Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeare and Skeptical Faith

NOTES

NOTES 251 Preface and Acknowledgments 1 On the philosopher’s costume, see Julius S. Held, Rembrandt’s Aristotle and Other Rembrandt Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 15–16. 2 Despite its suggestive title, Philip Davis’s Shakespeare Thinking (London: Continuum, 2007) was published too late for me to use in this book. I am grateful to Matthew Fike for bringing it to my attention. 3 James Kennedy and Caroline Simon, Can Hope Endure? A Historical Case Study in Christian Higher Education (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005). Chapter One 1 Manfred Pfister, “Elizabethan Atheism: Discourse without Subject,” Deutsche Shakespeare Jahrbuch 127 (1991): 59. 2 Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 35. 3 On Descartes’ place in the history of early skepticism, see Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 172–92. 4 Shakespeare may not have used “skeptic” and related words because he matured before they became widely known, he did not have a university education, and he did not grow up with aristocrats. According to William Hamlin, the earliest use of “skeptic” in English is by the Scottish scholar and poet, George Buchanan, who at various points in his life tutored both Montaigne and the future King James VI and I (Tragedy and Scepticism Tragedy in Shakespeare’s England [Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005], 43). Hamlin offers the best summary of early skepticism’s reception in England (29–71), pointing out that skeptical ideas were introduced first in the two universities and then, “around the beginning of the 1590s,” at the Inns of Court (48), while acknowledging that “Shakespeare may never have seen” The Sceptick, a summary of Sextus’ main points that is known to have circulated in manuscript in the 1590s (8). 252 Notes to pp. 2–6 5 Robert B. Pierce, “Shakespeare and the Ten Modes of Scepticism,” Shakespeare Survey 46 (1993): 145–58. The ten modes are spelled out in Montaigne’s Apology for Raymond Sebond, but Shakespeare is very unlikely to have known Montaigne in the early 1590s, and Pierce does not address the issue of a possible source. 6 Houston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 28–31. 7 For a model of reading sixteenth-century skepticism in context, see Terence Cave, “Imagining Scepticism in the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies 1 (1992): 193–205. 8 Paul Whitfield White, Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage, and Playing in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 12–41. 9 The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 231. 10 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakesperaean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 113–14. 11 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 12 Thomas More, Translations of Lucian, ed. Craig R. Thompson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). 13 Christopher Robinson, Lucian and His Influence (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 180. 14 Jonson owned a 1530 Latin translation of Lucian and a 1527 edition of Erasmus’ Colloquies. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, ed., Ben Jonson, 10 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952–61), 1:266 and 268. 15 Ben Jonson, The Devil Is an Ass, Revels edition, ed. Peter Happé (Manchester University Press, 1994), 5.3.6. 16 Erasmus, Colloquies, ed. Thompson, 630. 17 Pope Celestine V (1294) was beatified after his death as a saintly and humble man, but not everyone was impressed. Dante places him in the circle of hell reserved for the opportunists (Inferno III) because his indecisiveness and lack of critical judgment resulted in the papacy of Boniface VIII, who reportedly duped and supplanted him, earning a place even lower in hell. Erasmus’ wry comment suggests that he evaluated Celestine in about the same way Dante did. 18 Erasmus, Praise of Folly, trans. Betty Radice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 196. The reference is to 2 Corinthians 11:17. For Folly’s stinging attack on “the Supreme Pontiffs,” see 178–81. In a letter written in Greek in October, 1518, Erasmus remarks that “the monarchy of the Roman High Notes to pp. 6–8 253 Priest (as that see now is) is the plague of Christendom.” Quoted by James D. Tracy, The Politics of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 116...