ABSTRACT
In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault uses as his prototype the model of the military camp (that 'short-lived, artificial city, built and reshaped almost at will')2 to describe the inauguration of 'observatories' as a distinct form of knowledge that came into being in the classical age. Yet, as noted,3 there is no attempt to distinguish between military structures operating from one epoch to another, with promiscuous use of Wallhousen to exemplify both Renaissance and Enlightement structures of surveillance. This section therefore challenges Foucault's assumption that full-blown panopticism was a feature only of the age of Enlightenment by showing that it was already operating at major institutional levels in the literature on war in the 1590s - a full century earlier than Foucault would have it. I start with Foucault because his characterization of surveillance fits in very well with contemporary descriptions of the 1590s military camp despite his claims to the contrary. Here, I examine the nature and structure of the manual literature of the 1590s on encampment to see what further light it can shed on the much-disputed English camp scene in Henry V. I show how the different kinds of writings and manifold diagrams on setting up camp (Northumberland has many pages of them) converge into a discourse with symbolic and literal significance on ways of achieving and understanding
a form of specialized knowledge, and how this knowledge was used to construct secure boundaries in real and symbolic terms. These discourses combine with the plays to form what Foucault calls 'new forms of knowledge' of man, constituted through the operations of bodily regimes and strategies of surveillance. My enquiry into structures of surveillance and preoccupation with securing boundaries begins by examining the relationship of this particular kind of knowledge to the figure and positioning of the general, and the mapping of knowledge-routes and watch-points throughout the camp. As such, this section (and Part 3 as a whole) rounds off my main argument that these generically diverse writings detail practices of secrecy and defence that may be related to border anxieties in the continuing struggle to keep Spanish troops from encroaching upon English interests in France and the Netherlands.
