After the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572,[1] the English government, particularly Principle Secretary Francis Walsingham (often credited as the father of English espionage), greatly increased the scope of their intelligence networks. This resulted in the foiling of a number of plots against the life of Queen Elizabeth, most notably the Babington Plot, which led to the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Moments such as these, which were themselves highly public displays of state power, underscore the breadth of the intelligence apparatus that was being developed in Britain during the tail end of the sixteenth century. England was one of many states that reassessed the value of clandestine intelligence operations, rapidly developing and refining European intelligence networks.
As I mentioned last week, the playhouse of the early modern period was understood by the English government to be a dangerous space of potential political unrest (I’ve written about this in the past). This fear resulted in the censorship and targeted surveillance practices being undertaken by the English government. This fear is also seemingly a feeling that early modern playwrights understood. Many of the most famous plays of the era recognize the degree to which spaces, both public and private, often only possess a veneer of legitimate privacy away from the gaze of the powerful.
It is within this historical moment that the early modern stage because increasingly invested in how surveillance cultures impact and restrict human relationships. Ben Jonson’s 1605 play Volpone sets the scene of a fictionalized Venice bydrawing our attention to how the city is filled with spies. Speaking of the jealous Corvino’s watch upon his wife Celia, the servant Mosca notes:
There is a guard of spies ten thick upon her,
Ben Jonson, Volpone, 1.5.123-126
All his whole household; each of which is set
Upon his fellow, and have all their charge,
When he goes out, when he comes in, examined.
Here, Jonson does not merely draw our attention to the intense scrutiny placed upon Corvino’s wife, but also the degree to which the spies are being set upon themselves. The spies are tasked with not only observing the movements of their charge, but also the movements of one another. Employees of Corvino are asked to spy upon his wife, in order to ensure him of her fidelity; they are asked to spy upon one another, lest Corvino risk that one of them might cuckold him in the process. It is a vision of a world defined by mistrust, manifested in the form of the spy watching the every move of one of the play’s only innocent bodies. Jonson’s critique is located safely in the domestic sphere of far-away Venice (no threat to the English government here). But this sense of the ever-present and recursive nature of the surveillance state became a staple of early modern drama.
For the early modern playwright, this sense of an ever-present culture of surveillance crept into the everyday relationships that defined social organizations, such as familial relationships like marriages and parent-child relationships. For instance, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the boisterous and sycophantic courtier Polonius reveals himself to be a somewhat competent spymaster and, in doing so, demonstrates the warping effects of the “prison-like” qualities of Denmark. Not only is Polonius spying upon his son, employing a member of the court to carefully monitor his actions abroad, but also he draws his daughter into the role of the spy, making her a (possibly unwilling) member of the Danish surveillance state. We see Shakespeare represent the degree to which the paranoia of the court of Denmark is so pervasive that the father-daughter relationship between Polonius and Ophelia gives way to the demands of the state surveillance system. Polonius, in an effort to please his king, places his family at tremendous risk in order to discreetly produce the intelligence that Claudius desires. Like Jonson’s Volpone, under the watching gaze of the surveillance system, even the seemingly private space of the domestic sphere is revealed to be little more than an illusion, one in which those in positions of power are able to carefully monitor the movements of all bodies in and around their domain, whether or not those bodies are positioned as threats.
I bring all of this up for two reasons: One, to set the stage for understanding what surveillance culture meant to the early modern audiences watching plays such as Volpone, Hamlet or The Duchess of Malfi, all of which examine the anxiety that is derived from living in a space where it feels as if one is always being watched. Second, to begin to contextualize the differences between what surveillance culture meant to Shakespeare and Jonson and what it might currently mean to us. Jonson and Shakespeare understood the degree to which all of their actions might have potentially been watched, but these concerns were limited by the technology and practices of the era.
Early modern surveillance almost strictly falls into the category of what today’s intelligence agencies call human intelligence or HUMINT: intelligence gathering performed by human agents by means of personal contact. Thus, early modern fears of surveillance culture centered on concerns about interpersonal contact, with the specter of the body of the spy or informant intruding into private spaces.[2] With this knowledge, we can further explore the degree to which our modern understandings of privacy differ as a product of the ways in which we interface with one another change. Today, we do not imagine the work of surveillance being performed by hired human informants, but instead imagine it as the cost of interfacing with the devices that simplify our lives.
Shakespeare and Jonson had no understanding of metadata, digital cookies and algorithmic profiles of human beings being created out of fragments of data being trawled out of our search histories. Nor could they have imagined the ways in which institutions and hostile third parties would leverage that data as components of complex disinformation campaigns. They did, however, imagine the stakes of living in a world where privacy evaporated and everyone in their society was made aware of the ever-present surveillance apparatuses that surrounded them. For Shakespeare and Jonson, it fundamentally unsettled familial relationships and made acts of trust implicit in these relationships impossible. All human interaction could thus be leveraged in service of assuring that, for those in power, individual privacy was merely an illusion.
Beyond this, though, much of our understandings of modern
surveillance cultures are not rooted in questions of national security as early modern commentators framed them.[3]
Our attention is instead focused on the algorithmic construction of mass data
as an economically valuable project,
either for advertising or the control of public opinion. Information and
intelligence about consumers, their habits and their desires are a profitable
industry. The manipulation of that data is both a key social and a massive
political concern. In the next two posts, I will be looking at the ways in
which the early modern period does align more closely with our contemporary
understandings of intelligence, focusing first on the degree to which
intelligence is transformed into a moveable commodity, and, second, on the use
of this kind of intelligence to sway and manipulate public opinion.
[1] The culmination of religious strife in Paris, resulting in the death of thousands of French Protestants at the hands of French Catholics. Christopher Marlowe would later write a (possibly unfinished) play about the massacre in 1593, the year of his death.
[2] There were also concerns of rudimentary Signal Intelligence, concerned with the breaking or forging of letters, but this was nothing close to the contemporary investment in SIGINT.
[3] Though this is the language that serves to justify a great deal of illegal espionage practices.
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.
