Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeare and Skeptical Faith

7: ESTHETICS, EPISTEMOLOGY, ONTOLOGY

7 ESTHETICS, EPISTEMOLOGY, ONTOLOGY 195 I never may believe These antique fables nor these fairy toys. A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.2–3 Love talks with better knowledge, and knowledge with dearer love. Measure for Measure 3.2.146 For several identifiable reasons, criticism has been boldest in claiming to be able to say something certain about Shakespeare’s esthetic thinking. These reasons include the Romantic evaluation of Shakespeare as an inspired genius, the esthetic movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the assumption that Shakespeare was committed to writing poetry and poetic drama above anything else, and most recently, the impact of New Criticism, with its emphasis on autonomous literary artifacts. This line of inquiry has paid rich dividends. Several books have been devoted, in whole or in part, to elucidating Shakespeare’s idea of art and of his own art in particular.1 Everyone now recognizes that Shakespeare frequently drew attention to what he was himself doing as a poet and playwright, from the artful classical imitativeness of The Comedy of Errors and Titus Andronicus to the discussion of art and nature in The Winter’s Tale (4.4.79–103) and the image of Prospero as artist in The Tempest. Though he left no independent critical comments on the question, he attended to it frequently in his narrative and lyric poetry and his writing for the theater. His staging of plays within plays has attracted particular notice as evidence of esthetic self-consciousness, and thematic analysis of virtually any Shakespearean play as “metadrama ,” or a play about making plays, was for a time a small critical growth industry.2 Shakespeare’s esthetic thinking does not, however, stand by itself, despite critical attention to it as a subject in its own right. It acquires 196 John D. Cox both greater complexity and greater clarity when it is considered in the context of Shakespeare’s thinking more broadly. I have argued that the most important category of his intellectual makeup is not esthetic but religious, and I want to urge in this chapter that his way of thinking about art, and about his own art in particular, is closely related to what I am calling skeptical faith. For the esthetic question does not stand alone in Shakespeare’s writing; it is seamlessly connected with epistemology , or the nature of knowledge, and ontology, or the nature of being. In the sixteenth century, these three questions had not been separately addressed and identified, as they would be by Enlightenment thinkers, and all were still intimately related to religion. Insofar as any of the three questions can be addressed in Shakespeare’s writing, they are bound up with issues concerning liturgy, drama, religious reform, the status of signs, the nature of illusion, the quality of belief, miracles, wonders, devils, and God. SHAKESPEARE AND SIDNEY The context to which Shakespeare’s sense of his art has usually been referred is Renaissance critical theory, especially as represented by Sidney’s Apology for Poetry.3 Sidney’s familiarity with Italian humanism made his treatise the most elegant and influential conduit through which Renaissance neoclassicism reached Elizabethan England. Still, The Comedy of Errors suggests that Shakespeare may well have learned about neoclassical standards apart from Sidney, because the play perfectly meets those standards despite being staged for the first time earlier than 1595, the year Sidney’s Apology was published. Moreover, Sidney was acutely conscious of his own political and religious context, as well as that of Italian humanism, and though Shakespeare responded to the same religious and political critique of the theater that Sidney did, Shakespeare regarded the English dramatic heritage more positively than Sidney. In short, comparing Shakespeare’s sense of his art to Sidney’s critical theory requires consideration of a broader sense of the past than the history of criticism and drama.4 Sidney’s well-known defense of poetry as fiction, for example, is not only central to his own argument but to Shakespeare’s defense of theater as well, and on the face of it, Sidney’s assertion that the poet is not Esthetics, Epistemology, Ontology 197 tied to imitating nature provides a useful gloss to several passages in Shakespeare. The poet, Sidney says, is “lifted up with the vigor of his own invention,” so that he creates “in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew...