Gods, Informers, and the Erotics of Surveillance: The Critique of Surveillance in King Lear

Abstract

Ideologically, surveillance in early modern England was justified through claims that Providence guided the state counter-espionage apparatus, especially when preventing assassinations of Protestant English monarchs. King Lear critiques such idealized surveilling by conflating it with another, more quotidian and odious surveillance assemblage, the qui-tam system of surveillance-for-profit. This was the most notable, or notorious, feature of surveillance in Shakespeare’s England, and was perceived as having a corrupting influence on politics, economics, and the legal system, its abusive nature in Lear being conceptualized as sexually perverse. The play also stages the intersection of qui-tam surveillance-for-profit with religiously justified forms of surveilling, calling into question the validity of such rationalizations and linking the eroticized, abusive informing with more socially accepted modes of surveilling, including the benevolent oversight of divine justice. This article contributes to surveillance studies by arguing that the erotics of surveillance informs discussions of the relationship between surveillance and capital, of epistemologies and ideologies of surveillance, and of surveillance art, while suggesting that King Lear can enrich our understanding of the complexities of surveilling.