Rethinking Shakespeare’s Skepticism: The Aesthetics of Doubt in the Sonnets and Plays by Suzanne M. Tartamella, and: Shakespeare and the Art of Lying ed. by Shormishtha Panja (review)

Reviewing these two books, a monograph contending that “praise generates doubt” (Tartamella 14) and a collection of “scholarly attempts to ‘spot the evasion’” (deSouza x), entails a careful choice of words. A graceful antimetabole from Suzanne Tartamella’s Rethinking Shakespeare’s Skepticism—“even as praise discovers a vice, vice provokes more praise” (132)—seems a good place to begin. It is worth noting, given the book’s title, that the “usual skeptics” of the early modern period make only brief cameo appearances—Montaigne is mentioned half a dozen times, Erasmus three, Sextus Empiricus once, Machiavelli, Samuel Harsnett and Reginald Scot not at all—while Petrarch proves a seminal figure, “planting the seeds from which would later spring . . . the epideictic skepticism of Shakespeare’s sonnets” (26). While what Tartamella calls “‘epideictic skepticism’” (3ff), or “skepticism concerning praise and flattery” (137), may strike some readers as an add-on to the philosophical tradition from Pyrrho to Descartes, Tartamella insists that it is foundational: “Praise always already suggests a skeptical evaluation of the admired object” (4). This is a rethink of Shakespeare’s skepticism.

Readers most interested in Hamlet, a play often credited with skepticism’s ascendancy at the turn of the seventeenth century, might be tempted to start in medias res with chapter 3. But unlike many monographs comprising a series of discrete essays, Tartamella’s book develops one cohesive line of reasoning across six chapters, including the “Introduction” and “Afterword,” and nearly three hundred pages, including “Notes.” Thus, this monograph takes on the attributes of its primary subject. “Intense, probing, single-focused, and long” is how Tartamella describes “the sonnet sequence” from Petrarch to Shakespeare (25). In place of Lafew’s “They say miracles are past” speech from All’s Well That Ends Well, a touchstone passage for recent discussions and debates of Shakespeare’s skepticism, Tartamella substitutes “the controlling metaphor of Shakespeare’s sonnets: the uniquely recurring, and often ignored, figure of the canker, whose position alongside, within, and in place of the rose of beauty . . . symbolizes sixteenth-century epideictic skepticism” (8–9).

Chapters 1 and 2 cover “The Roots of Shakespeare’s Epideictic Skepticism” and “Tragic Discovery in the Young-Man Sonnets.” If Petrarch “mostly wonders at his praise object’s goodness and beauty” in his Canzoniere, Tartamella tells us, “Shakespeare’s poet spends as much time wondering about his beloved” (63). Readers familiar with Joel Fineman’s Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye will detect its influence as Tartamella examines three problematic features of the Young Man sequence: “struggles with innovation,” “isolating doubt,” and the “impulse to inquire” (65). The first problem “goes deeper than Shakespeare’s ‘anxiety of influence’” (23). It goes to the heart of “the epistemological—and so inherently skeptical—dimension of praise” (82). The second feature of epideictic skepticism, “the praise poet’s psychological isolation” (39), grafts what Tartamella terms “Fineman’s formalist argument” (41) onto historical scholarship about “the rise of the scientific empiricism” (42). The third element of epideictic skepticism manifests as an “obligation to interpret” (55) in which poetic celebration becomes merely the first phase of a forensic investigation. Not even the poet’s suspicions are above suspicion: for example, in Sonnet 35 “the ‘loathsome canker’ ostensibly arises through some fault of the beloved [but] by the second quatrain,” Tartamella notes, “the poet begins meditating on his own responsibility for the canker’s appearance” (90). The overall argument is strong but, alas, sometimes secondary sources on skepticism feel shoehorned into these chapters, such as when the author mentions “the transubstantiated Eucharist . . . which scholars such as Gallagher, Greenblatt...