Renati the King

Renati the King is a play that explores the final hours of Rene Descartes. It is also a play about the perennial question of how love is addressed, who embodies it, and at what level of mastery it is exercised. Baroque and android-like characters intersect each other's fates, and it is suggested that if human love is impossible in terms of constancy, then that of the posthuman is not. Rainer J. Hanshe offers an illuminating counterpoint to this idea by situating the play in a wide context that includes careful considerations of the ancient Greeks, court politics, Nietzsche, and a host of poets ranging from Aristophanes to Genet and Beckett, and tracing the implication of philosophers becoming dramatists.