Theatricality and surveillance: The art of government in early modern English literature (Sir Thomas More, John Skelton, John Bale, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare)

This dissertation takes up five early modern writers—Sir Thomas More, John Skelton, John Bale, Christopher Marlowe, and Shakespeare—to account for the process of subjectification in early modern England in which the art of government was rehearsed, reproduced, and circulated in the form of the literary and theatrical representation of surveillance and theatricality. Drawing upon Michel Foucault's idea of “governmentality,” implying not only the government of the state but also the government of one's self, I speculate on the art of government in early modern culture in which surveillance and theatricality were mobilized to come to terms with the epistemological and cultural significance of subjectivity. Thus I investigate the culturally and psychologically inscribed web of courtly and domestic relationships shown in major literary texts of the Tudor period, by conceptualizing theatricality and surveillance both as a political and social means to codify the normalized behaviors, and as a catalyst to produce a displacement within and of the normative discourse. By investigating how, under the rubric of the art of government, surveillance and theatricality are internalized and externalized in the characters and language of early modern literature, I show that the governmental discourse played an essential role in the process of early modern subjectification by initiating and re-articulating the individual into a subjected status. In so doing, I present the early modern art of government as a specific type of political rationality and a specific form of rational knowledge to systematize the conflicts and negotiations between performativity and normalization.