Sovereignty and Intelligence ─ Spying and Court Culture in the English Renaissance

This book uncovers a culture of courtly surveillance, secrecy, and espionage in an era generally regarded, since Foucault, as characterized by the association of sovereignty with public display. Examining the centrality of espionage in the careers and works of Michel de Montaigne, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Sir Francis Bacon, it demonstrates the association of surveillance with sovereignty before surveillance became the characteristic mode of discipline in the modern, abstract state. The author substantially revises our understanding of the relationship between power and knowledge in the rise of the modern state while subtly illuminating the inscription of that relationship within Renaissance texts.
The book examines the configurations of surveillance, sovereignty, and the accompanying forms of subjectivity and knowledge in the transition to modernity. The association of sovereignty with intelligence extended far beyond the identification of sovereignty with the personal power of the sovereign. In Montaigne's France, sovereignty appeared in a disseminated form. Montaigne's Essais exemplify the situation of the courtier self-fashioned to serve an absent sovereign; like Lacan's subject, he is looked at from all sides. Montaigne's description of the search for self-knowledge as self-spying reveals how deeply this quest was implicated in a culture of courtly surveillance. At Elizabeth's court, observation evolved into political espionage based on a system of courtly patronage and employed as a means of policing sexuality centered on the unmarried monarch. Sidney's Arcadia inscribes ways of coping, with the anxieties produced by this surveillance-fraught environment.
Beyond and below the court, the culture of surveillance produced Christopher Marlowe's urban subculture of intellectuals and travelers, linked to the aristocratic "subculture" of the court by espionage and the equivocal homosexuality of the patronage system. Thus in Edward II Marlowe uses the sovereign's relationships with his favorites to legitimate both espionage and male love. And although Ben Jonson's negative depiction of an urban court under a regime of surveillance in Sejanus criticizes the rise of abstract state sovereignty at the end of Elizabeth's strong personal reign, in Catiline he endorses the abstract state and tries to rehabilitate the association of sovereignty with intelligence.
Francis Bacon's anxieties as an intelligence agent at Elizabeth's court appear in his Essays. In the New Atlantis, however, he gave issue to a wholly idealized program that preserved the culture of surveillance while abstracting sovereignty from sovereign and court. Bacon was able to envision a world in which impersonal knowledge supports social control - the world of classical modernity. The author shows us how the disciplinary surveillance of the modern state grew out of the complex culture of surveillance that preceded it.

John Michael Archer is Associate Professor of English at Columbia University.