Rethinking Shakespeare's Skepticism: The Aesthetics of Doubt in the Sonnets and Plays

Introduction: Rethinking Shakespeare’s Skepticism

1 Introduction Rethinking ShakeSpeaRe’S SkepticiSm Continuing in the tradition of Stanley Cavell’s Disowning Knowledge and Graham Bradshaw’s Shakespeare’s Scepticism (both published in 1987) are many compelling studies on the intersections between Shakespeare’s plays and early modern epistemology.1 Scholars have been especially drawn to the tragedies, finding that classical skepticism provides an analytical structure, a cultural context, even a vocabulary for comprehending Lear’s bewilderment on the heath and Macbeth’s confused sense of reality.2 In our own culture of doubt, investigating the moral and political uncertainties of Shakespeare’s tragedies deepens our sense of his relevance, convincing us that he could just as easily have traded ideas with Friedrich Nietzsche as with Ben Jonson or John Donne. Our modern anxieties about knowing and being, in other words, may explain the recent attempts to define and redefine the nature of Shakespearean doubt. While David Bevington and A. D. Nuttall focus on Shakespeare’s spirited exploration of ideas as well as his tragic uncertainty, Benjamin Bertram defines Shakespeare’s skepticism in terms of early modern “socioeconomic disorder.”3 Still other commentators turn to skeptical tenets to advance arguments about Shakespeare’s mixed allegiance to classical and medieval sources, his experimentation with literary genres, his associations with contemporaries like Christopher Marlowe and John Donne, his knowledge of Michel de Montaigne, and his religion.4 Skepticism , in many ways, has become a scholarly catch-all. Some of the most valuable of these critical studies also look at how Shakespeare’s works deploy particular skeptical strategies— strategies that reveal the point of intersection, or place of tense conjunction, between philosophical skepticism and literary 2 Rethinking Shakespeare’s Skepticism representation. Millicent Bell, for instance, draws on Montaigne to analyze the formal problem of causality in Shakespeare’s tragedies, which she argues reflect a “potent philosophic skepticism verging upon nihilism.”5 Cavell prefers the religious explorations of René Descartes to the secular pragmatism of Montaigne and Machiavelli, arguing that Shakespeare seems less interested in “how to conduct oneself best in an uncertain world” than in “how to live at all in a groundless world.”6 But Cavell observes that Descartes sees God as a substitute for that lost ground, whereas Shakespeare seeks other means of “aspiration,” “achievement,” and “transcendence.” Contending that the “Shakespearean corpus” is “in competition with religion,” Cavell is as interested in discovering the inductive possibilities opened up by skepticism as in exploring its dark, cramped corners.7 The notion that one can uncover Shakespeare’s skepticism in specific aesthetic procedures has animated other studies as well. Similar to Cavell, Bradshaw is concerned “not with a body of [historically specific] ideas which supposedly corresponds with Shakespeare’s ‘thought’...but with the processes of the plays’ poetic-dramatic thinking.” Taking as his departure point Shakespeare’s “creative preoccupation with the act of valuing,” Bradshaw explores what he calls “that difficult triad, value, valuer and valued.” He argues that Shakespeare “repeatedly exposes...a process of disjunction,” in which “value appears to be inherent in the valued and detached from the valuer.” The resulting conflict between multiple conflicting viewpoints shows Shakespeare to be a radical skeptic, “weighing the human need to affirm values against the inherently problematic nature of all acts of valuing.”8 Anita Gilman Sherman and William M. Hamlin contribute to this examination of Shakespeare’s skeptical procedures. While Sherman focuses on Shakespeare’s “skeptical aesthetics,” showing how it helped “forge a new and distinctive idiom for memory,” Hamlin presents a comprehensive “anatomy of early modern doubt” in the form of seven “sceptical paradigms” reflecting the “distortions , appropriations and strategic deployments of Pyrrhonian and Academic scepticism.”9 Thus, Sherman and Hamlin, in particular, model a way of reading Shakespeare’s skepticism that combines new formalist practices with fidelity to historical nuance. Introduction 3 Taking my cue from critics who have investigated a “skeptical aesthetics” or “skeptical paradigms,” and building on Bradshaw’s exploration of the relationship between skepticism and “the act of valuing,” I argue for the central position of the sonnets in understanding the impact of Renaissance doubt on Shakespeare’s aesthetic practices. Focusing specifically on his engagement with epideictic rhetoric, I contend that praise possesses an intrinsic skepticism that is brought into sharper focus during the Reformation. In this age of radical experimentation and reform, Shakespeare revises conventional methods of praise by doing more than mocking or challenging his literary precursors and contemporaries. He uses...