In this final chapter exploring fugitive politics in Shakespeare, I want to extend the study's focus on the fractured power of the sovereign to include a discussion of divisible sovereignty at its most diffuse. Titus Andronicus and The Winter's Tale challenge the monitory function of the female docile body regulated by and reinforcing patriarchal desire. Indeed, these two plays hold much in common that commend them as dramatic set pieces bookending Shakespeare's dramatic career. If in 1594 with Lavinia in Titus Andronicus Shakespeare was interested in exploring the idea of the dangerous female body with a potency to kill, in 1611 he revisits this theme with Hermione in The Winter's Tale, exposing the affective claims of the female body as a volatile object and staging the phenomenon of what Sharon Krause calls non-sovereign agency that menaces the masculine fantasy of sovereign hegemony.

In staging the female body in both plays, Shakespeare explores what Emily Wilson describes as tragic overliving. According to Wilson, overliving involves

The effects of tragic overliving in Titus Andronicus seem especially powerful with respect to Lavinia. She asks to be thrown into a ‘loathsome pit’ (2.3.176), ‘[w]here never man's eye may behold [her] body’ (177); her tortured body is a spectacle for others to interpret; Lucius, her uncle, calls her body an ‘object’ that ‘kills [him]’ (3.1.64), and she loses any sense of self as she becomes a property in Titus's culinary performance in act 5; Lavinia's fate precipitates the revenge narrative that brings an end to her tragic overliving.