Ideologically, surveillance in early modern England was justified through claims that Providence guided the state counter-espionage apparatus, especially when preventing assassinations of Protestant English monarchs. King Lear critiques such idealized surveilling by conflating it with another, more quotidian and odious surveillance assemblage, the qui-tam system of surveillance-for-profit. This was the most notable, or notorious, feature of surveillance in Shakespeare’s England, and was perceived as having a corrupting influence on politics, economics, and the legal system, its abusive nature in Lear being conceptualized as sexually perverse. The play also stages the intersection of qui-tam surveillance-for-profit with religiously justified forms of surveilling, calling into question the validity of such rationalizations and linking the eroticized, abusive informing with more socially accepted modes of surveilling, including the benevolent oversight of divine justice. This article contributes to surveillance studies by arguing that the erotics of surveillance informs discussions of the relationship between surveillance and capital, of epistemologies and ideologies of surveillance, and of surveillance art, while suggesting that King Lear can enrich our understanding of the complexities of surveilling.
Poet, playwright, religious dissident, and collaborator with the state surveillance apparatus: Ben Jonson experienced a long and tortuous relationship with surveilling in late-Tudor/early-Stuart England. The cultures of surveillance he encountered extended beyond espionage to social and religious surveillance, which in early modern England often bled into and facilitated the workings of the state’s network of informants. His literary output and unusually detailed (for the time) biographical information combine to give us a complex picture of his engagement with surveilling, secrecy, and resistance. Jonson’s experience of surveillance involved incarceration and the threat of corporal punishment, but in his writings, he associates surveilling and being surveilled with pleasure in the context of his Humanist education, his conversion to Catholicism at a time when the Protestant English state had outlawed such worship, and his work as a satirist, playwright, and poet. Using Freud’s notion of unheimlich, or the uncanny, I argue that Jonson demystifies surveilling, but approaches his critique from two directions simultaneously: he interrogates and encourages resistance to state violence and coercion while highlighting his own acquiescence to the pleasures of voyeurism and exhibitionism, suggesting that surveilling is seemingly irresistible, as in both overpowering and appealing. Because he centers the uncanny in his writings, Jonson may be a useful guide for those theorizing and navigating the complexities of surveillance. He exemplifies how resistance to asymmetries of power persists through time and despite outward conformity to a regime of surveillance, which itself may be unheimlich.
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