Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeare and Skeptical Faith

1: SKEPTICISM AND SUSPICION IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

1 SKEPTICISM AND SUSPICION IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND 1 They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless. Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear. All’s Well That Ends Well, 2.3.1–6 SKEPTICISM The reception of skepticism in the sixteenth century can be made to support a narrative about a deluge of disbelief: “the sources of a commonly shared sense of the sacred were rapidly running dry and floods of unbelief rising torrentially.”1 The publication of two first-time translations of ancient skeptical texts from Greek to Latin helps to define this story: Lucian’s Dialogues in the first decade of the century and Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism in 1562. Taken in conjunction with increasing interest in Cicero’s Academica, another ancient treatise on skepticism, these translations can be seen as flood markers in the surging tide of doubt from Machiavelli, through Erasmus, Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Bacon to Descartes. Where Shakespeare in particular is concerned, this narrative has been especially influential. Stanley Cavell, one of Shakespeare’s best interpreters in the second half of the twentieth century, identifies his own thinking as “a late stage in the process of skepticism in the West, that history (assuming there is such a thing, or one thing) that begins no later than Descartes and Shakespeare.”2 Cavell’s conjunction of Descartes with Shakespeare as key authors in the history of skepticism points to the narrative in question . Descartes’ attempt to find a dependable and rational foundation for reflection began in methodological skepticism and came to define the philosophical enterprise over the next two centuries. Linking 2 John D. Cox Shakespeare with Descartes thus enhances Shakespeare’s authority in a story of emerging secularism, in which skepticism is a key indicator. The advent of skepticism, however, is more complex than this story of a great flood suggests, and Shakespeare’s skepticism is anything but a straightforward drowning in unbelief. For one thing, Shakespeare does not use the word “skeptic” or its derivatives, whereas Descartes formulated his rationalism with the challenge of contemporary skepticism specifically in mind.3 It seems unlikely that a poet so sensitive to words would have ignored “skeptic,” had he known it and understood its import.4 Moreover, careful analysis of Shakespeare’s skepticism takes one in some unexpected directions. Robert B. Pierce, for example, finds instances of each of Sextus Empiricus’ ten modes of skeptical “therapy” in Shakespeare, and Pierce’s instance for the third mode comes from Duke Humphrey’s exposure of religious fraud in 2 Henry VI.5 This mode holds that “we dare not assume that what is apprehensible to our five senses constitutes the reality of what we perceive” (150). Duke Humphrey illustrates this mode by asking Simpcox to identify various colors, after Simpcox claims to have just regained his sight miraculously, though born blind. When Simpcox naïvely identifies the colors accurately, Humphrey points out that he is lying, because Humphrey has just used common knowledge that in the case of sight, four senses cannot make up for the loss of one. Pierce’s analysis is incisive, and the example is apt, but the conclusions one can draw are many and ambiguous . For present purposes, the incident does not prove that Shakespeare was skeptical of religious faith, because his source for the Humphrey episode was John Foxe’s Acts and Monument of the Christian Church, more commonly known as “Foxe’s book of martyrs.” Shakespeare could be using Foxe as a cover for his own skepticism of course, but Houston Diehl points out that Foxe himself deliberately “empowered the skeptic,” in her phrase, in order to attack what he saw as abuses in belief.6 How Shakespeare is using skepticism in this case needs to be evaluated not just from the episode itself but also from the whole of the play in which it appears, from Shakespeare’s writing in the early history plays, and from what was happening around the playwright in the early 1590s.7 Foxe himself is extremely unlikely to have known Sextus Empiricus, but he did not need to. His most immediate inspiration Skepticism and Suspicion 3 was probably the former Carmelite friar, John Bale, who popularized a style of scoffing disbelief regarding traditional religion in...