John Michael Archer. Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying 
and Court Culture in the English Renaissance (Stanford: 
Stanford University Press, 1993).

	The word "spying," for John Michael Archer, has a 
double meaning and reflects a double activity. He charges 
the term with both the more commonly used diplomatic 
meaning (related to "espionage") and with the more archaic 
meaning "to view or watch" (related to the French 
"surveiller"). He writes "I have set out in this book to 
explore the relationship between spying and court society by 
examining the representation of espionage in a selection of 
Renaissance texts" (15). He then extends his analysis to 
explore the aspects of surveillance and self-surveillance 
inherent in the workings of the politically-charged 
atmosphere of a monarch's court. Courtiers are spies for the 
monarch, but they are also under the scrutiny of the 
monarch. 
	Archer begins with a discussion of Montaigne's 
"Essais." He attempts to show how Montaigne, a man 
experienced in government and a diplomat who had managed 
to steer a middle course between the opposing camps of 
Henri III and Henry of Navarre (the future Henri IV), 
revealed the tensions within the politics of court culture. 
Montaigne's method of diplomacy required the agent to have 
a double self, that of a servant and of a "man of honor." This 
split allowed one to take sides and remain virtually neutral at 
the same time (38). Such a diplomat, armed with his 
reputation for "honesty" and a healthy "discretion," could 
safely navigate between two quarreling kings (39). These 
masks, vital to the success of the courtier, were 
manifestations of the double bind of display which both 
concealed and required massive self-surveillance.
	Archer continues his analyses with a discussion of 
Philip Sidney's "Arcadia." Archer constructs the bridge 
between Sidney and court society on the basis of court 
patronage of his work and his relation to Sir Francis 
Walsingham, Elizabeth I of England's "spy master," and 
Sidney's father-in-law. Archer states that Walsingham's 
position at court depended at least as much on secret 
intelligence as on self-display, and his spy network 
gradually generated a "space between his own desire for 
militant action against England's Catholic enemies and the 
queen's temporizing; it seemed the best compromise between 
open war and peace" (46). Sidney, in his "Arcadia," 
attempted to deflect the royal control and monitoring of 
courtiers by turning that surveillance back on the royal 
person. 
	In chapter three, some of Christopher Marlowe's 
plays are considered. Marlowe supposedly acted as an agent 
for the Elizabethan government, and some have theorized 
that he was assassinated in a bar fight because of his spying. 
Through his theater, Marlowe "engag[ed] the paranoia of the 
heterosocial court and affective family through dramatic 
representation of the social bonds that preceded them" (94). 
Marlowe tried to investigate and deflect, through his writing, 
the various constraining powers inherent in courtly and 
spying behavior. 
	Archer proceeds to Ben Jonson's Roman plays, in 
which the author carries the anxiety of self-surveillance one 
step further. Jonson constructed and ridiculed fictional spies, 
on the one hand, but, in Catiline his Conspiracy, 
demonstrated the need for political intelligence to safeguard 
the state against treason (95). Archer accounts for this 
apparent contradiction by writing that, "Instead of 
articulating a stable set of beliefs, Jonson's Roman plays 
embody an ambiguous attitude toward surveillance at court 
and the sort of knowledge it produces" (95-6). 
	The conclusion, on Francis Bacon's "New Atlantis," 
contains a complex discussion of Archer's reading(s) of 
Bacon's texts and courtly behavior. Referring to Bacon's 
The History of the Reign of Henry VII, Essays, and New 
Atlantis, Archer posits Bacon's intellectual progression from 
seeing domination as a spy king out-conspiring his enemies 
(Henry VII) to "the dissolution of the sovereign self into the 
collective agency of the abstract modern state" in New 
Atlantis (135,139). Archer shows the intimate connection 
between the first two works and Bacon's attempts to praise 
Elizabeth and to ingratiate himself with his patron, Robert  
Devereux, second earl of Essex and favorite of the Queen. 
The role of New Atlantis in Bacon's courtier behavior is less 
clear.
	The disconnectedness of Bacon's New Atlantis 
reflects the major difficulty with Archer's book, the 
connections between the texts he wishes to discuss and the 
royal court, site of surveillance. Archer constructs chains of 
patronage and clientage to make the connections he needs 
between courtiers and canonical literary authors, but those 
connections seem strained and artificial. While the charting 
of the conduits of power from the center to the edges does 
contextualize the literary works to an extent, Archer passes 
up the opportunity to scrutinize the words and texts of 
Elizabeth's more intimate courtiers, such as Walsingham, 
Salisbury, and Devereux.
	But Archer's study has much to recommend it to 
historians of diplomacy. The true strength of the work lies in 
Archer's drawing literature and literary approaches into the 
debate on the functioning of courts and of diplomacy in the 
Early Modern period. Literary theorists and critics have 
found rich soil in the sixteenth century, particularly in 
Elizabeth's England, but have, until recently, tended to 
neglect the connection between politics and literature in favor 
of seeing the author as first an author and only second a 
political actor. Historians, in their turn, have generally 
downplayed the literary and rhetorical aspects of diplomatic 
and governmental correspondence. An encouraging 
exception to this last generalization is John Bossy's 1991 
investigation of Giordano Bruno, in which Bossy 
reconstructs the interaction between Bruno's spying and his 
religious beliefs, oscillating his analysis between 
contemporary diplomatic correspondence and Bruno's own 
philosophical writings. While Bossy's approach may be 
more familiar to historians, Archer has given historians of 
diplomacy a valuable lens through which to view the 
connections between courtly, literary and diplomatic 
behaviors.

Richard E. Lundell
Ph.D Candidate
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign



Better, but there is still the problem with apostrophes, italics, 
open and close quotation marks. Sorry.

Rick