Stanley Cavell and the Claim of Literature

2 The Avoidance of Shakespeare

William Shakespeare occupies a unique position in the writings of Stanley Cavell. No other writer of what we would readily identify as literature has preoccupied him to anything like the extent Shakespeare has.1 Both his masterpieces Must We Mean What We Say? and The Claim of Reason conclude with an essay on Shakespearean tragedy, and this tradition has been continued in more recent works such as Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes and Cities of Words. Even after the publication of Disowning Knowledge, the volume that brought together Cavell’s writings on Shakespeare in earlier texts such as Themes Out of School and In Quest of the Ordinary, his engagement with Shakespeare has been extended and expanded in later works such as Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow. In sketching the background to Cavell’s thought, then, Shakespeare’s name needs to be ranked alongside those of such hugely influential figures as Austin and Wittgenstein, Emerson and Thoreau. And yet Cavell’s Shakespeare essays have until recently met with a mixed reception, and often with no reception at all, unless wholesale indifference among literary critics and philosophers alike may be considered a reception. LawrenceRhu,inaddressingthisissue,observesthatforsomelessthangenerouscommentators ,“Cavellseemstobesimplydrawingupontheculturalcapital of the swan of Avon himself, the most bankable of bards. . . . Cavell strikes such critics as a name-dropper seeking to show off his familiarity with the canonical in-crowd.”2 Such criticisms are empty. For while Cavell freely confesses , “Of course I share the temptation to idolatry of Shakespeare” (DK, p. 30), he is just as keen to flaunt the limits of what he calls “my amateur forays into Shakespeare” (DK, p. 179) as he is to talk them up. Indeed, the preface to Disowning Knowledge is itself something of an exercise in disowning knowledge.3 The Avoidance of Shakespeare chapter two t h e avo i da n c e o f s h a k e s p e a r e 43 If there are philosophers who suspect Cavell of trying to enliven philosophy with a smattering of literary window dressing, so too there are literary critics who accuse him of moving in the opposite direction: as an interdisciplinary imperialist trying to colonize literature by imposing ideas from philosophy onto it. In fact, nothing could be further from his stated aims: The misunderstanding of my attitude that most concerned me was to take my project as the application of some philosophically independent problematic of skepticism to a fragmentary parade of Shakespearean texts, impressing those textsintotheserviceofillustratingphilosophicalconclusionsknowninadvance. Sympathy with my project depends, on the contrary, on unsettling the matter of priority (as between philosophy and literature, say) implied in the concepts of illustration and application. The plays I take up form respective interpretations of skepticism as they yield to interpretation by skepticism. (DK, p. 1) Michael Fischer, one of the earliest commentators on Cavell’s thought in general and his literary concerns in particular, insisted that “in turning to Shakespeare . . . Cavell is not simply documenting ideas already gleaned from philosophy. . . . If anything, for him philosophical expressions of skepticism ‘intellectualize’ problems first worked out in literature.”4 But to put the matter this way is to emphasize the distinction between literature and philosophy in a waythatisfarremovedfromCavell’spracticeinhisShakespeareessays.Infact, the question that hostile literary critics put to Cavell is a question he already asks of himself (“But what is it that calls for philosophy, Shakespeare’s play or my manner of reading the play?” [DK, p. xiv]).5 His riposte to it explains that rather than importing philosophy into his reading of Shakespeare, he is more than happy to move in the reverse direction and “count certain texts as philosophical that may not announce themselves so. I do not mean that Shakespeare ’s texts, for instance, are to count as philosophy, but if not, then the most responsive texts in the world, to the world, the ones accordingly most extreme in their manifestation of philosophy’s first virtue, are not philosophy” (DK, p. xv). It is not that Cavell is trying to deny the distinction between literature and philosophy in his readings of Shakespeare, but rather that he is happy to leave open where to draw it. As he says of his Shakespeare essays, “I become perplexed in trying to determine whether it is to addicts of philosophy or to adepts of literature that I address myself” (DK, p. 2). It is unsurprising, then, that one early description of Disowning Knowledge calls it “a volume of writings on Shakespeare that not many will...