Thermidor

On Gusto

Regicide Fantasia: Second Commercial Articulation

Rationalizing the Aesthetic within the Political Problematic

Sing and meet and meet and sing
and your Chains will drop off like burnt thread.
-- Thomas Spence

Regicide Fantasia: Historical Articulation

“The treason of compassing or imagining the king’s death is, as Thomas Erskine puts it in his defense of Hardy, a ‘complete…anomaly’ in the English law, for the crime is ‘wholly seated’, as he puts it, ‘in unconsummated intention’ (ST 24H: 896). Until 1800, indeed, the law took the will so completely for the deed that ‘a man cannot be indicted,’ as Erskine pointed out, ‘for killing the king’; there was no punishment in English law for killing the king, only for intending his death, and in that case punishment was to be exacted independently of whether or not the king died as a result of the intention, and independently even of whether any attempt was made upon his life” (123).
-- John Barrell, Imagining the King's Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793-1796.

Regicide Fantasia: One Commercial Articulation