Reconstructing Love: King Lear and Theatre Architecture

Phelan, Peggy

doi:10.1002/9780470996706.ch2

Cited by 1 publication

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“…Volpone also catalyzes critical insight among the extratextual surveillors taking pleasure in watching from behind the fourth wall. Insofar as one of the goals of satire involves readerly self-awareness, Jonson harnesses the fictional staging of surveillance to defamiliarize spectators' complicity in surveillant habits of mind (Angus 2016;Hogue 2016;Phelan 2008;Slights 1994). Jonson dramatized the enticing and destructive aspects of secrecy, aiming to implicate audiences in the pleasure and terror arising from keeping and divulging secrets.…”

Section: Self-satire and Self-surveillance In Jonson's Playsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“I Do Love / To Note and to Observe”: The Pleasures of Surveillance and Resistance in the Work of Ben Jonson

Miele

2023

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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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Section: Self-satire and Self-surveillance In Jonson's Playsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“I Do Love / To Note and to Observe”: The Pleasures of Surveillance and Resistance in the Work of Ben Jonson

Miele

2023

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Reconstructing Love: King Lear and Theatre Architecture

Cited by 1 publication

References 12 publications

“I Do Love / To Note and to Observe”: The Pleasures of Surveillance and Resistance in the Work of Ben Jonson

“I Do Love / To Note and to Observe”: The Pleasures of Surveillance and Resistance in the Work of Ben Jonson

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