Seizures of Sleep in Early Modern Literature

Abstract

This article argues that for early modern thinkers, sleep constitutes an other sovereignty—a power of seizure at the edge of sovereignty's claim to the total control over life through the threat of death. The discussion focuses in particular on The Jew of Malta , because in this play Christopher Marlowe draws on classical ethics and the political theology of sleep in order to conceive a form of biopower in physiological dormancy, a power whose potencies and opacities are likewise explored in Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew and Milton's Paradise Lost . Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Milton all think through sleep's capacities to elude the seizures of sovereignty and to cultivate rather than suppress vitality, thereby giving shape to an early modern desire to live beyond the claims of sovereignty.