Imaginary Betrayals: Subjectivity and the Discourses of Treason in Early Modern England by Karen Cunningham (review)

JEMCS 3.2 (Fall/Winter2003) Book Reviews Karen Cunningham, Imaginary Betrayals: Subjectimty and the Discourses of Treason in Early Modern England Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. 216 pp. $42.50 ($30). Reviewed by Harry Keyishian Karen Cunningham's title alludes to that extraordi nary turn that legal history took in the reign of Edward III when the definition of treason was expanded from deeds to thoughts, when it became treason "to imagine the death of the king, his queen, or the royal heir" (8). Legal dictionaries define the term "imagine" rather flatly, as "to intend," but Cunningham is wise to invoke its further connotations. The OED, citing examples from the four teenth century on, offers, "to form a mental image of" and "to conceive in the mind as a thing to be performed; to devise, plot, plan, compass," phrases that portray the mind as a busy, potentially malicious site wherein pro jected evils can be conceived and initiated in the ways architects initiate material structures. But adding thoughts and intentions to the list of legal violations can only be done on the assumption that sub jectivity can be read, that the inner life can be known with sufficient accuracy to determine guilt in capital cases. Cunningham connects this development to Henry VIII's founding of the Church of England, which "nationalized the right of English authority to oversee a subject's interi or life" (40). Although the process of uncovering what a Reviews 155 subject has "imagined" resembles the concept of mens rea?used in modern law to ascertain degrees of culpabil ity?we do not make a guilty state ofmind a crime in itself, absent criminal deeds, whereas an English judge declared in a 1441 case, "If a man imagines the death of the king, and does nothing more, he shall be drawn, hung, and dis emboweled" (11). Indeed, in the treason trial of Thomas More, silence was deemed "a sign of . . . evil intention and sure proof of malice" (11). Judgments like this allowed prosecutors a pretty free hand in construing writings and even utterances in whatever way was required to indict a subject who dissented from reigning policies or, as in the cases of Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard, had the mis fortune to be wives who had outlived their usefulness to their royal spouse. This legal enterprise reeks of totalitar ian fraudulence, of course, and becomes a tool employed by a ruling structure that was consolidating its hegemon ic power against common law traditions and other rem nants of personal autonomy. A work of cultural studies, Imaginary Betrayals explores the connections between two related ways of looking at ques tions of guilt, intention, punishment, justice, and social order. Building on the work of Katherine Eisaman Maus on how "inwardness" and subjectivity were read in early mod ern theater, Cunningham pairs legal and theatrical texts to investigate the ways female sexuality, male friendship, and private letters were used to support accusations of treason. In the process, she identifies some of the connections between trials and theater. Both use narrative extensively; both intend a public effect?in the case of treason trials, to induce "terror" (the favorite justification for punishment in Early Modern jurists) and, in the case of plays, to "please, of course, but also to help formulate "England's cultural iden tity" (3). (Here she cites Richard Helgerson's Forms of Nationhood [1992].) Also, and somewhat surprisingly, both drama and law were dialogic. Drama is of course naturally so, but Cunningham finds that despite what the crown might desire in the way of establishing a single cultural dis course and narrative, "the trial genre is characterized by dis agreement and dispute" (1). "The early modern treason trial 156 The Journal for Early Modem Cultural Studies is a permeable form, open ... to rumor, scandal, and innu endo" (3). Treason "is a discursive category in which certain cultural anxieties emerge into visibility and language" (6). Cunningham identifies as the dominant "cross-over" issue of the period "the question of personal public fidelity" (2), and picks three trials for close scrutiny. The first, from 1542, is that of Katherine Howard, which hinged on accu sations that the queen had...