Cloaked in Eyes and Ears: Reading Surveillance Culture Through the Early Modern Stage

In our contemporary social moment, the American public has come to possess a fairly blasé attitude towards the degree to which governments and corporations collect our data and monitor our actions. It has become almost an unfunny joke to acknowledge that, yes, Amazon and Google do monitor our internet habits and listen in upon our phone conversations in order to better sell us products. Popular memes and one-page comics across the internet rely upon the shared understanding that the government monitors our internet activity. We have come to understand that we live in a society defined by the ever-present surveillance practices of government and corporate entities.

I say we have come to understand that we’re always being spied upon, but this is not a new attitude in English-speaking society. In two poems of his 1616 collection of epigrams, the English poet and playwright Ben Jonson makes oblique reference to two men he understood to be employed by the government of England to spy upon him.[1] Speaking of an imagined moment of hospitality, he writes: “Of this we will sup free, but moderately, / And we will have no Pooly’, or Parrot by.” He may have been correct: these men, called “Poley” and “Parrot,” were in fact government spies. Employed by the English Privy Council, they were charged with locating political dissidents and securing the stability of the English government. Also true: Jonson himself was targeted by the government as a possible dissident.[2] And Jonson’s poems, particularly “On Spies,” produce a rather unassuming image of these men, whom he treats as little more than tools of the state.

Jonson’s passivity in the face of government surveillance seems to have been standard among the many English playwrights who saw increased government scrutiny upon their actions and their works. The English government sought to control and repress the theater, instituting measures of censorship on the production of new plays from the late 1500s onward. This came to a head when Jonson found himself imprisoned and tortured after the suppression of his 1597 collaboration with Thomas Nashe, the now lost play The Isle of Dogs.

For a scholar of early modern espionage, the public theater is a unique site to begin contemplating the impact of surveillance culture. The stage served as one of the most hyper-visible venues for political commentary during the late 16^th century, and it was understood by the government as a gathering place for the common rabble.[3] Not merely is the theater a major public space, it is also structured in such a way as to deny the possibility of privacy.

Thus, the stage was a key feature of early modern espionage. On the one hand, playwrights were often tasked with serving as spies, such as the infamous Christopher Marlowe, who was likely killed in relation to his work as a government agent. On the other hand, as evidenced by Jonson’s poems, playwrights often understood that they were themselves being spied upon, and they recognized the tremendous stakes of assuring the watching government that they were not threats or dissidents. This dichotomy placed the role of the surveilling agent at the forefront of the minds of early modern playwrights. Thus, the early modern stage was littered with representations of the spy, from the learned Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet,to the bumbling Politic-Would Be in Jonson’s Volpone,to the insidious intelligencers in Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Woman Hater.

It has always struck me how blasé people can be about the ubiquity of mass intelligence gathering practices. The early modern playwrights knew that they were being spied upon, and they integrated this into their work, producing a vision of their society that was defined by the reach of government surveillance. But these representations were not always insidious or morally dubious figures, often depicting loyal clandestine servants operating at the behest of good representatives of government service. Early modern plays, particularly those set in political courts, such as Hamlet and The Massacre at Paris, are defined by the choking miasma of government surveillance that surround them.

But these representations were just as frequently treated as natural manifestations of state power, rather than fearful images of government over-reach. The spy on the early modern stage was just as often a figure of the natural evolution and practice of state politics, a normalized presence in public spaces. Just as we normalized the idea that both the government and Silicon Valley track our internet activity and collect our metadata as status quo of our own lives, early modern subjects had come to understand the presence of spies and informants as the status quo of their own lives.

This series of blog posts will explore the question of what early modern literature can teach us about living with a society structured around surveillance and spying. While our understandings of what it means to be monitored by cold and unfeeling institutions is more defined by corporate data mining and algorithmic control than ever before, such questions of surveillance culture were still prevalent in early modern England, particularly on the stage.

We do not have the same understanding of privacy and the private life that early modern audiences and playwrights had, but we still face questions surrounding how we live our lives in a society that is seemingly defined by the lack of private spaces where we can retreat. What does it mean to live in a world where surveillance is understood as commonplace? How do we negotiate our relationship with a government that we understand to be spying upon us? How are changes in technology and government practice being used to limit or restrict our privacy? I will draw upon these questions to consider two main points. First, how do individuals come to understand their position in a society where they are spied upon? And second, what can early modern art teach us about our own relationship to the structures of surveillance under which we currently live?

[1] LIX “On Spies,” and CI “Inviting a Friend to Supper.”

[2] And may have been later employed by the government as a spy.

[3] This extended beyond political issues, as public theaters were frequently shutdown by government decree over fears that their status as public gathering places exacerbated plagues.

Evan Hixon is a PhD candidate in English at Syracuse University. His research centers on early modern British drama and political writing, with an emphasis on Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson. His dissertation examines representations of spies and informants in the works of early modern English dramatists.