“I Do Love / To Note and to Observe”: The Pleasures of Surveillance and Resistance in the Work of Ben Jonson

Poet, playwright, religious dissident, and collaborator with the state surveillance apparatus: Ben Jonson experienced a long tortuous relationship surveilling in late-Tudor/early-Stuart England. The cultures of he encountered extended beyond espionage to social surveillance, which early modern England often bled into facilitated workings state’s network informants. His literary output unusually detailed (for time) biographical information combine give us complex picture his engagement surveilling, secrecy, resistance. Jonson’s experience involved incarceration threat corporal punishment, but writings, associates being surveilled pleasure context Humanist education, conversion Catholicism at time when Protestant English had outlawed such worship, work as satirist, poet. Using Freud’s notion unheimlich, or uncanny, I argue that demystifies approaches critique from two directions simultaneously: interrogates encourages resistance violence coercion while highlighting own acquiescence pleasures voyeurism exhibitionism, suggesting is seemingly irresistible, both overpowering appealing. Because centers uncanny may be useful guide for those theorizing navigating complexities surveillance. He exemplifies how asymmetries power persists through despite outward conformity regime itself unheimlich.