Between Exile and Execution: Shakespeare’s Deadly Dance of Sovereignty and Bare Life

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-581-2_9How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Sovereignty; Bare life; Necro politics; Exile; Execution; Colonial domination; Biopolitics; As You Like It; Romeo and Juliet; The Tempest

Abstract

This paper examines Shakespeare’s dramatization of sovereign power through the concepts of Giorgio Agamben’s bare life and Achille Mbembe’s necro politics, interrogating the sovereign’s ultimate power to decide who lives, who dies, and who remains outside the law. In As You Like It, exile renders the Duke Orlando and his companions, by stripping them of their legal sovereign right and reducing them to mere survival in the forest of Arden. Necro politics is illustrated in Romeo and Juliet through civic and familial decrees, and the young lovers’ fate is sealed by sovereign authority, as their banishment equates to social death. In The Tempest, Prospero exercises colonial power by subjugating Ariel and Caliban, the island’s inhabitants. They get dispossessed by Prospero and reduced to servitude while fully denied legal recognition. By examining these dynamics, this paper explores how Shakespeare indicates the power of the sovereign as a “deadly dance” between protection and exclusion, dramatizing the political vulnerability of human life under exclusion, exile, and the regime of colonial domination. His plays thus fuel the notion of modern (late 20^th century onward) biopolitical lives, portraying how sovereign practices its power through the creation of lives deemed expandable.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Tasnia Elahi Proma
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/05/30
TI  - Between Exile and Execution: Shakespeare’s Deadly Dance of Sovereignty and Bare Life
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Challenges and Trends in Arts and Social Sciences (ICCTASS 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 98
EP  - 108
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-581-2_9
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-581-2_9
ID  - Proma2026
ER  -