Foucault, dynastics and power relations

Michel Foucault’s historical approach is usually understood as moving from archaeology to genealogy, the former describing his work of the 1960s and the latter the 1970s. From the mid-1970s Foucault certainly describes his work as genealogy, and he explicitly relates this to Friedrich Nietzsche’s project, which he had critically explored in lectures and the famous “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” essay published in 1971. But in lectures and one interview from the early 1970s, Foucault uses another term to describe the complementary approach to archaeology, which is that of dynastics, a mode of analysis he relates to both power and knowledge. Tracing the usage of these terms over time, this article explores their relation. Foucault uses the term dynastics to describe his approach after his explicit engagement with Nietzsche, and before settling on genealogy as the appropriate term. Foucault’s use of dynastics is interesting for many reasons, including the way he glosses this as dunamis dunasteia. Foucault is here thinking about a range of senses, from dynamics or power to dynasties, heredities, and lineage. Even after he drops the term to describe his approach, Foucault is perhaps invoking the notion of dynastics every time he subsequently writes about power relations

Queen Charlotte and the Royal narratives of Boydell's Shakespeare Prints

This case study focuses on an atlas-sized folio of prints depicting scenes from Shakespeare’s plays published by John Boydell to reproduce paintings exhibited at his Shakespeare Gallery on Pall Mall (1789-1805). Boydell’s project brought together Britain’s leading painters and engravers, and secured subscriptions from George III, Queen Charlotte and the Prince of Wales. The two volumes of the print folio open with reproductions of full-length portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte. Consequently, the folio shifted the public viewing experience for those who had already visited the Shakespeare Gallery into a more private and domestic mode, framing it through the presence of the monarch and his consort which structured the viewer’s encounters with the works, characters and narratives which follow. This essay explores the second volume of the folio, prefaced by Queen Charlotte’s portrait, in order to unpack the highly-gendered imagery of queens and royal children which dominates this volume