Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeare and Skeptical Faith

8: SHAKESPEARE AND THE FRENCH EPISTEMOLOGISTS

8 SHAKESPEARE AND THE FRENCH EPISTEMOLOGISTS 227 the subtle-witted French 1 Henry VI 1.1.25 In view of the link I have suggested in chapter 7 between Shakespeare’s esthetics and epistemology, it seems appropriate to consider more specifically his way of thinking about how we know in relation to the epistemological revolution that had its first stirring in the late sixteenth century. The history of modern philosophy is usually said to begin with Descartes, because he established a purely rational foundation for thinking to replace the theological assumptions that had been regarded as necessary in Western philosophy since Augustine. But Descartes, for all his striking originality, did not come out of nowhere, and the context that formed him was very similar to the context in which Shakespeare grew up and pursued his career in the London theater. Influence either way is not the point. Descartes was only ten years old when Shakespeare died, and Descartes’s first publication was twenty years later. As for Shakespeare’s influence on French philosophy, Descartes does not seem to have read plays, he did not read English, and the impact of Shakespeare on French culture began long after Descartes. Where Shakespeare’s thinking is concerned, the point of the comparison is primarily hermeneutical, though it is true that Shakespeare and Descartes shared the same early modern European culture; they lived during the intellectual crisis that eventually emerged from the publication of Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism in 1562; and they both read Montaigne, in turn a keen reader of Sextus. It might be useful, then, to consider how each thought about knowing in particular. 228 John D. Cox MONTAIGNE Let us begin with Montaigne, since he influenced both Descartes and Shakespeare. For over two hundred years, Shakespeare’s paraphrase of a passage in Montaigne’s essay “Of Cannibals” has been recognized in The Tempest, and the reference has given rise to a large and varied bibliography connecting the two.1 In all that time, however, no one has succeeded in finding another allusion this compelling, and because The Tempest is so late, it is impossible to know for certain how early Shakespeare read Montaigne. Undoubtedly they shared a remarkable independence, suppleness, and amplitude of mind, serious doubt about human moral and intellectual capacity, and enough deference to their respective cultures (including their cultures’ religious expectations) at least to pass official inspection, but those points of similarity do not prove Shakespeare’s indebtedness to Montaigne. In “Of experience,” Montaigne remarks that “[i]f our faces were not similar, we could not distinguish man from beast; if they were not dissimilar, we would not distinguish man from man.”2 Taking this point as a cue, I want to urge that although Shakespeare and Montaigne differ from most other writers in the later sixteenth century by virtue of their similarity to each other in ways just mentioned, they also differ from each other.3 The point can be illustrated by considering two similarities (not noted by Alice Harmon) that ultimately point to difference. Henry V’s prayer on the eve of Agincourt is self-serving and self-deceived, as argued above in chapter 5, and Montaigne’s comment on such prayers is striking in its aptness: I was just now thinking about where that error of ours comes from, of having recourse to God in all our designs and enterprises, and calling on him in every kind of need and in whatever spot our weakness wants help, without considering whether the occasion is just or unjust, and invoking his name and his power, in whatever condition or action we are involved, however vicious it may be. (Essays, I:56, 230) When Henry prays, he acknowledges that his father wrongfully gained the throne and proposes a bargain with God as a consequence, but the bargain does not make right either Henry IV’s wrong or Henry V’s victory at Agincourt. Henry thus allows himself to keep what he knows he should not have—a rationalization that Montaigne describes so precisely (“without considering whether the occasion is just or unjust”) as to make Shakespeare and the French Epistemologists 229 it seem that Shakespeare wrote the episode with Montaigne in mind. That conclusion, however, is far from certain. For one thing, Harmon’s point about common indebtedness needs to be kept in mind. Selfdeception in prayer is a problem Jesus addresses in the...