Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in the English Renaissance.

In his subtle reading of the "culture of surveillance" in early modern Europe, John Archer productively applies critical theory to literary and cultural texts. Looking afresh at the relationship between power and knowledge, the critic challenges Foucault's separation of sovereignty and surveillance within successive historical periods. Instead, he argues that the techniques of surveillance were firmly rooted in the "court politics of the pre-Enlightenment state ruled by a personal sovereign" and were not primarily a creation of the modern nation state, as Foucault suggested in Discipline and Punish.

In Archer's reformulation, the specular processes by which courtiers spied and were spied upon - reflecting the paranoia of early modern subjectivity as described by Elias, Foucault, and Lacan - drew both the Renaissance courtier and the absolute monarch into contingent social relationships based on the gathering and use of information. The modern state, Archer believes against the claims of Horkheimer and Adorno, "insofar it has inherited the sovereign's position, remains limited by this strategic relationship between knowledge and power" (12). Thus, tracing the origins of modernity to the pre-Enlightenment culture, this study explains the operations of power within a more satisfying historical narrative than that offered by Foucault and the Frankfurt School.

This argument unfolds through discussions of several Renaissance texts. An innovative reading of Montaigne's Essais in chapter one focuses on the psychological and phenomenological "self-fashioning" of the French courtier. Chapter two reveals the sexual surveillance in the Elizabethan court, charting the spying activities among rival courtiers as they evolved into a "recognizable political intelligence by means of the patronage system" (14). These rituals offer an excellent context for a reappraisal of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. Here, Archer suggestively reads the pastoral romance, especially in its revised form, as it plays out the erotic politics of the time and marks the changing psychology of the courtier to that of the servant of the state.

The critic next considers this courtly world "from below." Following Christopher Marlowe's career, he links the playwright's self-representations in Dido, Edward II, and The Massacre at Paris to his probable engagement in espionage as well as his involvement in an urban subculture shaped in part by what we now define as homosexuality. In this world, spying and love between men coalesced into an underground patronage system among aristocrats, of which, it seems, Marlowe was a part, and which he brought to life in Edward II's relationships with his favorites.

Ben Jonson's Roman plays are the subject of chapter four, in which subtle readings of Sejanus, his Fall and Catiline his Conspiracy chart the playwright's move from a dark regime of surveillance to more positive associations with an omniscient, and hence abstract, sovereignty in Catiline. The final chapter moves to Bacon, linking his role as an intelligencer and inquisitor to his study on the power of the state in History of the Reign of King Henry VII and New Atlantis. Here the critic persuasively charts a transition from a "centralized Stuart sovereignty" to a valorization of the "sciences of human control within the modern state" (151). Thus, according to Archer, Bacon's "program for an impersonal, technocratic, and surveilling state" in New Atlantis forms a bridge to the modern rationality of the Enlightenment.

Overall, Sovereignty and Intelligence vividly illuminates the Byzantine world of spies while also revealing the psychology of an aristocratic culture. However, it ends somewhat abruptly, gesturing (via Bacon) without a clear transition toward the Enlightenment and the modern state. The work needs a concluding chapter to examine the continuities and analogies between the Renaissance culture of surveillance and the later nation-state, especially as the connections between the different periods were far from seamless. Some concluding reflections would have strengthened the claims of this otherwise engaging and compelling book.

JYOTSNA G. SINGH Southern Methodist University