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This paper considers how magic power – as a political resource, and as a metaphor for political power – is implicated in current and past thought about sovereignty and domination. Shakespeare's treatments of politics, magic, sovereignty and domination are an illuminating source, relating as they do to the Machiavellian tradition, and to later treatments of the themes by Hobbes and Weber. The question is raised how articulated scepticism about political power relates to scepticism about alleged magic; and how the conduct of Shakespeare's magicians casts light on their conduct qua political actors.

This paper offers a reading of Clint Eastwood's film Mystic River. Mystic River differs from archetypal Hollywood revenge movies in one important way: the act of revenge kills the wrong man. Moreover, instead of abandoning its wayward avenger, the movie strives to defend or at least to understand the act of wrongful vengeance as the loving act of a kingly father. To explore the connection between trauma, masculinity, and revenge, the paper follows the stories of the film's three male protagonists. Dave is defeated by his boyhood trauma and never recovers. Jimmy, the film's avenger, forcefully resists the dehumanizing power of the loss of his daughter by taking revenge. Sean neither succumbs to trauma nor masters it. Instead, Sean –when confronted by his wife's silent departure and with the fact of Jimmy's vengeance –responds by admitting his vulnerability. An upright man struggling to balance his masculinity with the reality of his tragic limitations, Sean's willingness to accept his human finitude is set against Jimmy's rebellious insistence on his superhuman justice based on the prerogative of vengeance.