Did Ben Jonson Love or Hate Surveillance? It’s Complicated.
In this post, Benjamin Miele reflects on his article ‘“I Do Love / To Note and to Observe”: The Pleasures of Surveillance and Resistance in the Work of Ben Jonson’, which appeared in the 21(2) issue of Surveillance & Society.
Best known in our time as a contemporary of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson was a larger-than-life figure in his own: military veteran, actor on the London stage, playwright, highly educated translator of Ancient Greek and Latin, poet laureate, and overall redoubtable raconteur. He also encountered state surveillance throughout his adult life, starting with a stint in prison for writing a play that ran afoul of state censorship laws in 1597. Cornered by two stool-pigeons, or jailhouse informants, he was warned beforehand by a guard. A year later, he was imprisoned for killing a man in a duel, and released when he could prove that he could read Latin.
Jonson seems to have invited controversy and scrutiny, repeatedly writing scandalous plays that landed him in jail, and converting to Catholicism in prison even though the Protestant English state had outlawed such worship. His neighbors informed against him, and he gladly paid fines and agreed to debate the merits of Protestantism and Catholicism with noted London ministers. While I do not argue in my recent article for Surveillance & Society that he enjoyed being surveilled, I do explore how his fiction and non-fiction writings reflect on the pleasures of voyeurism and exhibitionism, which are normalized in cultures like Jonson’s that experience an expansion of state surveillance.
Certain characters in his plays revel in both seeing and being seen within a context of covert observation, suggesting that such watching is seemingly irresistible, as in both overpowering and appealing, to creatures of the English Renaissance surveillance state. To understand how Jonson navigated this maze of surveillance in his time, I turn to the Freudian concept of the unheimlich, which translates to uncanny and describes experiences that are both intimately known and radically unknowable. Jonson asks how we can be attracted to and repulsed by surveilling, and what role pleasure plays in our relationship to surveillance.
Turning back to his biography, we can see his lived experience of state spying was quite uncanny. When in prison in 1605 for another scandalous play, he wrote to England’s spymaster, Robert Cecil, sparking a productive relationship between poet and politician. Jonson got out of jail, and only a few months later Cecil called in a favor: in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot, a notorious domestic terrorist plot by disaffected English Catholics to blow up England’s Parliament when the Protestant King James was present, Cecil asked for information from Jonson about Catholic priests in London. The now-in-favor poet went on to serve as King James’s official writer of masques for courtly entertainment and receive patronage from leading figures at court.
Ultimately, Jonson’s relationships with surveillance and writing are defined by the tensions inherent in both. Jonson’s works are still read because they so skillfully resist interpretation, or being explained away so easily. They also resisted government agents and valorized such resistance among his audiences, while acknowledging the enduring appeal of seeing and being seen.
