Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England (review)

In Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England, Elizabeth Hanson explores what she posits as a “Renaissance obsession,” indeed “one of the most prevalent and historically specific versions of inter-subjectivity in Renaissance England: . . . the discovery of the heart’s secrets” (1). Hanson sees the struggle to unveil those secrets evidenced in the peculiar outbreak of torture during Elizabeth I’s reign, in William Shakespeare’s representation of the state’s deputies (in Measure for Measure and Othello), in cony-catching pamphlets (which she sets in the foreground of Ben Jonson’s Bartholmew Fair), and in Francis Bacon’s program for the discovery of nature, each a focus within this richly historicized investigation. In a somewhat more abstract background, Hanson places “an expanding royal administration, religious schism, new technologies, and economic arrangements” (2), which together raised the possibility—and the stakes—for a potentially troubling expansion of individual agency.

These changes in the structures of state authority, Hanson argues, created an “epistemic crisis” (19) around the subject. For what came with them—and what was, according to Hansen, “new and catastrophic in the Renaissance”—was not simply the “sense of interiority” previous studies have emphasized, but “the usually fearful, even paranoid recognition that interiority can give the subject leverage against his [and, since the arena is state politics, Hanson means “his”] world” (16). Although operations of discovery offered a means to counteract that leverage, they also “disclose[d] their own fraudulence” and “generate[d] counter-discourses, hostile or ironic,” exposing “the discovering subject as himself an object of discovery” (123), that is as full of leverage-bearing secrets as the accused under his discerning eye. In cony-catching pamphlets, for example, the secrets of the criminal are no more suspect than the motivating secrets of the author, whose opportunistic telling of the rogue’s story betrays in himself the “innovative will to power which he attributes to his adversary” (123), and who becomes, therefore, “the aggressive agent of our displacement from the scene of truth” (110). Hanson sees a resolution to this “ferocious self-reflexivity” (123), finally, in Bacon’s works, which script nature as the ultimate subject of discovery—a subject whose truth necessarily exceeds, and “police[s]” (146), the complicating subjectivity of the discoverer.

In charting this cultural phenomenon, Hanson’s book suggests important new ways not only of imagining the subject, the author, the state agent, and the scientist, as well as the project of discovery itself, but also of telling history. Using and revising Foucault, Hanson urges us to understand epistemic shifts not as distinctive breaks in the formation of cultures but as “complex re-weavings of conceptual resources” (13) already in place. Those re-weavings, and the anxiety that comes with them, she contends, pivot not as much on the established mechanisms of government and knowledge as on the emergent, arising less from the conflicts and contradictions within a given way of knowing or being than from “new organizational possibilities,” “which are themselves multiplied and transformed in the attempt to manage the instabilities they produce” (7). Hence, in exploring each particular manifestation of the discovery discourse, Hanson sets a series of related texts in motion, as part of an interactive and counteractive negotiation of relentlessly unsteady terms. So, for example, her chapter on cony-catching pamphlets starts with Thomas Harman’s Caveat and sees there the construction of an author whose claims to an authorizing presence simultaneously betray the radical, if not also scandalous, instability of his voice. Jonson emerges within this context as an author attempting to forge “a different relation to [these] contradictions” (117), and trying to do so, in Bartholmew Fair, by abstracting himself from the drama and making the “commodity text” serve instead “to signify (and dignify) his authorial labor” (120).

As Hanson thus challenges the perceived predominance of dominant discourses in the shaping of culture by suggesting the emergent as the more vital source of crisis and change, she...