite doxa that medieval texts are the repository of Merrie England’s organicist values rather than aesthetic objects in their own right. Secondly, there is the question of periodization. For Foucault, sovereignty (as he defines it in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality) was superseded in the eighteenth century by ‘biopolitics’ (that is, the power to regulate matters of life).49 Agamben’s work troubles this cultural history because he shows how on the contrary sovereignty has from ancient times produced, and been produced, by biopolitics. Sovereignty constitutes itself at that place and at that moment where it inclusively excludes ‘bare life’ from its sphere of influence, simultaneously politicizing that which was held not to be political. That this can be seen in medieval texts productively unsettles the division between modernity and the middle ages. But we can also turn this insight onto literary history. Early modernists constitute their period as sovereign power by treating the middle ages as bare life, holding it within their ban by abandoning it. The early modern and medieval periods are thus related through an essentially political tie, and modernity is not marked off from the past by an absolute line but is a threshold phenomenon, not only inextricably tied to what it makes the object of its decisions but even (like Orfeo in the wilderness) in close proximity to it. Notes I would like to thank John Drakakis, Stephen Knight and Dale Townshend. 1 Sir Orfeo exists in three versions: the Auchinleck manuscript (National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates’ 19.2.1); London, BL, MS Harley 3810; and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 61. The standard edition is A. J. Bliss (ed.), Sir Orfeo, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). I use the transcription of the Auchinleck version, by David Burnley and Alison Wiggins, at http://www.nls.uk/auchinleck/mss/orfeo.html, not Bliss’s reconstructed text, giving line numbers parenthetically in the text. See also Sir Orfeo, ed. Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury, The Middle English Breton Lays, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995): available at http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/orfeo.htm. On Auchinleck, see Timothy Shonk, ‘A study of the Auchinleck manuscript: bookmen and bookmaking in the early fourteenth century’, Speculum, 60, 1 (1985), 71–91. 2 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Page references are given parenthetically in the text. 14 Evans MCS 210 4/1/06 9:15 am Page 210 The Cultural Politics of Romance 3 Stephen Knight, ‘The social function of the Middle English romance’, in David Aers (ed), Medieval Literature (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), pp. 99–122 (p. 103). The phrase ‘political unconscious’ is Fredric Jameson’s. 4 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1976), trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 147. 5 On the genre, see Elizabeth Archibald, ‘The Breton lay in Middle English: genre, transmission and the Franklin’s Tale’, in Judith Weiss, Jennifer Fellows and Morgan Dickson (eds), Medieval Insular Romance: Translation and Innovation (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000), pp. 55–70. 6 Peter J. Lucas, ‘An interpretation of Sir Orfeo’, Leeds Studies in English, ns, 6 (1972), 1–9 (p. 1); David Lyle Jeffrey, ‘The exiled king: Sir Orfeo’s harp and the second death of Eurydice’, Mosaic, 9, 2 (1976), 45–60 (p. 45). 7 Oren Falk, ‘The son of Orfeo: kingship and compromise in a Middle English romance’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 30 (2000), 247–74 (p. 247). On the poem’s reworking of the Orpheus myth, see Roy Michael Liuzza, ‘Sir Orfeo: sources, traditions, and the poetics of performance’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 21 (1991), 269–84, and Enrico Giaccherini, ‘From Sir Orfeo to “Schir Orpheus”: exile, and the waning of the middle ages’, in Sharon Ouditt (ed.), Displaced Persons: Conditions of Exile in European Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 1–10. 8 According to both Mark Ormrod and Lynn Staley, there is no systematized ideology of rule in texts of the late 1320s: W. M. Ormrod, Political Life in Medieval England, 1300–1450 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), p. 65, and Lynn Staley, ‘Translating “communitas”’, in Kathy Lavezzo (ed.), Imagining a Medieval English Nation (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press), pp. 261–303 (p. 263). 9 See L. H. Loomis, Review of Bliss’s first edition of Sir Orfeo, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 55 (1956), 291; Edward D. Kennedy, ‘Sir Orfeo as rex inutilis’, Annuale Mediaevale, 17 (1976), 88–110; A. S. G. Edwards, ‘Marriage, harping and kingship: the unity of Sir Orfeo’, American Benedictine Review, 32 (1981), 282–91; William J. Connelly, ‘The affirmation of love and loyalty in Sir Orfeo’, Medieval Perspectives, 8 (1992), 34–43; Falk, ‘Son of Orfeo’. 10 See Kennedy, ‘Rex inutilis’, 106 and 96; Ormrod, Political Life, p. 78; Jeffrey, ‘Exiled king’, 50–1. 11 Connelly, ‘Affirmation of love’; Edwards, ‘Marriage, harping and kingship’, 284. 12 See Rachel Snell, ‘The undercover king’, in Medieval Insular Romance, ed. Weiss, Fellows and Dickson, pp. 133–54. 13 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1922), trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). 14 Edwards, ‘Marriage, harping and kingship’, 291. 15 Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. Karen E. Pinkus and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 105. 16 ‘Affirmation of love’, 38. 17 For example, Felicity Riddy, ‘The uses of the past in Sir Orfeo’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 6 (1976), 5–15 (p. 7); Connelly, ‘Affirmation of love’, 39–40; Mary Hynes-Berry, ‘Cohesion in King Horn and Sir Orfeo’, Speculum, 50, 3 (1975), 652–70 (p. 664). 18 See Riddy, ‘Uses of the past’, 10–11. Bart Veldhoen’s reading uses a ritualistic approach: ‘Psychology and the Middle English romances: preliminaries to readings of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Orfeo, and Sir Launfal’, in Henk Aertsen and Alasdair A. MacDonald (eds), Companion to Middle English Romance (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1990), pp. 101–28. 14 Evans MCS 4/1/06 9:15 am Page 211 Sir Orfeo and Bare Life 211 19 Cf. Dominick LaCapra’s reference to Agamben’s ‘often exaggerated emphasis on confined, positivistic, relatively antiseptic notions of biology, medicalization, and eugenics’ (my emphasis): ‘Perpetrators and victims: the Goldhagen debate and beyond’, in Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. 114–40 (p. 128 n. 14). LaCapra’s critique of Homo Sacer nevertheless misses the point that it is the camp, not the Holocaust per se, that Agamben takes as the paradigm of modernity. 20 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Abandoned being’, in The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 36–47 (p. 36). 21 Nancy, ‘Abandoned being’, p. 40. 22 Cf. Nancy: ‘Bandon . . . is an order, a prescription, a decree, a permission, and the power that holds these freely at its disposal’ (‘Abandoned being’, pp. 43–4). 23 Riddy, ‘Uses of the past’, 9–10. 24 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 27. 25 Sir Orfeo in the Otherworld: courting chaos?’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 26 (2004), 195–226 (p. 200). 26 ‘Affirmation of love’, 39. See also Riddy, ‘Uses of the past’, 7. 27 ‘Son of Orfeo’, 258; E. C. Ronquist, ‘The powers of poetry in Sir Orfeo’, Philological Quarterly, 64 (1985), 99–117; Seth Lerer, ‘Artifice and artistry in Sir Orfeo’, Speculum, 60, 1 (1985), 92–109. 28 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957). 29 W. M. Ormrod, The Reign of Edward III: Crown and Political Society in England 1327–1377 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. xi. 30 Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 107–8. 31 Cf. ‘the price upon [the outlaw’s] head was originally as that upon a wolf; whence it was said commonly that an outlaw “had a wolf’s head” . . . he was civically dead, hence he could be killed with impunity’ (Maurice Keen, The Outlaws of Medieval Legend (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), pp. 9–10). 32 Ormrod, Political Life, p. 61. 33 Alan Fletcher, ‘Sir Orfeo and the flight from the enchanters’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 22 (2000), 141–77 (p. 142); Dorena Allen, ‘Orpheus and Orfeo: the dead and the taken’, Medium Ævum, 33 (1964), 102–11. 34 Lewis J. Owen argues that it is ‘because of overpowering, human emotions’: ‘The recognition scene in Sir Orfeo’, Medium Ævum, 40 (1964), 249–53 (p. 250). 35 ‘Alisoun’, in G. L. Brook (ed.), The Harley Lyrics: The Middle English Lyrics of MS. Harley 2253 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1948), no. 4, l. 8. 36 Passim in Jacques Lacan, ‘Encore: Seminar XX: God and the jouissance of the woman [1972–3]’, trans. Jacqueline Rose, in, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 137–48. 37 See Slavoj [P]i[P]ek, ‘From courtly love to The Crying Game’, New Left Review, 202 (1993), 95–108 (p. 100). 38 Larry D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Fragment and line numbers appear parenthetically in the text. On the possibility that Chaucer may have known Sir Orfeo, see W. A. Davenport, Chaucer and His English Contemporaries (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998), pp. 94–5, 124. 39 Jacques Lacan, ‘Courtly love as anamorphosis’, in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 139–154 (p. 151). 14 Evans MCS 212 4/1/06 9:15 am Page 212 The Cultural Politics of Romance 40 Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, p. 212; Edwards, ‘Marriage, harping, and kingship’, 284–5. 41 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 96. 42 Ormrod, Political Life, p. 62. 43 ‘Son of Orfeo’, 251. These events include Edward’s humiliating abdication, and an episode that happened on or around 18 October 1330, alluded to in a passage in item 40 of the Auchinleck manuscript, The Anonymous Short Metrical Chronicle, which, as Thorlac Turville-Petre points out, merges a recollection of the French Mort Artu, in which Lancelot protects Guenevere in Joyeuse Garde, with a much more recent memory of Roger Mortimer and Queen Isabella in 1330 barricading themselves into Nottingham Castle, from which Mortimer was ignominiously dragged and sent to London to be hanged. (England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 000). This reference makes the terminus a quo of composition of Auchinleck later than 1327, probably 1331. 44 Ormrod, Political Life, p. 158. 45 John Bellamy, Robin Hood: An Historical Inquiry (London: Croom Helm, 1985): see Hahn, this volume p. 00. 46 E.g. Falk, ‘Son of Orfeo’, 251. 47 See Isobel Armstrong, ‘Introduction: a case for rethinking the category of the aesthetic’, in The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 1–23. 48 Stephen Knight, ‘The characteristic mode of “Sir Orfeo” – a generic reading’, Balcony/The Sydney Review, 5 (1966), 17–23 (p. 17). 49 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979); Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 139.