1.It is a widely distributed, old motif. It is Harun Al-Rashid in the Arabian Nights, who, in order to “secretly to observe for yourself the manner in which justice is done and order is kept throughout the city,” as his advisor says, goes through the bazaars of Baghdad disguised as a foreign merchant. It is the king in the fifth book, Les Fers, of D’aubigne’s Les Tragiques:
A king who sometimes, for justice, abandons
the capital, the very place of the crown
To make a tour of his entire kingdom
To see if the viceroys are doing their jobs
There are a few Greek myths in which the gods so disguise themselves to walk among men. The motif pokes out in the new testament, when Jesus asks his disciples a puzzling question:
“When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?”
14 They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
15 “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”
16 Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
The passage ends like this: “Then he ordered his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.”
2. This motif resonates with a very common political opinion, which can be summed up by the phrase: “if the Czar only knew.” People in an authoritarian order, an ancien regime order, had to guide themselves with regard to the powers that be – the nobles, the bourgeoisie of the cities, the judges, the land surveyors sent out from the capital, etc. – with a sense that it all was, somehow, ordained. When injustice, or what was perceived as such, was widespread – when there was famine, when there was seizures of property, when the center did not hold – the explanation that the ruler at the nominal center was being mislead becomes powerful. Famously, on January 22, 1905, a procession of workers, led by a priest, was taking a petition to the Czar when the Czar’s soldiers gunned them down. The very motive for the petition was that, outside of the throne, in the vast folds of Russia, the Czar’s supposed officials were operating in a way that the Czar would have disapproved of, if only he knew. The sovereign in disguise is an enigmatic figure in a riddling tale that responds to real material conditions. The conditions are accepted, on the one hand, as the way things are, but they are rejected, on the other hand, as a deviation from the way the ruler, who by his very position is justice incarnate, would want things to be.
Interestingly, the sovereign in disguise can be paired with the abject fink or informer. The Confidential informant is a necessity of modern policing, as it conceives itself: essentially, a force to protect property. The protection of the security of the citizens is derived from the relations of property. However, the police are always going to be numerically few in relation to the people they are ostensibly protecting. Into this gap comes the denunciator, or the fink. On that January 22, 1905, the people who were petitioning the Czar were led by a priest named Gapon, who had ties to the Okhrana, the Czar’s secret police. Gapon confessed this to the leaders of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, one of whom, Azef, was a long time agent and provocateur for the Okhrana.
The abject fink and the missing sovereign fink – two ends of the bourgeois revolution, I could conclude, all too neatly.
3. Modern political science is sadly enmeshed in models, a form of disciplinary capture by the science of economics, and sadly inattentive to the rich world of folk motifs. Those motifs did not disappear with universal suffrage. If only the king knew is still one of the strongest answers to the riddle of injustice.. In the U.S., for instance, many of the theories about the assassination of JFK rely on a variant of the king knowing. He was about to end the Cold War! He was going to withdraw from Vietnam! He was going to extend Camelot to all his subjects! And thus, he had to be struck down. The evil viceroys conspired and did it.
This isn’t to say, of course, that the evil viceroys didn’t do it. We are all touched by this motif, evil viceroys and filming spectators alike.
4. The critical intelligence, and rare and illfavored thing, is aghast at the mental subservience that comes with this seemingly impenetrable reverence for authority. Don’t you know that justice and injustice are arranged, in the social order, precisely to keep you down? Don’t you know that the sovereign’s trick is to surround himself with a certain ignorance, a need not to know, in order to function for his class? That ignorance is produced by the sovereign for the same reason the mullosk extrudes its carapace: to protect the creature as it does its nutritive and generative work.
But the critical intelligence has an unfortunate shorthanding habit of reducing the man to the concept, and to be always discovering self-interest in the form the economists imagine it – amassing more – instead of the passions for which that effort is made, among which are fear, honor, vanity, love, and etc.
5. Shakespeare of course has already been here. Wyndham Lewis took Coriolanus as Shakespeare’s most political play, starting a tradition in the scholarship. Myself, I think Measure for Measure is less stark, less liable to a reading influenced by fascism, and gives us a reading of the king in disguise that takes up the passions that sway the governors. The Duke of Vienna appoints the too well named Angelo to be his deputy as he takes off on a trip; but this is, of course, royal fooling, and the Duke comes back, disguised as a friar.
Angelo, as the Duke expected, surveyed the state of order and decides right away to strike at “moral crimes” – notably, he tears down the whorehouses and he sentences to death a young man named Claudio, who has impregnated his fiancé before they could celebrate their nuptials. Claudio has his sister, Isabella, go to Angelo to plead his case. Isabella is on the verge of joining the “sisterhood” – becoming a nun. Of course, Angelo is seized with lust when Isabella makes her case, which is a case for pity. Is there pity in the legal order? Pity has many critics – most notably Nietzsche – but has, as well, a great defender in Shakespear. She makes the case against the pitiless sovereign:
“O, it is excellent/To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous/ to use it like a giant.”
This is the very paradox of sovereignty. To attain a giant’s strength is here leaped over – as the critical intelligence tells us – but the fact of giganticism is before all our eyes. Though the motif of the disguised king, Shakespeare plumbs the depths of a certain kind of executive power, combining the legislative with the juridical. But if it has only rules, if these are the cold bounds of the giant, it can never ultimately be liberal – that is, generous. And as it rules illiberally, it purges the very image and hope of generosity from the subject.
6. Our kings. We so want the king to know. The Duke, in Measure for Measure, saves the order of the state and the outcome of the play – which is a comedy – by righting Angelo’s wrong not just to Claudio but to, as well, the woman Angelo abandoned. In the revelation scene – when the Friar who has helped Claudio’s fiancée and the woman who Angelo abandoned is revealed to be the Duke – Angelo speaks for the masses:
O my dread lord,
I should be guiltier than my guiltiness
To think I can be undiscernible,
When I perceive your Grace, like power divine,
Hath looked upon my passes.
And thus Vienna is restored, and a bonfire is made of non-disclosure orders. But as is common in Shakespeare’s “problem” plays, there’s a disquiet, a specter, that is not put down in the spectator as the play ends. Its formal solutions do not exorcise its enigmas. We fall back. We are not here for treatises and political science.
The king, the true king, knows.
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