Abstract
Michel Foucault’s has recently been published in English under the title Society Must Be Defended. 1 In the series of lectures given at the Collège de France between January and March 1976 Michel Foucault ‘quite specifically outlines the programme for a genealogy of the relations between power and knowledge’ in contrast to his earlier focus on ‘the archaeology of discursive formations that had previously been his dominant concern’.2 These lectures raise questions about race, history and biopolitics, and for this reason, thinkers such as Achille Mbembe and Julian Reid have argued that Society Must Be Defended is relevant to the post-9/11 world. In this chapter I turn back from Society Must Be Defended to analyse, in the light of such a critical reassessment of Foucault’s thought, how his earlier work on the archive relates to the development of discourses of power that Foucault identifies. Specifically, I revisit Foucault’s discussion of the statement and the archive in Archaeology of Knowledge3 by examining two very different documents: ‘Henslowe’s Diary’ and the ‘Manual for a Raid’.4 At stake in such a comparison is both the nature of the continued use of Foucault in early modern studies and also what the legacy of readings of ‘Henslowe’s Diary’ can reveal about the problems of interpreting archives such as the ‘Manual for a Raid’.
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Notes
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège De France 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (London: Penguin Books, 2003).
Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 2002). Subsequently referred to as Archaeology.
Hassan Mneimneh’s translation of pp. 2–5 of the document are appended to Makiya and Mneimneh, ‘Manual for a “Raid”’, in Robert B. Silversand and Barbara Epstein (eds.), Striking Terror: America’s New War (New York: New York Review of Books, 2002).
All quotations from Henslowe’s Diary are taken from R. A. Foakes, Henslowe’s Diary, second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Subsequently referred to in the text as Henslowe.
Norman Nathan, ‘Is Shylock Philip Henslowe?’ Notes & Queries, 193 (1948), 163–5.
Edmond Malone, William Shakespeare: Plays and Poems (London, 1790).
J. Payne Collier (ed.), The Diary of Philip Henslowe, from1591 to 1609 (London: Shakespeare Society, 1845).
F. G. Fleay, A Chronicle History of the London Stage, 1559–1642 (London: Reaves and Turner, 1890).
Rutter provides an account of how Fleay’s view of Henslowe influenced subsequent interpretations of the diary: C. C. Rutter (ed.), Documents of the Rose Playhouse, revised edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 2.
Bernard Beckerman, ‘Philip Henslowe’, in Joseph W. Donohue (ed.), The Theatrical Manager in England and America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 1971), 26;
and S. P. Cerasano, ‘The Patronage Network of Philip Henslowe and Edward Alleyn’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 13 (2001), 82–92.
Peter Thomson, Shakespeare’s Professional Career (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 35;
but see S. P. Cerasano, ‘Henslowe’s “Curious” Diary’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 17 (2005), 11–12, 72–85, for a different perspective.
William Ingram, The Business of Playing: the Beginning of the Adult Professional Theatre in Elizabethan London (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).
Neil Carson, ‘Collaborative Playwriting: the Chettle, Dekker, Heywood Syndicate’, Theater Research International, 14, 1 (1989), 22–3.
Rosalyn Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 147.
J. M. Nosworthy ‘Dornackes and Colysenes in Henslowe’s Diary’, Notes & Queries, 15 (1968), 247–8. He concludes that ‘dornicks’ was a reference to a fabric used in tapestries and hangings, and ‘colysenes’ were cognisances, or badges.
Barbara Ravelhofer ‘ “Beasts of Recreacion”: Henslowe’s White Bears’, English Literary Renaissance, 32, 2 (2002), 287–323.
Gabriel Egan, Green Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2006), 3.
Ibid., and S. P. Cerasano, ‘The Geography of Henslowe’s Diary’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 56, 3 (2005), 328–53 and 380.
For a seminal example, see Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1984).
Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind: Afghanistan, Al Qa’ida and the Holy War, revised edition (London: Pluto Press, 2003).
Yosri Fouda and Nick Fielding, Masterminds of Terror: The Truth behind the Most Devastating Terrorist Attack the World Has Ever Seen (London: Arcade, 2003).
Terry McDermott, Perfect Soldiers (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 249–51, where McDermott includes a translation of another part of the document as an appendix.
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© 2008 Rebecca Fensome
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Fensome, R. (2008). ‘Manual for a Raid’ and ‘Henslowe’s Diary’: Foucault and the Multiple Meanings of the Document. In: Morton, S., Bygrave, S. (eds) Foucault in an Age of Terror. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230584334_11
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