Cultures of Surveillance

Abstract

On 30 May 1593 Christopher Marlowe, playwright and probable spy, was killed in the company of three suspicious characters - Robert Poley, Ingram Frizer, and Nicholas Skeres. Marlowe’s sudden death by knifewound to the eye, long considered the result of a drunken brawl yet now typically deemed a political assassination, is the most notorious murder in literary history. Marlowe had connections to the Cecilian regime. He was killed at a time when Cecilians were sending even Protestants to the scaffold for having the wrong ideas about the Elizabethan Church (and hence State).Marlowe was an intellectual who read books in numerous languages. He was awarded his M.A. from a reluctant Cambridge University at PC command. Marlowe was arrested in relation to a street killing in 1589. He was arrested for counterfeiting in Flushing in 1591/2, a crucial port town in the Netherlands held by England in return for supporting Dutch revolt against Spain. Meanwhile Marlowe wrote six or seven great plays in about as many years, achieving greater fame and popularity than Shakespeare at the same point in their theatrical careers (both born 1564). In brief, Marlowe had a fascinating life and death.

Just as torture is not employed merely to cause pain, but to repress

dissent, to frighten people of conscience into silence, so too we are

faced with a system that uses totalitarian surveillance to inspire

fear and encourage political quiescence.

Blanche Wiesen Cook,

‘Surveillance and Mind Control/

in Uncloaking the CIA, p. 179