What Can King Lear Teach Us About Surveillance?
In this post, Benjamin Miele reflects on his article ‘Gods, Informers, and the Erotics of Surveillance: The Critique of Surveillance in King Lear’, which appeared in the 21(1) issue of Surveillance & Society.
King Lear is having a moment. This spring, its run in Washington, D.C. was extended an eye-popping three times. As the TV-drama Succession concluded, many viewers noted the similarities between King Lear and Logan Roy, an ageing corporate titan who promises control of his media empire to three of his children. Shakespeare’s 400-year-old play about a society in decline, self-interested politicians, potential civil war, and a broken justice system overseen by a mad king resonates right now.
I want to add another note to these harmonies between the present and the play: Lear can tell us quite a lot about surveillance in Shakespearean England, and this just may be relevant to our surveillance society. This was the argument in my recent article for Surveillance and Society, which reinterpreted Lear as a criticism of the corrupting effects of the qui-tam system of surveillance-for-profit.
Qui-tam refers to a decentralized network of paid informants who reported on nearly everything, from illegal wool dealing to watering down beer to outlawed religious worship (Catholicism and Puritanism were illegal but retained many worshippers in secret). If informers helped win convictions in court, they split the fine with the state, qui-tam being Latin for “just-so,” or just as to the state, so to the informant. This incentivized informing for both providers and consumers of intelligence.
Today, informants may be conventionally perceived as rare but potentially credible resources for law enforcement, but in Shakespeare’s time qui-tam was much more than a marginal, unsavory practice. With so many people reporting on family, friends, and neighbors, England’s leading legal expert, William Lambarde, compared informers to a plague of locusts upon England or flies that eat the sores of diseased cattle.
In Lear we see informing mainly orchestrated by its worst (or best?) villain, Edmund. To gain his family’s lands and wealth, Edmund “informed against” his half-brother and father (16.80), betraying them and subjecting them to poverty and torture for his own personal profit, a practice Edmund calls “my business” (6.13). Edmund believes he is on track to become King of England by the start of Act 5, but in a twist Edmund’s half-brother, Edgar, uses surveillance to defeat Edmund. Edgar is presented as miraculously saving Lear’s ancient Britain, just as English propaganda framed the work of the clandestine services, suggesting that when good guys spy, everything works out. However (spoiler alert), Lear ends with the death of the heroine and rightful heir to the English throne, a death produced by Edmund’s scheming. Instead of reassurance, spectators are left to contemplate just how corrosive to the body politic qui-tam surveillance can be.
The connection to our own time, you ask? Shakespeare’s England was quite different than our world, and context matters when discussing “ye olde” surveillance, but Lear raises urgent questions about surveillance’s potential to corrupt political and legal systems, the erotics of surveillance (roughly defined as the desire to see secret things, but explained more in my article), and the impulses of private profit that push people to surveil.
