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.

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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Above my fortunes, yet my state is well.

I am a gentleman. – Viola, Twelfth Night

Viola, the shipwrecked woman of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, finds herself separated from her twin brother in a foreign land. Vulnerable, she must find means for supporting herself and dons the disguise of a eunuch named Cesario to serve Duke Orsino. The neighboring grieving Duchess, caught off-guard by Cesario’s unexpected presence of beauty and eloquent speech, seeks to uncover Cesario’s origins as s/he enters the court. She inquires about Cesario’s “parentage,” and s/he responds, “I am a gentleman” (1.5.222-24).[1] I read Viola’s embodied construction of the gentleman named Cesario within the tradition of courtiers and courtly service culture. I ask, why is the courtier, as an eroticized figure of civilized society, wrapped up with notions of reconstructing lost times and places? I explore this question in the deployment of Castiglione’s figuration of the ideal humanist courtier within The Book of the Courtier in Viola/Cesario’s embodiment of an English gentleman in Twelfth Night. I argue that Shakespeare’s re-imagination of Castiglione’s ideal Italian humanist courtier in Twelfth Night is demonstrative of the affective entanglement between courtiers, nostalgia, and sovereigns; thus, offering the potential for alternative queer futures.

The influence of Castiglione’s The Courtier as a political model for negotiating status within the court can be seen impacting the English imagination throughout Tudor England. This ideal humanist courtier even makes an appearance in Sir Thomas Elyot’s Governor, which was published only three years after Castiglione’s dialogue. Thomas Hoby translates The Courtier into English by 1561, and its influence on contemporaneous works is reflected in Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster (1570).[2] The ideal humanist courtier, as composed by Castiglione, began circulating throughout England during Henry VIII’s reign, carried into Elizabeth’s England, and became the preferred mode of conduct for English gentleman.[3] Within this context, Twelfth Night provides evidence that the form of the courtier exceeds textuality; the courtier draws upon past models of comportment, textual and performative, to elicit a sense of wonder and desire from sovereigns.

Viola carries on from the shipwreck at the opening of Twelfth Night towards a better life only after she disguises her appearance, such that others perceive her as a male courtier. Attempting to resuscitate a vestige of her lost brother, Viola draws upon Sebastian’s comportment for her employment as a courtier, “in this fashion, color, ornament/ For him I imitate” (3.4.322-23). Viola nostalgically draws upon the comportment of her lost brother as the model for her citational performativity “in this fashion” not only to succeed in securing her fortunes, but also to collapse the temporal separation between Sebastian and herself.

The figure of the gentleman in Viola’s performance of Cesario mirrors Castiglione’s ideal humanist courtier. Employed by Orsino, Cesario/Viola is sent to Duchess Olivia’s court to deliver the Duke’s declaration of love. Olivia, shocked at the eloquence of Cesario/Viola’s speech and comportment, asks him about his social status. Cesario describes himself to Olivia as a gentleman that has done well. His assurances to Olivia that he has already succeeded as a courtier – in that he is “above” his “fortunes” – is reminiscent of Cesare Gonzaga’s summary in Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier: “he who has grace finds grace” (Castiglione 30). Cesario’s use of the word “fortune” is indicative that it is through his grace of speech, beauty, and conduct that he has been able to ascend this far.[4]

Cesario has done so well because he has already captured Orsino’s interest with his graceful abilities. Cesario taunts Olivia with allusions to his prior success of becoming Orsino’s beloved, inflaming his prestige as a courtier in her imagination. Olivia rehearses to herself, almost trancelike, Cesario’s many favorable attributes such as his “tongue” for his rhetorical powers, his “face” for his youthful and feminine appearance, his “limbs” which are of lovely shape, his “actions” that are demonstrative of his capabilities, and his “spirit” that proves his morality. Strikingly, Olivia embeds Cesario with the same corporeal physicality and neo-platonic idealism that is found of Castiglione’s ideal humanist courtier. Indeed, Olivia admits that she gives a “fivefold blazon,” connecting Cesario to the chivalric tradition that the courtier and English gentleman pulls upon.

Viola’s disguise as her brother is a form of performative nostalgia that provides the material basis for her hope of a better future and puts into effect the circulation of queer desire. Olivia’s desire for Cesario brings the Duchess out of her mourning, hopeful for a future in which she is wed to this female dressed as male courtier. The promised, yet unfilled, union between Cesario and Orsino at the end of Twelfth Night suggests an alternative queer future as well. The Duke summons the male courtier, “Cesario, come -/ For you shall be, while you are a man;/ But when in other habits you are seen,/ Orsino’s mistress and his fancy’s queen.” (5.1.362-65). Orsino lingers over the idea of having Cesario as a beloved, and refuses to call, or perceive, Cesario as female until he has changed back into Viola’s clothes. As long as Cesario stays within the garb of a courtier then there still exists an alternative queer ending to Twelfth Night, one in which Viola’s clothes are never found and Cesario remains Orsino’s beloved.

[1] All references to Twelfth Night are from Bruce Smith’s edited edition.

[2] Linda Salamon reads affinities between The Courtier and The Scholemaster to argue that The Courtier influenced its design in “The Courtier and The Scholemaster.”

[3] See Bryson, Anna. From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England; Kelso, Ruth. The Doctrine of The English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century.

[4] Shakespeare uses the word “grace” as defined by good “fortune” in Two Gentlemen of Verona (3.1.146) (OED 6)

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A quick look at popular TV programming might lead a person to think that Americans are obsessed with Britain. We watch sci-fi shows like Dr. Who? to feed our imaginations about the possibilities of alien life and technology, as well as shows like The Great British Bake Off that combine culinary delights with intriguing locales. Then there are the historical dramas that have their own allure. We’ve watched the tumultuous reign of Henry VIII in The Tudors (or maybe we were just watching Henry Cavill?), followed the lives of the Crawley family in Downtown Abbey, and fell in love with Margaret in The Crown.

While these programs may implicitly be trying to tell us that there is something about Britain that should be revered, earlier broadcasting was not so subtle. In 1618 Thomas Gainsford published a text titled, The Glory of England, or A True Description of many excellent prerogatives and remarkable blessings, whereby she triumphs over all the Nations in the world. This travel writing does just that; it outlines, in Gainsford’s opinion, why England was so magnificent in comparison to other polities in the world.

One might ask, “Who is Thomas Gainsford that he would write such a text?” Well, Gainsford was born in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Unfortunately, he was never very good with his money and tended to owe people a lot of debt. This led him in 1601 to join the English army in the Nine Year’s War, a campaign against an Irish rebellion. He travelled across Europe after his time in Ireland was completed, and in 1607 made the trip to Constantinople. Upon his return to London, sometime after 1614, he prepared the first edition of The Glory of England to be sold at Saint Paul’s Churchyard.

Saint Paul’s Churchyard provides us context for thinking about who may have encountered the text, and how many copies may have circulated. St. Paul’s was considered the place to go to hear news and gossip concerning the state. It attracted people from all classes. It was a place that people could go to hear news from afar as well as news from the state itself. Selling The Glory of England at St. Paul’s means that not only did the text circulate between the people on the streets, but also that it had the opportunity to come into contact with, and travel to, members of the Elizabethan court.

The text’s note to the reader, that the narrative is an “oculatus testis” (Preface), is the reason why The Glory of England can be categorized as a piece of travel writing. Oculatus testis, or an eyewitness testament, signals to the reader that the information in the narrative is intended to be interpreted as real observations. Like all forms of travel writing, Gainsford’s text is precipitated by the fact that he actually went somewhere, out there. The purpose of travel writing is to record the experience of encountering either unknown, or unfamiliar, lands and people. Hence, as we find in the title, it is call a “True Description.” It is through this first-hand account that The Glory of England is branded as an unbiased comparison and evaluation of other nations against England.

While travel writings proffer descriptions of different peoples and places, they can tell us something about the culture of the person who composed it as well. I am interested in the ways in which this military man’s narrative sculpts and courts its readership. The text, assured enough in itself to not doubt what it says is true, describes the type of reader that might doubt ‘th glory of England’ above other nations:

1.either you are a stranger: 2. Or have been a Traveler: 3. Or look no further, than on the scarred and deformed face of antiquity as Authors have wounded the same: 4. Or live discontented through particular grievances in your Country: 5. Or are willful and irregular by the impostures of superstition: 6. Or affrighted at the power and greatness of other Princes: 7. Or transported with a poor opinion of our wealth: 8. Or to conclude, are merely ignorant (para. 1).

A quick look at this list begins to form an image of the type of reader who would agree with the premise of Gainsford’s narrative. We see that it is someone born within the country who has not traveled far, and so from the start we might think that the text is oriented towards insular nationalism. Categories three and five suggest a more Protestant reader, as the ancients were Pagans and the Catholics were involved in hocus pocus. And finally, with category eight, we see that the reader who believes in the glory of England is an educated reader. Or at least, they are not ignorant. It is interesting to me how the circulation of this book, with the contemporaneous rise of literacy, may have functioned to produce ‘proper’ citizen-subjects who were able to embody the glory of England themselves.

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[5-7 minute read]

When going on vacation these days, we take our cameras (or phones) with us to commemorate the places we visited, and the adventures that we embarked on. Contemporary phones and photos offer a way to share our experiences with friends and loved ones in a manner that allows them to imagine they were on the trip with us. Whether it is curating a collection on Flickr or Facebook, or even circling around a TV set hooked up to a DSLR, sharing pictures of where we have been and what we have seen enables viewers to put themselves in our shoes, and imagine themselves in our company. In this sense, others vicariously embody the same spaces we once did. Of course, what must be remembered is that behind every photograph is the person taking the picture. In this way, the photograph is not necessarily an accurate representation of an unmediated space, but rather an intentionally selected perspective. Think of your Instagram account – each photograph has a specific angle, filter, and caption to guide your followers into seeing you how you wish to be seen.

My interest in photos and vacations is actually just a thinly veiled obsession with space and spatial formations.[1] The type of space that can send me into an existential crisis (or epiphany, if we’re feeling generous) is the space that bodies occupy. I’m intrigued by how our bodies occupy spaces, and how we come to understand the type of spaces certain bodies are either allowed to, or barred from, occupying. Think of your friends describing that one place where people get drinks in that one part of town as “the gay bar.” The bar’s designation as a “gay place” invites bodies with certain orientations (notably queer) and repulses others. In fact, in this example we discover something curious: spaces can make different bodies experience different emotions and feelings.

However, as an Early Modern scholar, my obsession with space uses a slightly different framework than these contemporary examples. Instead of local gay bars that certain straight male acquaintances would deny feeling uncomfortable attending, or a series of photos from that person you knew in undergrad who decided to vacation some different country for the fact that “it sounded cool and was different,” I work with texts.

Well no, they didn’t have SMS back in sixteenth and seventeenth century either; I work textual evidence such as travel writings and plays. And yes, I can see where this might be confusing, “Tyler, how do you study space when you just read books?” Well the thing is that even within texts we have representations of travel and different spaces. We can see who is traveling in narratives such as Adriaen Van der Donck’s A Description of New Netherland (1656), as well as how other lands are imagined such as in Thomas Gainsford’s The Glory of England (1618). We can even see imagined responses to being shipwrecked in foreign lands in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1609).

Thankfully there are multiple social theorists who have spent an incredible amount of time conceptualizing what we mean when we say “space,” and even how space is produced. It is from theorists such as Lefebvre, Certeau, and Soja that we can begin to understand how it is possible to use the textual to study the spatial. Like a text, Lefebvre says that space can be read, decoded, and interpreted.[2] Certeau finds that the characteristics of any particular space are not stable, but in fact are produced through repeated performances.[3] As an extension of these assertions, Soja conceptualizes space being both real and imaginative.[4] So, when I read texts like A Description of New Netherland and The Glory of England, I consider what it means for readers to be reproducing, or re-performing, the spatial formations within the texts. I will ask, and attempt to explore the following questions: how do particular imaginations of certain spaces within these texts orient the readers towards certain bodies and spaces? What might the performance of courtly spaces within a text such as Twelfth Night inform us about the affects and feelings about certain courtly bodies?

Please join me this month as we explore the military exploits of an English soldier and his representation of the Ottomans, a colonist’s relationship to beavers in the New Netherlands, and the strange erotic nostalgia within courtly performances.

[1] While space as in space space – like outer space – is cool for its own reasons, that is not the type of space that I mean here.

[2] Lefebvere, Henry The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson Smith. Malden: Blackwell. 1991.

[3] Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life [Trans. Steven Randall. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984].

[4] Soja, Edward. Thirdspace. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999

Tyler Smart, an MA student in English at Syracuse University, is primarily interested how space produces certain subjectivities, locally and transculturally, in literary and cultural imagination. Other research interests include cross-cultural influences, queer theory and the history of sexuality, subjectivity, phenomenology, eco-criticism, and post-humanism.

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