Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England by Elizabeth Hanson

Abstract

tRpl/FEWS Elizabeth Hanson. Discovering the Subject in Renaissance Eng­ land. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 190. I have to confess that the circumstances under which I read this book and began the review — a sunny week at a summer cot­ tage — were not exactly suited to its theme or style. It is a highly intelligent book, but not one that you could describe as summer reading (I kept glancing with envy at my wife’s immersion in that lovely highbrow soap-opera A Suitable Boy). Nevertheless, Elizabeth Hanson’s book, which is a contribution to the long­ standing debate on the construction of selfhood in early modern English culture, made a strong impression. Since the publication in 1981 of Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self Fashioning, subjectivity has been a recurrent concern of cultural m aterial­ ist analysis. Under the implicit or explicit surveillance of Michel Foucault, much of the work done in this vein has propounded a simplistic thesis about the production of individual selfhood by regimes of power; or it has sought to describe devious ways by which the semi-autonomous subject escaped the shackles of discursive entrapment. The often fruitless 1980s debate about subversion and containment resulted in an impasse that left most scholars either frustrated or bored. While adopting Fou­ cault’s model of discursive regimes and utilizing his vocabulary of “rupture,” “scandal,” “episteme,” “crisis,” and the like, Han­ son consciously seeks to avoid the kind of totalizing analysis that some earlier commentators have derived from the m aster’s work and to m aintain a resolutely dialectical point of view. Inevitably, both in the way it is written and the intellectual strategies it deploys, the book has a strongly Foucauldian ring, and to some extent reads like a throwback to the late 1980s or early 1990s (its paradigmatic chapter, “Torture and Truth,” was first published in Representations in 1991). But to characterize it thus would be to attend to the book’s superficial rather than substantive features. If one makes the effort required to probe ESC 27, 2001 ESC 27, 2001 below the book’s dense and sometimes irritating surface (I here adopt a metaphor germane to its them e), Hanson’s work reveals itself as always challenging and sometimes brilliant. Hanson’s perspective on the “subject” (she emphasizes the familiar doubleness of the term — its linkage of interiorized sub­ jectivity and political subjection) is centered on practices of in­ vestigation. She is interested in “discovering” as a practice — a technique for probing the subject’s “truth,” a term that she also construes doubly, i.e. both loyalty to the state and what Hamlet calls “the heart of my mystery.” She structures the book around a number of different instances of the discourse and practice of discovering: interrogatory torture, Shakespeare’s “deputy dra­ mas” (Measure for Measure and Othello), rogue literature, and Baconian science. In these disparate arenas she traces a complex pattern of inquisition, outlined first in relation to torture, which impinges on and helps to produce the subjectivity of both the investigator and the one investigated. The assumption is that there is a secret hidden at the core, a secret the victim is bound to protect and the investigator bound to uncover. Torture, which was rarely seen in England before the 1550s or after 1610 and was without foundation in English law, was an administrative procedure allied to the developing practice of criminal investigation during the Elizabethan period. It was carried out mainly against Catholics, and Hanson asks both why it should have emerged when it did and why Catholic re­ sistance, with its emphasis on inner truth, should have been a peculiarly appropriate target (30). Torture’s avowed aim was to discover truth (such was the justification for its practice), but just for this reason it opened up an “epistemic crisis” (56) around the relation of truth to subjectivity. “Truth” played a key role in both “the administrative discourse of judicial in­ vestigation and the religious discourse of conscience” (19), and Hanson stresses how this double role produced “the conceptual interdependence that emerges in torture between two appar­ ently oppositional modes of knowing, the discovery of secrets and the stoic experience of...