The Politics of Vision in Shakespeare's "1 Henry VI"

Abstract

Anyone today reading the phrase of in the title of an essay on a Shakespeare play generally prepares himor herself to adopt a version of a Foucauldian frame of reference for interpretation. For Michel Foucault, a shift in the focus and nature of the gaze between ruler and ruled forever changed the dynamics of political power in seventeenthand eighteenth-century Europe. Beginning with the Renaissance, the ever-watchful, usually invisible eyes of state surveillance of the subject, radically concentrated later in Bentham's Panopticon, gradually displaced the mutual gazes of the monarch on display and the courtiers and citizens he or she would control.1 In late Tudor England, the social field began to correspond to what Jacques Lacan has called the scopic field. The courtier, a man observing other men, and observed in turn, might indeed have remarked with the Lacanian subject: 'I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides.'2 In the English 1580s and 1590s, this situation produced scopic anxiety, chiefly because William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and Francis Walsingham instituted an elaborate system of spying that made surveillance equivalent to a politics of vision.3 John Archer and Curtis Breight, among others, have shown that Elizabethan writers who were either involved in state surveillance or subject to scopic anxiety such as Christopher Marlowe and Sir Philip Sidney incorporated a politics of visual surveillance into works such as Edward II and the Arcadia.4 But a politics of vision in Shakespeare's time included more than the above-described