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