When he reunites with Marina, Pericles requests that his royal advisor, Helicanus, “strike” him:

Give me a gash, put me to present pain,
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me
O’erbear the shores of my mortality
And drown me in their sweetness.[2]

To maintain his composure and, concomitantly, his masculinity, Pericles rhetorically begs Helicanus to wound him, to penetrate his flesh and produce an orifice through which to vent the mighty excess of his emotions. Such affective too-much-ness recalls Gloucester’s death in King Lear, as Edgar tells audiences that his father’s weak heart, on reconciliation with his eldest son, was “too weak the conflict to support / ‘Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, / [and] Burst smilingly.”[3]

Under the duress of excessive albeit pleasant affective energies, a similar kind of bursting threatens Pericles. But unlike Gloucester, whose excessive, oppositional feelings erupt him, Pericles calls for a curative bodily modification which registers as a metaphoric invagination. Put differently, Pericles seeks to regain and reassert a “Neostoic,” masculine self through a temporary feminization, figured here as the “gash” that would enable him to evacuate the waste of his excessive affect and purge himself into a purified state of rationality. His goal, moreover, figures as anti-queer; he attempts to tidy what Martin F. Manalansan IV calls “queer mess,” which refers to “material and affective conditions of impossible subjects as well as an analytical stance that negates, deflects, if not resists the ‘cleaning up’ function of the normative.”[4] But prior to this “cleaning up,” Pericles is a liminal, queer subject, defined both by masculine rationality and feminine excess.

In seventeenth century Europe, Neostoicism, or the so-called “new humanism,” rose to prominence and filtered into literary texts by discursive osmosis. Not to understate its significance, Richard Tuck writes that Neostoicsm, which is a blend of “skepticism, Stoicism[,] and Tacitism,” became “as all-pervasive as the Ciceronian humanism and the Quattocentro had been.”[5] This ordering philosophy grew in large part out of the sixteenth century writings of Michel de Montaigne, author of Les Essais (1580), and Justus Lipsius. Lipsius published his most famous Neostic text, De Constantia, in two parts in 1583. In it, he blends Stoic ideals with Christine doctrine, yielding a text which, according to Tuck, touts the following tenet: “wisdom comes not through the repression of emotion by reason, but through the cultivation of helpful passions, like plants and a garden.”[6] Therefore, as a man guided by Neostoic principles, Pericles aims not to excise himself of all emotion but to practice a kind of emotional temperance to maintain his composure and, inextricably, his masculinity. For as Lipsius extolls, the “true Mother of Contancy, is Patience / and lowliness of the Mind”:

As for Virtue she ever
marches in the middle path, and is
cautiously heedfull lest there should
be any thing of Excess or Defect in
any of her Actions. For still she directs
her self by the Ballance of right
Reason, and hath that alone for the
rule and square of her Test.[7]

To Lipsius, the ideal Neostoic bears a measured and relatively stable disposition. “Excess” literally has no part in such a body-mind. Rather, it is a weed, like Pericles’s overabundance of joy on reunion with Marina, to be yanked out by the root. Within this philosophical framework, when Pericles is overcome by feeling—nearly drowned by it—he is a queer subject, liminally suspended between Neostoic masculinity and excessive femininity, between total order and senseless chaos.

During the reunion scene, Pericles firmly situates emotive excess within the realm of the feminine, a category that early modern culture constructed as oversexed, irrational, and vulnerable to penetration by external forces. Prior to discovering that she is his daughter, for instance, Pericles’s first look at Marina overcomes him. He figures his surplus joy as a gestational burden that must be delivered, bemoaning, “I am great with woe, and shall deliver weeping.”[8] The physical similarities between Marina, a perceived stranger, and Thaisa seem to him an impossibility. Because he cannot reconcile it, and because it likely assaults him with complex feeling, the knowledge must be labored and he, a figurative mother, must lachrymosely deliver it. Likewise, when Pericles learns that Marina is his daughter and asks Helicanus for a “gash,” he figures his emotional surfeit as a superflux of blood that must be painfully let. This image of bloodletting also recalls the purgation of menstrual blood from the uterus, a process understood by early modern culture to maintain humoral balance within the female (i.e. uterus bearing) body. In each case, Pericles figures “too-much-ness” as a feminine something that must be released from the body to arrive at Neostic, masculine stasis.

[1] William Shakespeare and George Wilkins, Pericles, ed. Suzanne Gossett, Third Series (New York and London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2004): 1.1.131. All subsequent references to the play are to this edition.

[2] 5.1.181-4.

[3] William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes, Third Series (New York, London, and Ireland: The Arden Shakespeare, 1997): 5.3.197-8.

[4] Martin Manalansan IV, “The Messy Itineraries of Queerness,” Fieldsights, Theorizing the Contemporary, July 21, 2015, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/the-messy-itineraries-of-queerness: n.p.

[5] Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572-1651 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), https://hdl-handle-net.libezproxy2.syr.edu/2027/heb32217.0001.001: 62-3.

[6] Ibid., 54.

[7] Justus Lipsius, A Discourse of Constancy in Two Books Chiefly Containing Consolations Against Publick Evils, 1679; trans. Nathaniel Wanley, p. 21-2, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A48621.0001.001?rgn=main;view=fulltext.

[8] 5.1.97.

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In Book X of the Metaphorphoses, Ovid tells the story of Myrrha and her incestuous longing for her father, Cinyras. In this section, readers follow along as Myrrha vacillates between the rightness and wrongness of her desire,  which she  ultimately consummates . She does so via the aid of her nurse, a maternal caregiver who embodies the trope of the “bawd,” or one who prostitutes others. While Myrrha’s mother is away participating in a fertility festival (oh, irony of ironies), Myrrha’s nurse leads her to Cinryas’s bed, lying by omission by telling him that someone “about / The age of Myrrha” wishes to lie with him (10.504-5). There, under the obfuscating guise of night, taboo becomes actualized.

Ultimately, Cinyras discovers the truth, leading Myrrha – heavy with her father’s child – to flee. After wandering far from home, she is stricken with indecision, “Not knowing,” the poet tells us, “what she might desyre, distrest between the feare / Of death, and tediousnesse of lyfe” (10.552-3). In kind, I suggest, with her irreconcilable desire to be a daughter-lover, she prays that the gods place her in an equally liminal state of life-death:

O Goddes, […]
How bee it to th’ entent
That neyther with my lyfe the quick, nor with my death the dead
Anoyed bee, from both of them exempt mee this same sted,
And altring mee, deny to mee both lyfe and death.     

(10.552-9)

Just as her desire for Cinyras contains both eros and storge (i.e. familial love), Myrrha aims to atone for her transgressions by becoming something similarly in-between. Thus begins her “Ovidian petrification” into a Myrrh tree (Bate 187). I argue that, as an in-between subject/object, Myrrha is able, for the first time in her episode, to truly express herself. Paradoxically, she becomes freed from the constraint of either/or – of words or silence – gaining more expressive power than ever before.

To this point, in Arthur Golding’s (1567) and Frank Justus Miller’s (1916) translations of the Metamorphoses as well as in the original Latin (circa 8 AD), Myrrha’s metamorphosis is marked with two identical linguistic shifts. In the first case, despite the total restriction placed on Myrrha’s speech after becoming a tree, Golding’s translation concedes “[y]it weepeth she” (my emphasis 10.574). A few lines later, the poet begins,

But woordes wherwith to tell
And utter foorth her greef did want. She had no use of speech
With which Lucina in her throwes shee might of help beseech.

But then, he concludes,

Yit like a woman labring was the tree, and bowwing downe
Gave often sighes, and shed foorth teares as though shee there should drowne.

(my emphasis 10.580-4)

In both instances, the poet explicates Myrrha’s inability to express herself as she used to due to a loss of “senses” (10.573). What the poet means by this word, however, is appropriately unclear, as Myrrha is still in possession of her mind and sensory apparatuses – she feels “greef,” gives “sighes,” and sheds no end of “teares.” However, through such pained bows and grievous sighs – actions that are at once gendered (“like a woman labring”) and vegetal-kinesthetic – Myrrha successfully beckons Lucina, who then supplies “woordes of ease” and facilitates her labor (10.586). In this moment, the ineffable finds its venting place not through language but through a “repertoire of embodied practice,” including bodily gesture and fluids (i.e. myrrh-tears) (Taylor 18). I argue that Ovid’s Myrrha episode makes a case not for the power of speech or silence but of a third, liminal mode of communication: non-verbal, bodily self-expression. This is but one of several ways that the episode gestures toward ways of living and being otherwise when we attend to liminality.

In nearly all of the metamorphoses illustrated throughout Ovid’s poem, as Heather James summarizes, the “absolute powers” that instigate them “repeatedly visit one special punishment and torture on their victims: that of silence” (7-8). In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, silence is frequently defined in relation to human speech – silence strips one’s ability to vocalize and, specifically, voice the ways in which they have been wronged. Given that Ovid was ultimately exiled from the Roman empire (ostensibly as a reaction to his publication of sexually explicit poems), his ruminations on speech and silence have immediate social and political significance. James argues that his major contribution to political thought during the English Renaissance was “his conception of poetry as a site in which parrhesia [i.e. bold, open, ‘free’ speech]could persist even within the limiting structures of empire and […] insist on the liberties of citizen-subjects” (7). However, I suggest that Ovid’s poetry, particularly his Myrrha episode, develops a rather more capacious sense of self-expression wherein speech and silence occupy either ends of a spectrum whose middle zone teems with potential.

Following Myrrha’s incestuous scelus nefas, or “crime of indescribable dimensions,” she is metamorphosed into a myrrh tree and thusly “silenced,” but she is not simply disempowered (Lehmann 104). Rather, her transformation makes it necessary for her to rely on different methods of self-expression – something in between the utterance of “woordes” and stark silence – akin to what Diana Taylor calls the “repertoire.” Where the Metamorphoses most explicitly binarizes speech and silence, Taylor’s study charts Western hierarchizations of the archive (i.e. supposedly permanent materials, such as writing) over the repertoire (i.e. ephemeral forms of knowledge such as dance or ritual). Where her work overlaps with the present argument is in its assertion that the archive and repertoire, though often thought of as such, do not actually constitute a binary:

The relationship between archive and repertoire […] is certainly not sequential (the former ascending to prominence after the latter, […]. Nor is it true versus false, mediated versus unmediated, primordial versus modern. Nor is it a binary. […] We need not polarize the relationship between these different kinds of knowledges to acknowledge that they have often proved antagonistic in the struggle for cultural survival or supremacy. (22)

As is true of any dichotomy, uncritical endorsement of a speech/silence binary eclipses the force of tree-Myrrha’s repertoire, namely her vegetal-bodily movements and material secretions. Beyond simply calling Lucina’s attention, tree-Myrrha’s liminal expression even elicits the goddess’s pity, inspiring her to alleviate her pain. These expressive forces are not only powerful, proving just as efficacious for Myrrha as words (if not more), but they can be recuperated by sensitive reading practices which, in turn, can yield new insights about the world. To contend with these forces, the Metamorphoses asks us to linger with liminality – that which crops up in between the clearly defined zones of binaries – and attend to the ontological possibilities to which I believe it gestures.

 Ovid, Publius Naso. Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation of 1567. Edited by John Frederick Nims, Translated by Arthur Golding, Paul Dry Books, 2000.
*All forthcoming references to the poem will be to this edition.

 Bate, Jonathon. Shakespeare and Ovid. Oxford Scholarship Online, 2011, 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183242.001.0001.

Taylor, Diana. “Acts of Transfer.” The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, 2003, pp. 1–52, https://doi-org.libezproxy2.syr.edu/10.1215/9780822385318.

James, Heather. Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Tragedy and Dramatic Theater. Translated by Erik Butler, Routledge, 2016.

Image:

Marcantonio Franceschini – The Birth of Adonis, 1690 public domain image

MLA Citation (I think?): ‘Birth of Adonis’, oil on copper painting by Marcantonio Franceschini, c. 1685-90, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.jpg

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Act One of the play introduces audiences and readers to the Nurse, Juliet’s caregiver, confidant, and former wet-nurse. In the play’s third scene, the Nurse recalls a moment in time that is etched in her memory. She recalls when she weaned an infant Juliet from her breast:

“But, as I said,
On Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen,
That shall she, marry, I remember it well.
‘Tis since the earthquake now eleven years,
And she was weaned – I never shall forget it –
Of all the days of the year, upon that day;
For I had then laid wormwood to my dug,
Sitting in the sun under the dovehouse wall.
My lord and you were then in Mantua –
Nay, I do bear a brain! But, as I said,
When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple
Of my dug and felt it bitter, pretty fool,
To see if techy and fall out with the dug! (1.3.21-34)[2]

In her own words, she retrieves this information from her “brain,” the Cartesian site of rationality. However, as her diction reveals, her body is doing just as much of this retrieval work. Here, Diana Taylor’s concept of the “repertoire” is useful, a term which refers to “embodied practice[s]/knowledge[s]” such as spoken communication, ritual ceremony, and choreographed movements. Unlike archival records, which Taylor describes as “supposedly enduring materials” like “texts, documents, buildings, [and] bones,” the Nurse engages her bodily senses – those fleeting, unprocessed impressions that Cartesian dualism diametrically opposes to impartial rationality – to recall Juliet’s age.[3] Without necessarily intending to do so, she catalogues the sensory inputs that permeate her body during this blip in time, inviting us to inhabit her flesh, if only for a moment. She conjures the warmth of the “sun,” the cooing of the “dovehouse[’s]” inhabitants, and the steady pressure induced by Juliet’s suckling – made discontinuous by the bitterness of wormwood – to access her memory of Juliet’s age.

In contrast to the Cartesian and, thus, heteropatriarchal claim that bodies are sites of illogical disorder, the Nurse’s body produces and stores knowledge in this passage, operating on the same level as comparatively privileged archival information, such as birth records and geological reports.[4] In this moment, both archive and repertoire corroborate one another. Not only does Juliet’s factual age align with the Nurse’s corporeal memory, but the “earthquake” also offers a material trace of that day, whose memorial marks otherwise reside on/in the flesh.

Beyond functioning as an archival counterpart to the Nurse’s repertoire, however, the earthquake also signals the cosmic import of this ephemeral moment. As a play centered on the operations of destiny, perhaps the earthquake presages the doom that will result the next time Juliet’s body unites another’s, namely her “star-crossed lover[’s]” (Prologue.6). In another sense, this pairing opposes the heteropatriarchal binaries that stem from Cartesian dualism – such as mind/body, man/woman, political/domestic, and cosmological/earthly – elevating a moment defined by the female body and domestic care to a level of cosmic significance.

Moreover, the destructive earthquake literalizes the turmoil that an infant Juliet likely feels as her wonted source of comfort transforms into a loathed object. Here, Juliet’s passions, conceived of by Cartesian dualism as unrefined and unproductive, are expressed, whether intentionally or not, in the natural world. They are expressed sans language, the dominant mode of Western knowledge production that Taylor claims “has come to stand for meaning itself” (25). Perhaps the earthquake tells us something more about the Nurse’s feelings, too, who otherwise expresses fondness over her “pretty fool’s” maturation.

The Nurse’s performance harbors all of this and more, if only one takes the time to sense it. However, at the end of her speech, Lady Capulet tiredly commands, “Enough of this. I pray thee, hold thy peace” (1.3.50). Lady Capulet, Juliet’s biological mother, does not perceive the sensuous knowledges contained in the Nurse’s speech, or if she does, she values it as much as heteropatriarchy, the play’s dominant power-knowledge system, does. Of course, the Nurse propagates heteropatriarchal values herself, engaged, as we all are, in the “oppressing resisting”[5] dialectic theorized by Latinx feminist philosopher María Lugones (7).[6] However, the passage quoted above contains multitudes that heteropatriarchal epistemes are blind to, compelling us to attend more sensitively to the Nurse and sensuous knowledges in the play.

Image citation: Romeo and Juliet. Directed by Franco Zeffirelli, performances by Pat Heywood and Olivia Hussey, Paramount Pictures, 1968.

[1] Lloyd, Genevieve. “The Man of Reason.” Metaphilosophy, vol. 10, no. 1, 1979, p. 23.

[2] Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet: Texts and Contexts. Edited by Dympna Callaghan, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.

[3] Taylor, Diana. “Acts of Transfer.” The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, 2003, p. 18.

[4] Contemporaneous British writers such as Gabriel Harvey wrote about an earthquake around the same time that the Nurse would have weaned Juliet, meaning that historical British documentation also supports the Nurse’s sensuous, fictional knowledge.

[5] Taylor, Diana. “Acts of Transfer.” The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, 2003, p. 18.

[6] In other words, we are always engaged in a tense relationship between resisting oppressions and propagating them.

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Written in 1516, More’s Utopia is a text which provides the first major instance of the word “utopia” as we know it today. Derived from a Greek pun which alternately means “no-place” and “good-place,” Utopia concerns the travels of one Raphael Hythloday to a hidden island nation known as Utopia and the report of his findings back at court in England. Book II of Utopia features long descriptions of the island-nation’s geography. More writes:

The island of Utopia containeth in breadth in the middle part of it (for there it is broadest) 200 miles. Which breadth continueth through the most part of the land. Saving that by little and little it cometh in and waxeth narrower towards both the ends. Which fetching about a circuit or compass of 500 miles, do fashion the whole island like to the new moon. (49).

More’s book is best remembered for its discussion of social practices in Utopia, but these geographic details have inspired several attempts to visualize the island which I’ll explore here.

First, let me introduce the map included in the original 1516 edition of Utopia:

The 1516 map makes use of several representational shortcuts. It suggests the 54 cities of Utopia with the presence of only about 10 manmade structures on the island. The size of these representational structures in relation to the 500-mile long perimeter island also points to discrepancies between image and text.

The 1595 edition of Utopia sees a dramatically more attentive cartography:

In addition to representing all 54 of the cities described in the text, this map emphasizes the details of the landscape with depictions of hills, forests, and rivers throughout the island. Furthermore, the cities of the island are represented significantly more proportionally to the remainder of the landscape. Overall, the 1595 map represents a markedly higher attention to detail which, as a whole, conveys a sense of verisimilitude. Mapping the island to such a high level of detail suggests a more stable conception of the Utopia within the text.

As we skip to the contemporary moment, we can see an interesting clash across a technological divide on how to make a map of Utopia. Brian Goodey, in his 1970 essay “Mapping ‘Utopia’: A Comment on the Geography of Sir Thomas More,” undertakes the project of rendering a map of Utopia which is thoroughly founded on what he describes as the “statistical and topographical description of Utopia provided by More in the early sections of Book Two” (15). He makes step-by-step analyses of components of the mapping process before ultimately concluding that “The answer is unfortunately all too simple. More presents us with a Utopia, a ‘Nowhere,’ that cannot be mapped.” (8) Not only does Goodey find it impossible to piece together the details of the text into a coherent map, but he suggests that this is indicative of a larger project by More — an impossible utopic society on an impossible-to-map island.

Andrew Simoson’s 2016 article “The Size and Shape of Utopia” offers a starkly contrasting position to Goodey.[i] In this article, Simoson works through the text of Utopia to find what he considers the five most important cartographic details given in the text. Describing them as “clues,” he lists them as:

Clue 1: Utopia is shaped as a crescent, the horns of which bound a large harbor on its eastern end.

Clue 2: If we loosely define the midline of the island as the perpendicular bisector of the crescent’s two tips, then Utopia’s cross-sections parallel to the midline are all about 200 miles, except near the extremes where it collapses to 0.

Clue 3: This harbor is circular with a mouth of 11 miles so as to make a perimeter of about 500 miles.

Clue 4: Utopia consists of 54 city-states, each separated from the nearest neighbor by 24 miles. Each city-state is square-like with side lengths of at least 20 miles.

Clue 5: The capital city, located in the center of the island, lies about 60 miles from the harbor and 140 miles from the opposite coast. (65-66)

After Simoson works through the way previous maps have failed to accurately render Utopia following these five clues, he proposes five mathematic formulations to more precisely determine the map’s parameters. For Clue 1, he provides “Feature 1: The outer coast of Utopia will be an ellipse parameterized by O = (a cos t, b sint)” (68). Where Goodey relied on analog mathematical devices to attempt a map of Utopia, Simoson inputs his five mathematical features into a computer.

In other words, the mysterious hidden island of Utopia created in the year 1516 could only finally be mapped correctly in the year 2016 with the aid of computers. Those leery of some techno-positivistic moral lesson in this narrative should note that Simoson’s final map actually looks very different from that which was yielded by computer.

Ultimately, the closeness of the computer’s map to the text falls somewhat short and we are left instead with a map that appears in kind very similar to both the 1516 and 1595 maps. However this 500-year long mapping struggle seems to imply a kind of increasingly rational mode of ordering the world, this ultimate recourse seems to suggest an intertwined narrative about the role of maps and their relationship both to imaginary worlds and, perhaps, our own. Maps provide an inlet for us to orient ourselves to text not only in a rationalistic kind of space-ordering, but, as these examples suggest, some kind of imagistic and artistic way as well.

[i] Simoson’s article was the culmination of a project undertaken for the 500-year anniversary of Utopia.

References

• Goodey, Brian R. “Mapping ‘Utopia’: A Comment on the Geography of Sir Thomas More.” Geographical Review, vol. 60, no. 1, 1970, pp. 15-30.
• More, Thomas. Utopia. In Three Early Modern Utopias edited by Susan Bruce, Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Simoson, Andrew. “The Size and Shape of Utopia.” Bridges Finland. August 2016, Jyväskylä, Finland.

Dylan Caskie is a first-year PhD student in the Syracuse University Department of English, and broadly studies interactive media and visual culture with an increasing emphasis on film and digital media.

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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.

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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.

On the face of things, Mary Magdalene’s recurrence throughout decades of English literature is not an unexpected fact: biblical subjects were popular ones in Early Modern poetry on both sides of the Reformation. What renders this a curious fact is the history of Mary Magdalene’s representation in earlier English literature. Before the English Reformation, Mary Magdalene was the star of the famous and often-produced Digby mystery play fittingly called Mary Magdalene.

As I wrote earlier, Elizabeth banned the production of any religious subjects on stage, let alone mystery plays, which once had been one of the most essential ways of communicating Catholic religious principles and traditions to a mass, generally illiterate, audience. It’s not surprising that Mary Magdalene’s story had been a popular one to stage: in a conflation of a few gospel narratives, Mary Magdalen was a prostitute who extravagantly repented of her sexual sins by washing Christ’s feet with her tears and hair and anointing him with expensive perfume; having transferred her love for sex to love for Christ, she appears as one of the women who remains with Christ at his crucifixion, and she weeps at the tomb when she sees that her beloved’s corpse has gone missing. Her narrative is highly visual, full of erotic tension, and contains just the right amount of inspiration porn to urge a religious audience to convert their hearts like Mary.

“Thank you, God, for a good hair day today.”

Without the legal means to stage truly biblical conversion stories like these, Elizabethan and Jacobean literary artists necessarily had to find other media in which to work. A genre like poetry or devotional prose offered an interesting advantage over the essay or the sermon: they had connotations of intimacy, not publicity. Published collections, if they were published in the author’s lifetime, were often prefaced by long, exaggerated declamations of humility insisting that the author’s friends or a sense of duty had made them publish it against their own great reservations — not because they had designs on exposing the masses to a Catholic aesthetic. Even Southwell (who, as a Jesuit missionary, did have designs on converting the hearts of his audience) declared in the dedication of his devotional prose work “Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears” that he wished to “alter the object” of men’s “[p]assions … and loves” — a perfectly nondenominational desire to reform (sexual) desire.

Political restrictions on public expression also impacted how writers conceived of their private faith, shifting their attention to the interior experience of spiritual self-reformation over its external manifestation — no sackcloth and ashes here, but rather serious reflection on what it means to have conformed one’s heart to God’s will, a thought process often articulated in literary words. The Mary Magdalene depicted in these converts’ writing is not the same Mary Magdalene of the mystery plays. Yes, she converts herself from sex worker to saint, and her desire for Christ supplants her lust for flesh, but as a convert her personality doesn’t really change: her affection for Christ is still highly eroticized as she longs for his resurrected body, and she still has a predilection for the sensory and sensual. Perhaps Mary Magdalene’s conversion is not dramatized precisely because, to these Early Modern converts concerned with what makes a convert, the elements of interest in her story do not reside in the spectacular outward gestures of her conversion — her tears and perfumes and kisses — but rather her interior motivation to make these gestures and to convert her soul.

But “Noli me tangere” brings new meaning to “No touch-y.”

Indeed, in contrast to the transfiguration fulfilled in the body of the risen Christ, Mary Magdalene undergoes an internal metamorphosis with no impact on her body. In his poem to her, Vaughan exclaims, “How art thou changed!”, before observing that “thy beauty doth still keep / Bloomy and fresh” (my emphasis). The idea that she can be changed, while still looking exactly the same, speaks to an understanding that profound conversions do not always have visible consequences. Instead, Mary Magdalene’s conversion changes her interiority: marveling at the profound effects that her love for Christ has on her character, Southwell asks, “Can it thus alter sex, change nature, and exceed all art?” — even the art of theatrical representation.

In a complex way, Early Modern political repression of certain artistic genres helped change not only which art was most useful to understanding one’s faith but also how artists used that art to understand their political and spiritual conditions. Elizabethan and Jacobean artists still did not have much choice about how they wrote, as not even poetry was completely safe: the Jesuit Henry Walpole was run out of England for writing a poem celebrating Edmund Campion, a Jesuit martyr, and the poem’s printer infamously had his ears cut off for publishing it. But even under repression, artists find ways to capture the changing world.

Ashley O’Mara is a PhD student and teaching associate in the Syracuse University English program. She studies asexuality, celibacy, and the queer politics of Catholicism after the Reformation in Early Modern English literature. In her down time, she writes creative nonfiction and listens to Mashrou’ Leila. She has very strong opinions about hummus.

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As the threat of “Muslim registries” continues to linger after American lawmakers announced their support for such a tracking database, a number of writers have traced the connection of this desire for legalized discrimination/preemptive criminalization to other moments in recent history: the Bush administration’s NSEERS program, the Japanese internment, and the Holocaust. Each of these campaigns relied heavily on information processing, especially the collection of personal data which the state then weaponized against a domestic population. Modern computerized data processing certainly facilitated repression in these cases, and still promise to in the case of “Muslim registries,” but the roots of counting and criminalizing a whole class of people stretch much further back in history.

The Post-Reformation English state expended a great deal of resources on identifying, harassing, and condemning those who had failed to convert to, or had converted from, the state religion — the Church of England. Attendance at Church of England services was mandatory, and tracking attendance was one of the chief means of tracking non-conformists, including Anabaptists, Arminianists, Familists, but chiefly Catholics. Failure to attend resulted in fines, and also raised suspicions (as did too-frequent refusal of communion). Other religious transgressions were considered high treason: harboring a priest, facilitating the celebration of mass, or simply being a priest within England’s borders. High treason carried the death penalty and the forfeiture of property which would have benefitted one’s living descendants. Authorities could conduct raids on a household at any time in search of priests, vestments, and nonconformist texts and paraphernalia; the household would have to pay the authorities for the cost of the search.

Because there was no difference between the English church and the English state, transgression against the Church of England was transgression against the whole nation. Catholics were vilified as devilish foreign agitators, automatic enemies of the English people determined to replace the English monarch with the Whore of Babylon (otherwise known as the pope); other non-conformists were similarly foreignized and othered, in spite of their being born in English territory.

Welshman who claimed he was Christ, tho.

The documents I looked at in the Folger’s collection show how the English state orchestrated the tracking and regulation of religious nonconformity at every level. In Surrey, the Commission Concerning Jesuits, Seminaries, and Recusants recorded the indictments of local residents who failed to appear in church. One severely damaged handwritten document from 1572 describes the early days of the Commission, when it was formed at the express order of the Privy Council (Elizabeth’s inner circle, a kind of cabinet), and the bureaucratic tracking measures put in place in order to regulate and eliminate their impact on the security of the Protestant English state.

Another handwritten document (L.b. 241), on a sheet of parchment folded into its own envelope, was a 1581 arrest warrant for Jane Honyall, who had been a recusant for four years and was a suspected Catholic. This was one of a series of three documents pertaining to Hornyall; the other two (L.b. 199 and L.b. 208, respectively) concern the vicar and churchwardens of Egham, who were compelled to be witnesses to her years-long absence and also confirm that there were “no other recusants, massing priests or Jesuits in the parish” — lest the queen’s authorities suspect a cell of rebel Catholics was growing under the churchmen’s noses. Hornyall’s warrant includes three signed seals, quite literally officially sealing her fate.

Later, in a 1582 document (L.b. 219), the fully-fledged Commission listed in handwritten columns of indictments who had been convicted or released through the intercession of the Privy Council, and who had been imprisoned or “conformed” (officially repented and returned to church).

Other documents in the More Family of Losely Park, Surrey, collection — from which the above documents come — include official descriptions of the finances of different recusants and their ability to pay the fines levied against them.

That’s because this kind of tracking and regulating of minorities is never really about “domestic security” — hardly so. “Domestic security” uses an imaginary threat of foreign (or foreignized) “others” to mask policies that socially and financially benefit an elite few — usually, the financially and ethnically elite, although in England’s case religion came to operate as a kind of ethnic identity which conversion never truly erased. By inventing an overwhelmingly generalized set of policies, the elite secure the participation of the majority of the population in executing and sustaining those policies, even if only the elite continue to benefit from them. Before Nazi Germany legislatively stole property from Jews, the US from the First Nations and Japanese-Americans, and Israel from Palestinians, Elizabethan England systematically deprived English Catholics of their stake in England. Serial fines could slowly drain Catholic families of their financial resources, and a family member convicted of treason could deplete a family of everything all at once. John Gerard, an English Jesuit who survived to write about his mission work in England, described how many poor Catholics were dependent on the charity of the remaining property-owning Catholics who had so far escaped retribution. The property of persecuted Catholics of course would have gone back to the use of the Crown, not the people.

US Muslim-tracking policies — whether their targets are new immigrants who have to periodically check in with federal authorities or lifetime citizens covertly observed at their local university or place of worship — troublingly echo the technological and ideological systems of repression that supported the imprisonment, impoverishment, and death of minorities in our national and global history. Though the medium may have been different — handwriting instead of digital text, personal witness rather than metadata tracking — the method is nothing new.

Photos of manuscripts appear courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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