“Subjected Thus”: Plague and Panopticism in Richard II
Cox, Nick
Early Modern Literary Studies 6.2 (September, 2000)
Abstract
This essay seeks to read Richard II from within a theoretical framework constituted by the work of Michel Foucault, specifically the analysis offered in Discipline and Punish of the development of disciplinary strategies in the regulation and policing of the plague-stricken town. These mark one of the earliest manifestations within early modern culture of those mechanisms of surveillance and the techniques of subjection from which Foucault traces the development of panopticism. The essay argues that precisely these strategies of disciplinary power can be traced in the Elizabethan orders for the governance of the metropolis during a visitation of the plague. In these regulations it is possible to discern the progress of a molecular revolution in practices of subjection which signals a shift from the spectacular modality of power which has for so long been associated with the exercise of sovereignty in Early Modern culture and the installation of techniques of coercive confinement which signal the onset of modernity. The reading of Richard II offered by the essay suggests that the play figures the emergence, in the receding shadow of the spectacular corporeality of Renaissance absolutism, of a disciplinary technology and temporality that is associated with the figure of Bolingbroke. Richard’s deposition and incarceration signal his subjection to a carceral modality of power and the displacement of the spectacular corporeality of the sovereign by a penitent interiority discloses the play’s importance as an early textual trace of the process Foucault describes as leading to the formation of the “modern soul.”
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