Corpo sovrano e sovversione del corpo cristiano. Edward II tra Amor ovidiano e Mors paolina

This essay is a re-reading of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II in the light of St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and the Ovidian paradigm of love as a metamorphic force, which Marlowe makes his own in the celebrated poem Hero and Leander. Building on the Christian notion of ‘natural body’, which, in the longue durée, underlies the Freudian conception of psychic drive, the essay also offers a methodological criticism of the Kantorowiczian conception of the king’s sacred body as well as of the Kantorowiczian understanding of William Shakespeare’s Richard II.