Focusing on things like Russian troll farms and the theft of polling data, the public discourse surrounding surveillance and data manipulation has increasingly emphasized their threat to the imagined integrity of governing bodies since 2016. We increasingly worry about our hyper-connected lives and the degree to which those lives produce digital footprints that can be examined and manipulated. We worry that we are being surveilled for political projects that are more complicated and insidious than the targeted advertising and data collection that we have taken a much more blasé response towards.

One of the most common versions of this fear lies in the figure of the agent provocateur, an undercover agent placed within a space, intent on fomenting some degree of chaos or illegality. In the months leading up to the 2016 election (and, as evidence suggests, is still occurring leading up to the 2020 election), the vision of this kind of espionage shifted greatly. Rather than imagining the agent provocateur as an individual or small group of individual infiltrating organizations (such as Maria Butina’s involvement with the National Rifle Association), we came to imagine the figure of the agent provocateur as a collection of millions of online personas, carefully constructed to look like real human beings entering into online spaces to sow discord and dissent.[2] This further enflames dissension, as individuals are then conditioned to worry that anyone they are interacting with might be bots or foreign assets. This creates an uneasy climate wherein accusations of dissent or disagreement stemming from “Russian propagandists” gain traction and currency.

The digital space becomes one in which both the presence of foreign intelligence assets and the fear of those assets create a feedback loop, one that serves the same function that we imagine was performed by Cold War spies attempting to destabilize public opinion. Furthermore, we imagine this as a project of disinformation,[3] exploiting the public’s inability to distinguish fact from fiction, in order to craft politically advantageous popular narratives for the benefit of foreign states. Thus, this mode of surveillance, I argue, invokes two different anxieties surrounding our relationship to other members of the body politic. First, we don’t know which voices can be trusted. And second, we become worried that other people will be less discerning in their trust than is necessary.

I’ve spoken on Shakespeare’s relationship with powerful people fomenting popular discontent before, and the degree to which it unnerved early modern playwrights. While Shakespeare rarely directly addresses the concerns of foreign conspiracies against England,[4] his works do frequently comment upon the ways in which social manipulation and disinformation threaten the body politic. The populace, as it is imagined by Shakespeare, Marlowe and their contemporaries, is fickle and dangerous if properly manipulated. Julius Caesar, 2 Henry IV, and Coriolanus all communicate a pervasive fear that the crowd can be mobilized to violence or, at the very least, to act against its own interest if sufficiently skilled rhetoricians are able to shape and manipulate public sentiment. Coriolanus must combat disinformation and dissemination of rumor and scandal. Meanwhile, 2 Henry IV’s Jack Cade benefits from an infrastructure of convenient lies to bolster his own political ambition (which the people are more than happy to believe when it suits them).

In these plays, there is a fear concerning the possibility that granting authority to the populace will encourage bad actors to create and stoke public anxieties in service of nefarious ends. Our present historical moment seems to be invoking similar fears as it pertains to electoral politics. There is a worry that we, like Shakespeare, take a dim view to the capacity of public opinion to resist disinformation (what we now imagine as Cold War-style black-ops campaigns) and, like Shakespeare, we have an impulse to continue to project a dim view of this power onto the populace, as we look to explain away the motions of the body politic. 

While these plays may not provide us answers in how to combat the anxieties that contemporary surveillance and espionage practices provoke in our daily lives, we can use them as a site to understand how these fears are shaped and exploited. We witness in the drama of the period a society reacting to increased social surveillance and the pervasive fear that states could manipulate political instability in order to generate unrest and chaos. It is in moments such as this that we explore how individuals relate to the sense of their own private spaces, what information they make visible to the world, and how they relate to other members of the body politic. While the anxieties will certainly persist, to even begin to address them we must consider the long history of these worries and contemplate how others have responded the encroachment of surveillance.

[1] Using espionage and covert action to manipulate public opinion and rig elections is hardly a new concept, as evidenced by the United States’ long and brutal history of meddling in elections during the Cold War.

[2] This was not the only project by which disinformation campaigns or projects of public manipulation operated within the last few years, as legitimate sources of “fake news,” for instance also served this role.

[3] As the Oxford English Dictionary notes, disinformation is itself a loan word from Russian, dezinformatsiya, referring to a specific kind of KGB black-ops.

[4] These conspiracies were a very real threat. The primary job of the developing English intelligence apparatus was ostensibly to protect England from Catholic plots to replace Queen Elizabeth I.

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.

The post Hell’s Black Intelligencers: Shakespeare and Our Current Fears of Surveillance appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

Today, increased emphasis on brute-force SIGINT surveillance seems to have replaced the image of the human spy in our imaginations. No longer is global espionage being imagined as a cloak-and-dagger game drawn from the pages of a James Bond novel. Rather, surveillance has become yet another aspect of our lives defined by autonomous algorithms and computing practices: the vision of mass government surveillance by agencies such as the NSA or, more “benignly,” the consumer-focused collection of mass data trends scraped from our collective internet metadata. We are no longer focused on thinking through the ways in which spying targets us as individuals. Instead, it reduces us to a set of demographically divided masses, which can be reduced to data points on a spreadsheet, making our activities easier to track and predict.

Here, we no longer envision surveillance as being targeted; instead we have come to understand that the project of spying is to monitor hundreds of millions of people at once and piece together “useful” intelligence from this project. This shifts the way that we tend to perceive the anxiety of being spied upon. Hamlet, Beatrice and their ilk on the early modern stage imaged the figure of the spy behind the stage arras, carefully listening in upon their conversations. We, however are burdened with the image of a passive machine unthinkingly recording and collecting our activity. Even in its most seemingly innocent form, conjuring up ideas of Amazon and Google “listening”[1] in on our activity to find ways to better monetize our footprint on their websites, we come to understand this as a feeling of invasive burden.

We increasingly value modes of securing our digital footprint, with VPN and other services that purport to increase our ability to operate on the internet without the threat of our data’s being collected or our files’ being stolen. An entire industry has cropped up around the promise that there exists a way to temporarily “beat” the pervasive cloud of surveilling programs that monitor our daily lives. Technological problems require technological solutions, and we are beginning to see a mainstreaming of both the worry of data collection and of products attempting to assuage this fear. While Shakespeare and his contemporaries could not have accessed the technological knowledge to envision the massive collection of metadata, they were witnessing both the scope and intensity of intelligence practices shifting around them. Just as we have witnessed the ways in which entities collect data on civilians slowly shifting, so too can we see shifts, and reactions to these shifts, in the plays of the early modern period. 

For early-modern playwrights, the answer to reclaiming privacy was often located in a similar project of personal dissimulation: attempting to mask our true actions and intentions from those who might be spying upon us by concealing them in a performance or another project (like a VPN). Hamlet’s performance of madness is a reaction to the knowledge that he is being observed by individuals in positions of power; it takes as its base assumption that the only truly private space is one’s own mind.[2] Likewise, the feigned “bed tricks” of Middleton’s Beatrice and Shakespeare’s Isabella suggest that trickery and dissimulation could be turned against the clandestine agents who attempt to enter into our private lives and spaces. Shakespeare and his contemporaries were not defeatists in their answers to questions of mass surveillance. They understood that the nature of their relationship to public space had changed, and they imagined differing modes of interacting with their worlds in order to counteract the anxieties provoked by surveillance. 

In a similar way, we too have come to understand that our relationship to surveillance and tracking has changed and we are slowly attempting to ask the questions of how we can remain connected to our increasingly digital social and political landscape in a time where questions of privacy and data security are at the forefront of many of our most pressing conversations. However, this speaks only to our relationship with what we view as the “benign” model of mass surveillance, the kind that treats our data as a valuable, but unthreatening commodity. In our current political climate, which I intend to discuss next week, the fear that our data is being gathered and manipulated provokes a far greater anxiety than the possibility that our Facebook feeds are being trawled to better service targeted advertisers.

[1] It should be noted that even the language of treating this as an act of listening demonstrates the degree to which we still link contemporary data surveillance to older traditions of spying as an act of listening — itself an interesting term, given that “to spy” is most often used as a synonym for seeing.

[2] Hamlet still imagines a world in which trust can be possible, but that trust is fleeting and temporary.  He aligns himself with Horatio, believing his friend to be a trustworthy co-conspirator, but he also dooms Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for their too trusting allegiance to the monarch.

Header image CC by 2.0 from POP, cropped.

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.

The post “Millions of false eyes”: Responding to Surveillance appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

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,
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.

Ben Jonson, Volpone, 1.5.123-126

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.

The post They Come Not Single Spies: What Surveillance Meant to Shakespeare’s Audiences appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

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.

The post Cloaked in Eyes and Ears: Reading Surveillance Culture Through the Early Modern Stage appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

In our increasingly connected social lives, it becomes very easy for viral fictions to take on lives of their own and when these fictions are spread carelessly, they can produce very real consequences. Thus far, I have looked at medieval, early modern and contemporary issues of inciting rhetoric with easily identifiable points of origins and causes. This week, I want to look at what we do when the source of violent or inflammatory rhetoric is more diffuse.

In early modernity, the most consistent image of rumor was drawn from the Greco-Roman tradition, the figure of Fama. Most famously pulled from Virgil, she (and Fama is almost always gendered feminine) was a feathered monster with multiple eyes, tongues and ears to represent the multiplicity of her voice and her ability to hear and see all. She was capricious, such as in Chaucer’s The House of Fame, where she arbitrarily assigned glory and ignominy to those who seek her. She was a figure always kept at a distance, allowing other allegorical personages such as the wind or the crowd to spread the news, both true and untrue, for her.

Later, her image would be invoked in works by early modern playwrights such as Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, who saw rumor as a source of unease and anxiety, particularly in the climate of state repression that defined much of the Elizabethan political world. While I discussed earlier that Shakespeare and his contemporaries had few populist rhetoricians, they did use the figure of rumor to express a fear concerning what word and language could incite when the crowd was taken in by its sway.

I bring this up because the viral qualities of the internet, particularly its decentralized amplification of any and all voices, makes the image of Fama particularly relevant in our contemporary moment. On December 4th, 2016, a man carrying an assault rifle entered into a Washington, DC, pizzeria and fired shots, with the intent of freeing a number of children he believed to have been held captive in the restaurant. No such children existed, but a well-circulated conspiracy theory surrounding the restaurant alleged that it was at the center of child-trafficking/pedophilia ring/satanic cult tied to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager John Podesta.

While the origins of the conspiracy theory, dubbed “Pizzagate,” are likely tied to a specific white-supremacist Twitter account, the virality of the conspiracy placed it within the aether of the internet, endlessly cycling through permutation after permutation, becoming increasingly convoluted with each passing version. While the theory has been extensively debunked, its presence lingers in a number of later conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Seth Rich, the figure of QAnon and others. Each of these share a common thread: an accusation of criminal behavior, leveled against a major public figure, to incense rage.

I bring this up in relation to the early-modern concept of rumor because, like rumor, these viral conspiracy theories and the rhetoric that informs them are characterized by lacking a central point of origin. Fama exists, in part, to give form to the idea of rumor and scandal, rather than allowing it to exist as a shadow in the crowd. While the early moderns didn’t deal with virality in the same way that we understand it, there is a present unease with the capacity of dangerous or harmful rhetoric to catch fire and spiral out of control without the need of a Marc Antony or even a Jack Cade. Likewise, it seems as if part of the strength of an alt-right conspiracy theory like Pizzegate lies in its diffuseness. Rather than originating from a single source, it becomes part of a “wisdom of the crowd” and it can be shaped and reshaped as the present moment demands and as we have seen, it can be retrofitted into other conspiracy theories to construct a grand narrative of truth.

What interests me about these theories from the perspective of someone who studies the political applications of rhetoric is the way that the incited violence reads as a wholly unintended side-effect. Marc Antony and Henry II had very specific targets in mind when they spoke to their followers and there is little doubt that they intended that violence be done. These conspiracy theories, on the other hand, seem more intent on using rhetoric to construct a sense of purpose, a feeling of justified rage against an evil political other rather than a call to specific action against a target. Even though the original Pizzagate theory notes a specific crime and location, the revelation that someone believed this enough to take direct action feels shocking in a way that we don’t read into the story of Henry II, whose intent to cause violence is taken as a given.

This is the danger posed by virality and its relationship to rhetoric, as Pizzagate seems to have been picked up not by individuals who legitimately believed the accusations, but those who understood its rhetorical usefulness as part of a massive disinformation campaign near the waning moments of an election. There was never a movement to free children from a Satanic cannibal cult, because those individuals who pushed the theory seemingly knew there were no children to be freed, but at least one person didn’t and that was all it took to create a near tragic standoff.

This is certainly not the vision of Fama that Virgil, Chaucer or Shakespeare would have imagined, but it is useful to think of the degree to which the underlying anxiety remains constant. Rhetoric can be a powerful tool to persuade when it is purposeful, it can be a powerful tool when it used carelessly, and it can be a powerful tool when it isn’t clearly being used for anything at all. While we as modern political subjects confront politically inflammatory rhetoric in a very different light than early modern audiences would have, many of the fears and anxieties persist. I hope that this series of posts has begun to shed light upon the echoes of contemporary political anxiety we can see in the narratives and fictions of the early modern world.

Evan Hixon is a PhD student 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.

The post “Enter RUMOUR, painted full of tongues”: Virality and the Dangers of Rhetoric appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

Early modern English writers, though they are drawing a great deal of their thought on rhetoric from sources dating back to the Roman Republic, were writing under the watching eyes of an absolutist monarch, Elizabeth I. Elizabeth I, as well as many contemporary European monarchs, were understood to be careful, well-trained students of political rhetoric, having been trained in the art of speaking as the embodiment of state power. This is part of why, with the possible exception of Jack Cade in The History of Henry VI Part 2, Shakespeare’s rhetoricians are all styled in the vein of Marc Antony, and their capacity to manipulate the public to violent action is viewed as the product of a careful project of rhetorical manipulation. In our contemporary moment, this sense of conscious rhetorical provocation is less stable and as a result, slightly more challenging to address.

These works, as well as the underlying fear that colors the narrative of Henry II’s turbulent priest, are all contingent on the assumption that the careful suggestions of violence from the political leaders to their followers are all purposefully enacted by those leaders. They know exactly what their words will do. Marc Antony displays a concrete set of goals that he wishes the crowd to enact for him. He does not care how the crowd brings vengeance down upon Brutus and Cassius, he simply cares that his enemies suffer.

However, what do we do when it is less clear that the provocative speech and the fanning of violent tensions has an end-goal in mind? A common point of political discussion in recent months has concerned the degree to which President Trump is aware of the implications of his speech and to what degree individuals acting upon this speech are simply “misreading” his intent. When he calls the press “enemies of the people,” there is a frequent suggestion raised that these statements are not meant to be interpreted as calls to action.

The argument questions whether President Trump is a carefully Machiavellian rhetorician who knows precisely what he is doing when he makes these veiled threats, or if he is a raging bull in a china shop who only cares about the adulation of a crowd that legitimately enjoys the things he has to say about journalists and democrats alike. While, to a degree, this debate is present in most everything the President does, it takes on a relevance to discussions of rhetorical incitement to violence since these arguments so frequently hinge on concerns of motive and intent. In the popular narrative, and in the leveraging of his story, Henry II was not an angry man venting to no one in particular, he was a focused participant in the death of Thomas Beckett who knew exactly how his words were going to be interpreted by his followers. This shifts the focal point of the question away from the danger of focused and carefully constructed rhetoric to the dangers of rhetoric wielded like a hammer.

This then raises a second question; does it matter? If the result is the death of Thomas Beckett, does it matter whether Henry II truly wanted his knights to venture to Canterbury to have him murdered? Similarly, if journalists’ lives are being placed at risk, does it matter if President Trump was only attacking the press because he knew it played well to his base? In our contemporary moment, we are not given a clear affirmation like Marc Antony’s carefully constructed plot against the conspirators. Rather, the question that arises is a concern of intent against effect and the relationship between the two.

Without the help of a useful set of soliloquies documenting exactly how aware an individual is of the ramifications of their violent rhetoric, our contemporary moment places an increased scrutiny on whether a rhetorician is actively attempting to compel action or not. Therefore, the Comey moment is fascinating, as it becomes centered on a question of “proper interpretation” of a suggestion, implying that if Comey were to have interpreted “incorrectly” that would absolve Trump of all wrong-doing. This is mirrored less directly in responses to the recent instance of bombs being sent to key members of the Democratic Party and other vocal critics of the President. Individuals wishing to distance the President’s words from the action have positioned the attacks as a “misreading” or “misunderstanding” of Trump’s anti-media, anti-Democrat rhetoric.

With Henry II, it is assumed that we were not approaching the relationship between violence and rhetoric as one of interpretation. Here, there is a greater sense that the public debate is concerned with parsing out the meaning behind the words, as the possibility of misinterpretation is put on the table as a defense of the President’s involvement in these acts. In our moment, fears surrounding rhetoric are framed around interpretative questions more so than in past moments. The crowd in Julius Caesar is not guilty of misreading Marc Antony, as his intent is clear. In our contemporary debates, the certainty of the proper interpretation of inflammatory rhetoric is positioned as being as terrifying as the rhetoric itself, if not more so.

Next week, in my final post, I am going to turn slightly, towards a different kind of rhetorical provocation that troubles our current moment. In a public discourse increasingly defined by internet connectivity, these types of rhetorical strategies are becoming increasingly diffuse and increasingly anonymized. Looking at a case study of internet conspiracy theories, my last post will examine what happens when there is no singular individual concerned with the actions of a singular troublesome priest, but there is instead a legion of nameless, faceless voices collectively descending upon an invented troublesome priest.

Evan Hixon is a PhD student 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.

The post “If Thou Consider Rightly of the Matter”: Intent, Interpretation, and the Fear of Rhetoric appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

This speech is the beginning of Antony’s revenge, the fulfillment of his promise that “Domestic fury and fierce civil strife/ Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;” and his chosen tool of revenge is a carefully constructed piece of public speaking.

The populous, reminded of their love of Caesar, takes to the streets of Rome to bring the conspirators to justice, beginning with a cry of “Revenge! About! Seek! Burn! Fire! Kill! Slay!/Let not a traitor live!.” All the while, Marc Antony is careful to position himself against the crowd, claiming that he does not wish to “put a tongue/ In every wound of Caesar that should move/ The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny,” nor does he wish to “stir you up/ To such a sudden flood of mutiny.” All of this, is of course, an act, for as soon as the crowd is suitably out of his control, he muses “Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot,/Take thou what course thou wilt!”

This speech represents the most frequent kind of early modern anxiety surrounding the power of rhetoric, a fear that a masterful rhetorician might incite the crowd to violence or vice with simply the power of their words. When coupled with Marc Antony’s suggestion that the mischief that will follow take whatever course it will, audiences are left with a rhetorician who sets a crowd to violent action and is content to sit back and simply await the desired results, whatever the consequences may be.

In the confusion and chaos that follows, Shakespeare paints a bleak picture of what occurs in the chaos of the disordered Roman world. The mob runs into the poet Cinna on the way to capture Brutus and Cassius, and they confuse him with a conspirator of the same name, deciding to tear the man apart in the street. When they learn that this is not Cinna the conspirator but Cinna the poet, the mob does not change course, instead simply deciding upon another reason to murder the poet (his verses are bad).

As they carry him off to end the scene, a fourth citizen answers Cinna’s claim to innocence by proclaiming, “It is no matter, his name’s Cinna; pluck but his/name out of his heart, and turn him going.”* This is clearly not the result that Antony intended, that the poet Cinna should be killed, but it is of no matter to the rhetorician who has unleashed the rage of his supporters and followers upon those he wishes to see punished. In his criticism of the mob, Shakespeare also implicates the man who manipulated the mob into a violent fervor and the play centralizes the hypocrisy and falseness of Marc Antony’s claims that he had no desire to see the crowd turned to violence.

I’ve been returning to the concerns raised in this play a great deal in recent months, now more so than ever. While there is a lot left to discuss concerning the ways in which rhetoric and action become intertwined, moments such as these speak to a long, historical concern surrounding the ways that speech can be used to urge violence and the ways in which that violence becomes uncontrollable.

Now, Marc Antony is not a perfect parallel to our contemporary concerns, as we are able to see him consciously constructing his plan to set a crowd to violence, something we did not receive with Henry II and we do not receive within our contemporary moment, but he does offer a useful place to begin our examination.

This week, I hope to have demonstrated the degree to which the conversations that we are currently having about inciting speech and turbulent priests has a long-standing precedent in the world of literature. Next week, I plan to discuss the ways in which our contemporary political climate responds to the same questions that spurred Shakespeare to critique the masterful rhetoric of Marc Antony.

* In many ways, our contemporary moment is no stranger to acts such as these, as it is an all too common occurrence for Facebook pages and Twitter handles to be bombarded with death threats simply because their names are similar to those of the targets of an internet mob.

Evan Hixon is a PhD student 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.

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As a scholar of early modern political theory, I’ve frequently found myself returning to questions of the power of speech, as the voice of the monarch and the weight of their words become central to fears and anxieties surrounding the twisting and serpentine nature of rhetoric. Drawing on a long history of rhetoric, understood to be carefully constructed persuasive speech, dating back to Roman antiquity, European audiences have long considered the possibility that certain kinds of speech might be dangerous, as speech is used to mask intentions or manipulate audiences.

This particular line, I think, has taken on a revived relevance in contemporary American discourse. In 2017, the phrase re-entered the sphere of American politics when former FBI Director James Comey cited it directly in testimony to a congressional committee, as he discussed his relationship to the investigation of Michael Flynn. When asked if he considered President Trump’s “hope” that the matter might be dropped to serve as a command, Comey responded, “Yes. It rings in my ears as kind of ‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’” The direct invocation of this line asked the country to reconsider a near nine century old question concerning the nature of rhetoric and its relationship to power.

This was a debate grounded in a question of what it means to “read between the lines” of a statement that does not include a direct address to action and whether or not powerful individuals bear responsibility for ways in which their rhetoric is interpreted. While Comey’s reference may have been little more than a historical curiosity, the scholar in me can’t help but consider the long tradition of discourses surrounding the power and dangers of rhetoric that are wrapped up in the invocation of this quote.

This question of the dangerous potential of rhetoric has sadly resurfaced once again under the Trump administration. In late October 2018, a series of explosive devices were mailed to key figures within the American Democratic party, as well as an additional bomb being found in the mailroom of CNN Center in Atlanta, GA. CNN, as a news network, had repeatedly been at the center of feuds with President Trump, who accused them repeatedly on the campaign trail of smearing his campaign and being a source of “fake news.” Between Trump and his supporters, there has been an ever-present distaste for the news media, whom he has referred to as the “enemy of the American people,” and whom he has suggested are “unpatriotic.” This has caught on with his supporters, who have on multiple occasions displayed hostility towards journalists, both directly and indirectly, as demonstrated in a repeated propensity to gleefully chant “CNN Sucks,” at rallies or events.

While there is clearly no direct incitement to violence in these accusations, these recent events have recentralized the debate concerning the degree to which this kind of abstracted, non-directed rhetorical anger is understood by at least some individuals as direct calls to action. Once again, we are tasked with asking ourselves exactly how aware the President is when he complains about the various turbulent priests that he sees as impediments to his desired agendas.

While these two cases are fairly distinct, they both speak to a worry concerning how the speech of those in a position of power, either used carefully or carelessly, might be taken as a call to action by those who support them. My series of posts this month will take up this question, both in its status as a historical and as a contemporary debate surrounding the nature of rhetoric. I will look towards literary attempts to think through this question within my own period of study and I will look towards contemporary reimaginings of this question, divorced from its context within the logic of a divinely inspired monarchy. Finally, I intend to look at the degree to which this issue is complicated by the decentralization of public speech via the internet.

The goal of this series of posts is not to resolve this question of the dangers of rhetoric, but it is instead to place it within a broader literary and historical context, ideally to demonstrate the long history of the debate concerning the true meaning and implication of Henry II’s “turbulent priest.”

* The modern version of the line, often framed as “troublesome,” or “meddlesome” priest is likely archetypal, as the few historical records of this command are quite different. The implications however, seem to be consistent across versions.

Evan Hixon is a PhD student 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.

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Last week, I discussed Hamlet’s metatheatrical play within a play, The Murder of Gonzago, in an attempt to discuss what Hamlet’s attitudes towards acting could tell us about the relationship between theater and audience. This week, I would like to shift gears and discuss a different moment of metatheatricality in Shakespeare: the performance of The Most Lamentable Tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe in the final act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As with my previous examples, Midsummer has an investment in the relationship between actor and audience, particularly as it pertains to moments of interpretation relative to an imagined, unchanging ‘text.’ Here though, that interrogation would seem to lack the political stakes that characters like Hamlet and individuals like Elizabeth I associated with the theater. Rather, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we are presented with the possibility that an audience’s ability to interpret a text against an implied authorial voice does not represent a threat to the theater as an institution. Instead, this moment represents an instance of productive labor that allows audience and playwright to work in unison.

Among the many subplots moving through A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a great deal of time is spent with the “Rude Mechanicals,” a band of Athenian lower-class craftsmen preparing a play for the upcoming wedding of Theseus, Duke of Athens. The performance is framed as comically inept. From its treatment of the staging to the acting, the text of Midsummer’s invites mockery of the Rude Mechanicals’ stage play. The performance, which dominates the fifth act of the play,[1] becomes a spectacle of failure as the onstage audience of the performance mocks and jeers at the actors in what amounts to a four-century old version of Mystery Science Theater 3000. While the Rude Mechanicals are not Hamlet’s boisterous clowns, they seem aligned with his idea of the overly zealous actor who would threaten to “out-Herods/ Herod,” and thus cause the audience to fail in understanding the gravity of the play’s printed text.[2] The original Pyramus and Thisbe is a tragedy drawn from the pages of Ovid, and invokes the same vaunted high artistic sources in which Hamlet finds his text. Unlike The Murder of Gonzago within Hamlet, Pyramus fails to produce its desired effect and the narrative is transformed into farce.

Shakespeare’s Rude Mechanicals

To this end, it is important to consider not only the metatheatrical performance undertaken in A Midsummer’s, but also its metatheatrical audience. Theseus and his cohort are very aware of their role as audience members, and the beginning of Act V serves as a justification for why the Duke allows this performance to go on in the first place. Central to this is Duke’s assertion that he and his fellow audience members are serving as a magnanimous corrective to the failure of the mechanicals; they act as individuals who know the play will be awful but will watch it nonetheless, because their presence will solve the problem of the mechanical’s ineptitude, and thus ‘fix’ the play. The Duke, being informed of how awful the play will likely be, remarks “[t]he kinder we, to give them thanks for nothing. / Our sport shall be to take what they mistake.”[3] Taking what they – the performers – mistake implicitly frames Theseus’s goal as one of interpretative labor, in which he and his fellow audience members will correct the problems arising from the inability of the mechanicals to ‘properly’ perform tragedy.

This is however, made significantly more complex by how the performance of A Most Lamentable Tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe does not fail in a metatheatrical sense. In other words, although the Rude Mechanicals fail to properly perform tragedy within the logic of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the live audience is compelled to join in with Theseus and his royal audience. We laugh with them and the comedy of Midsummer becomes successful, even if it is at the expense of lower-class actors failing to produce real affective tragedy. We take it upon ourselves to participate in Theseus’s reinterpretation of the play and in doing so, we too find pleasure the kind of corrective interpretation that Theseus promises when he claims to “take what they mistake.” The audience is not a passive figure tasked with correctly taking in the meaning of the tragedy, as that is not the real stakes in the final moments of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Instead, the on-stage audience are active participants in the construction of the play and in doing so, provide a bulk of the pleasurable comedy. We, as the audience in the theater, are brought to laugh with the on-stage audience and in doing so, we aren’t failing to properly interpret Pyramus and Thisbe; we are correctly interpreting A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This is the central metatheatrical tension in Shakespeare’s Midsummer’s, and it is this tension between text and performance that creates the comedy of the final act.

Now, the political stakes in the reinterpretation of tragedy into comedy are much lower than the stakes of an early modern audience member reinterpreting a play like Richard II as pro-usurpation. However, the function of this examination, and the function of all my discussions this month has been to interrogate the ways in which early modern drama addresses and complicates the role of the audience as an active and passive portion of the space of the theater. I began this month in the present day, examining the suggestion that audiences failing to properly interpret the ‘meaning of a play’ might in turn serve as a threat to the institution of the public theater. From there, I spoke to two similar discourses present in early modernity, each suggesting how various audiences’ differing interpretation of a play might have dire political consequences. I close then, on a more ‘productive’ moment of misinterpretation, wherein the audiences’ ability to reject the ‘meaning of a text’ is not imagined as an undesirable response. At the conclusion of this series of blogposts, I hope to have made visible the complex relationship early modern theater had with its own interpretative communities, and the ways in which many of those vexed relationships remain present in our own relationship with the artistic productions of the past.

[1] The rest of the key plot points have been wrapped up by the beginning of the fifth act.

[2] Hamlet III.ii.x14-x15. Of note here, Bottom does pride himself in his ability to play a tyrant, an attitude he attempts to comically transfer off the stage during rehearsal.

[3] A Midsummer Night’s Dream V.i.95-96.

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During Act 3 of Hamlet, while preparing the travelling players for the evening’s performance, Hamlet provides the actor’s company with a lengthy speech concerning the proper methods of acting he would like them to employ. During the speech, he makes a note on clowns, saying “and let those that play/ your clowns speak no more than is set down for them;/for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to/ set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh/too.”[1] Here, Hamlet urges caution to the players: their clown should speak only those words written upon the page, lest his frantic ad-libbing set the audience to laughter, and risk missing “some necessary/question of the play be then to be considered.”[2] This moment reminds the audience of how seriously Hamlet takes the theater and how he believes the supremacy of the page should define the worth of theatrical performance. Hamlet’s worry is that that clowns and fools pose a threat to the political power of drama. Given the political implications of Hamlet’s play, the worry here is that a particularly boisterous fool may risk causing the entire theatrical endeavor to come crashing down. Moving too far from the text, or otherwise reducing its importance as a single-authored object of reverence, threatens to rob it of its political weight, and reduce it to airy nothingness.

William Kempe: Shakespeare’s first fool and likely the reason that this speech exists

Particularly key here is the sense that ‘some quantity of barren spectators’ will become wrapped up in the clown’s performance. Clowns were understood to be figures of the theater beloved by the commons; they were the wild antic-makers who, along with the jigs and songs that would accompany a public theatrical performance, successfully brought London’s poorer audiences into the theaters. This moment of directly – and assertively – attacking the figure of the fool is explicitly transformed into a jab at the kinds of audiences who would enjoy the labor of the clown and in turn, would rob the text of its dignity. Here, the assault on the fool is an instrument for critiquing the baser kinds of audiences who enjoyed the fools’ antics above the artistic merit of the tragic monologue. While Hamlet extends this beyond the antics of the clown (also critiquing players whose voices remind him of the town-crier), the thrust of the speech remains in the suggestion that the theater is a site of high art that must not be threatened by actors who would “split the ears of the groundlings, who/ for the most part are capable of nothing but/ inexplicable dumbshows and noise.”[3] A key component of this critique is misdirection; in other words, this critique emphasizes a playwright’s worry that his audience will fail to understand the gravity of the text, and will instead allow themselves to be enamored by disposable and unimportant moments that are not worthy of artistic labor. Within this speech, the antipathy towards the unwashed masses and their inability to properly relate to the artistic production of the theater is palpable, and framed through rhetoric reminiscent of critiques leveled against mass public audiences in virtually any contemporary moment.

This sense of the importance of the play is complicated by the performance Hamlet is discussing. While in the last few weeks we looked at texts that were assumed to have represented political leaders on stage, Hamlet’s intent is explicit, as he notes “the play’s the thing,/ wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.”[4] Hamlet is certain of the play’s ability to foreground the reality of Denmark’s corruption, despite the incongruity separating The Murder of Gonzago from the text of Hamlet. Hamlet’s audience, both on the stage and in the theatre, is meant to understand that the goal of the play is to “hold a mirror up to nature”[5] — and this in turn will reflect the rank villainy that has seeped into the Danish court. While Hamlet is not hoping that his play will stir a popular revolt,[6] he is assuming the play itself will have the power make the invisible sins lingering within the state visible, and furthermore, force a moment of confession and revelation to justify his act of regicide. His speech to the player kings also suggests a belief that if the play is not treated with the necessary reverence for the art form, it will be prone to fail. The stakes of this performance as so much greater than the enjoyment and applause of Hamlet’s hypothetical barren spectators, and so must be presented with the proper audience in mind.

While there is reason to be hesitant in ventriloquizing the voice of Shakespeare through Hamlet, it is worth considering the ways that this discourse was present during the period, and the ways in which Hamlet’s advice has become part and parcel with the discourse surrounding the theater in our contemporary world. As the theater has become a stable and lauded artistic institution, clowns and dumbshows in Shakespearean tragedies nevertheless remind us of their popular origins. As I noted in my first post this month, there was a sense among defenders of Julius Caesar (2017) that it was a case of audiences simply missing the “question of the play.” Those who then missed the question became like the lowly personages Hamlet critiques here, incapable or unwilling to grapple with the complexity of the dramatic representations put before them, and wasting energy in focusing on the wrong part of the text or performance. Though these complaints are not framed in the same language Hamlet proposes, the premise that underscores them remains worth considering. In our contemporary affirmation of the theater as weighty and serious art capable of enacting the kind of political labor early modern audiences feared, there is a danger that we have also affirmed Hamlet’s suggestion. Perhaps, this assertion also bolsters the belief that groundings, past and present, and their inability to fully understand the weight of artistic representation, act as a threat to the value of the theater as an institution. This becomes a highly contentious notion regarding who can enjoy the theater and what it means to ‘watch a play properly,’ lest we become the clown-loving audiences Hamlet chides. At its heart, these debates all return to the relationship between the theater and the general public, and this is the subject that I will explore in my final post this month.

[1] Hamlet III.ii.39-43.

[2] Ibid, 43-44.

[3] Ibid, 11-13.

[4] Hamlet, II.ii, 633-634.

[5] Hamlet, III.ii. 23.

[6] By contrast, Laertes does lead a popular revolt.

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