Abstract
Stanley Cavell has influentially argued that a particularly modern form of skepticism can be found in Shakespeare’s great tragedies. In this chapter, I suggest that attending to different, early modern notions of skepticism, especially as found in the writings of the essayist Michel de Montaigne, leads us to a different notion of skepticism with different dramatic possibilities—a comic skepticism, where comedy offers a playwright the opportunity of working through the dramatic implications of skeptical thinking. I illustrate this possibility through an analysis of Twelfth Night.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, Millicent Bell, Shakespeare’s Tragic Skepticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002): “tragedy results from skeptic disillusion” (p. 4). Other important studies of Shakespearean tragedy and skepticism include Benjamin Bertram, The Time is Out of Joint: Skepticism in Shakespeare’s England (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004); and William H. Hamlin, Tragedy and Scepticism in Shakespeare’s England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Alternate conceptions of skepticism in Shakespearean drama include Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Scepticism (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987), who finds skepticism to be characteristic of Shakespeare’s “poetic-dramatic thinking” as a whole and not limited to one genre; Richard Strier, in “Shakespeare and the Skeptics,” Religion and Literature 32, no. 2 (2000): 171–96, explores skepticism in The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as well as in King Lear, noting, for example, that The Comedy of Errors has “an extraordinarily dark view of human intellectual capacity.” See also Ellen Spolsky, who argues “against the inevitability of a tragic interpretation of the conditions of human knowing,” and considers tragicomedy (but not comedy) in her analysis in Satisfying Skepticism: Embodied Knowledge in the Early Modern World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001); and James Kuzner, Shakespeare as a Way of Life: Skeptical Practice and the Politics of Weakness (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016).
- 2.
From the “Preface” to Disowning Knowledge In Seven Plays of Shakespeare, Updated ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), xiii. Future references to Disowning Knowledge will occur in the text.
- 3.
For an extended essay on what the shift from Montaigne to Descartes means in the history of culture, see Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
- 4.
David Rudrum, Stanley Cavell and the Claim of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), pp. 55–56.
- 5.
See Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
- 6.
Cavell has been concerned with skepticism for virtually his entire philosophical career. In his own writings, see especially “Knowing and Acknowledging,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), pp. 238–66; and The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy, new ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). For accounts of his skepticism, see Michael Fischer, Stanley Cavell and Literary Skepticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Gerald Bruns, “Stanley Cavell’s Shakespeare,” Critical Inquiry 16 (1990): 612–32; and James Conant’s response to Bruns’s article, “On Bruns, On Cavell,” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 616–34; Espen Hammer, Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), esp. chaps. 2 and 3; and David Rudrum, Stanley Cavell and the Claim of Literature, esp. chap. 7.
- 7.
The Claim of Reason, p. xix.
- 8.
“What Did Montaigne’s Skepticism Mean to Shakespeare and His Contemporaries?” Montaigne Studies 17 (2005): 195–210.
- 9.
This citation is from “An apology for Raymond Sebond,” from The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 500. All citations of the Essays in English refer to this edition. The original French text is cited according to Les Essais, ed. Pierre Villey (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1924).
- 10.
René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. David Weissman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 72.
- 11.
Disowning Knowledge, p. 138. The phrase originally appears in his chapter, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” in Must We Mean What We Say?, p. 263.
- 12.
Citations of Shakespeare’s plays refer to The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al., 3rd ed. (New York: Norton 2016).
- 13.
Conant, “On Bruns, On Cavell,” 631, emphasis mine.
- 14.
Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 3. In addition to Nussbaum’s volume, in gaining an understanding of ancient skepticism I have benefitted from R. J. Hankinson, The Sceptics (London Routledge, 1995); Alan Bailey, Sextus Empiricus and Pyrrhonean Scepticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002); Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes, The Modes of Scepticism; Charles Brittain’s translation of and commentary on Cicero, On Academic Scepticism, (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 2006); and Richard Bett, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
- 15.
Ancient skepticism is traditionally divided into two main “schools”: Academic skepticism, which flourished intermittently in the Platonic Academy after the time of Plato, and Pyrrhonist skepticism, which was held to derive originally from Pyrrho. In broad terms, the difference most commonly cited between these two schools is that while the Academic Skeptics argued (one might even say dogmatically) that knowledge was not possible, the Pyrrhonists observed that one could not even make the claim that knowledge was not possible, and so they favored suspending judgment on all questions of knowledge and belief. Many scholars of Academic skepticism point out that the distinctions between the two schools are actually much more complex. For a recent discussion of the differences between them, see Gisela Striker, “Academics and Pyrrhonists, reconsidered,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism, 195–207. Montaigne, for his part, in “An apology for Raymond Sebond,” remarks that the Academics, while accepting that it was impossible to know the truth of things, did argue that certain things were more likely, “and concede to judgment the power to incline towards one probability rather than another.” The Pyrrhonists, on the other hand, held that “it is pointless for our judgement to be influenced by [our faculties], no matter what ‘probabilities’ it seems to present us with.” Montaigne declares the Pyrrhonist position “more true-seeming” (“plus vray-semblable”) (633).
- 16.
Here I paraphrase Sextus’s own definition of skepticism from his best-known work, Outlines of Scepticism (usually abbreviated as PH, after its Greek title, Pyrrhōneioi hypotypōseis): “Scepticism is an ability to set out oppositions among things which appear and are thought of in any way at all, an ability by which, because of the equipollence in the opposed objects and accounts, we come first to suspension of judgement and afterwards to tranquility” (I, iv, 8). I cite the translation by Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes in Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 4.
- 17.
From his classic account, Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. xix.
- 18.
From “An apology for Raymond Sebond,” p. 543.
- 19.
For example, in the introduction to his De libero arbitrio (written to combat Luther’s teachings against free will), Erasmus calls himself a skeptic: “And I take so little pleasure in assertions that I will gladly seek refuge in Scepticism whenever this is allowed by the inviolable authority of Holy Scripture and the church’s decrees.” I cite the translation by Peter Macardle, found in volume 76 of the Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 7.
- 20.
For example, see the brief essay, “Qu’il faut sobrement se mesler de juger des ordonnances divines,” translated by Screech as “Judgements on God’s ordinances must be embarked upon with prudence” (1.32).
- 21.
See chapters two and three, “The Revival of Greek Scepticism in the Sixteenth Century,” and “Michel de Montaigne and the Nouveaux Pyrrhoniens,” in Popkin, History of Scepticism, pp. 17–63. Popkin argues that “through Montaigne, Renaissance scepticism became crucial in the formation of modern philosophy” (p. 43). Further treatments of the spread of skepticism in the sixteenth century include Myles Burnyeat, ed., The Skeptical Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); and Brian C. Copenhaver and Charles B. Schmitt, “Stoics, Sceptics, Epicureans, and Other Innovators,” chapter 4 of Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 196–284. For a specific consideration of how Sextus’s writings spread, see Luciano Floridi, Sextus Empiricus: The Transmission and Recovery of Pyrrhonism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Zachary Schiffman argues—against Popkin—that the rise of skepticism, especially in Montaigne’s writings, was due to the breakdown of humanist assumptions about education. See “Montaigne and the Rise of Skepticism in Early Modern Europe: A Reappraisal,” Journal of the History of Ideas 45 (1984): 499–516. For a biographical consideration of why Montaigne turned to skepticism, see Sarah Bakewell, How to Live, Or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (New York: Other Press, 2010), especially pp. 123–53.
- 22.
There are too many studies to enumerate in full here. Some important studies in English include: Donald Frame, Montaigne’s Discovery of Man: The Humanization of a Humanist (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955); David Quint, Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy: Ethical and Political Themes in the “Essais” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); M. A. Screech, Montaigne & Melancholy: The Wisdom of the “Essays,” new ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000); and, especially, Ann Hartle, Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). A briefer statement of Hartle’s argument can be found in her chapter, “Montaigne and skepticism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne, ed. Ullrich Langer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 183–206.
- 23.
For a consideration of how Montaigne undermines and transforms humanist notions of exemplarity, see Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 134–97, although Hampton finds Montaigne’s notion of the self much closer to Descartes’s than I do.
- 24.
Richard Bett, “Scepticism and ethics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism, p. 193. For a consideration of whether Pyrrhonist skepticism is in fact “livable,” see M. F. Burnyeat, “Can the Sceptic Live His Scepticism?” from Doubt and Dogmatism: Studies in Hellenistic Epistemology, ed. Malcolm Schofield et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 20–53. He argues ultimately that it is not possible to live a skeptical life as Sextus describes it; Sextus, according to Burnyeat, fudges the question of belief, since it proves to be impossible to live a life without beliefs, as Sextus claims to be able to do.
- 25.
In the Introduction to Disowning Knowledge, Cavell makes it clear, however, that the skepticism that interests him is not of the Montaignian variety: “However strong the presence of Montaigne and Montaigne’s skepticism in various of Shakespeare’s plays, the skeptical problematic I have in mind is given its philosophical refinement in Descartes’s way of raising the questions of God’s existence and of the immortality of the soul” (p. 3).
- 26.
See Bruns, “Stanley Cavell’s Shakespeare,” pp. 617–19. Cavell most clearly lays out his case for attending to or confronting the characters of Shakespearean tragedy in the second half of his essay on King Lear: “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” in Disowning Knowledge, pp. 81–123.
- 27.
Paul Kocher, Science and Religion in Elizabethan England (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1953), pp. 50–54.
- 28.
Tragedy and Scepticism, p. 70. Hamlin provides a careful and illuminating discussion of the evidence for skepticism in England during Shakespeare’s day in Part One of this same study, “The Reception of Ancient Scepticism in Elizabethan and Jacobean England,” pp. 15–115.
- 29.
See Tragedy and Scepticism, p. 60, as well as Hamlin’s “What Did Montaigne’s Skepticism Mean to Shakespeare and His Contemporaries?” and, most recently, his Montaigne’s English Journey: Reading “The Essays” in Shakespeare’s Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). James Shapiro also argues that Shakespeare would have known Montaigne in some form as early as the composition of Hamlet, which Shapiro dates to the end of 1599. See A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), pp. 292–302. For a brief history of studies of Montaigne and Shakespeare, see Warren Boutcher, “The Cultural Transmission of Montaigne’s Essais in Shakespeare’s England,” in Shakespeare et Montaigne: vers un nouvel humanisme, ed. Pierre Kapitaniak and Jean-Marie Maguin (Paris: Société Française Shakespeare, 2003), pp. 13–27, especially pp. 13–17.
- 30.
Travis D. Williams makes the case for Shakespeare drawing on the French text of the Essays while composing the famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy in Hamlet, as it proves to be the only way to account for Shakespeare’s use of the word “bourn” at 3.1.78–79. See “The Bourn Identity: Hamlet and the French of Montaigne’s Essais,” Notes and Queries 58, no. 2 (2011): 254–58.
- 31.
Frye lays out this dichotomy in the first chapter of A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), especially pp. 1–8.
- 32.
Catherine Bates, “Love and Courtship,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy, ed. Alexander Leggatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 109.
- 33.
Tragedy and Scepticism in Renaissance England, p. 2.
- 34.
Shakespeare’s Scepticism, p. 21.
- 35.
To take one prominent example, in his 1996 film of the play, Trevor Nunn frequently edits out passages that most intriguingly engage questions of meaning and language.
- 36.
For the Academic tradition, see Cicero, On Academic Scepticism, 2.83–88, as well as Brittain’s discussion of the issue in his Introduction on pp. xix–xxiii. For the Pyrrhonist tradition, see Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians, trans. R. G. Bury (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), pp. 218–21 (1.409–11).
- 37.
A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 241.
- 38.
C. L. Barber, for example, argues that Malvolio “is not hostile to holiday because he is Puritan; he is like a Puritan because he is hostile to holiday.” See Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (1959; repr., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 291. The most extensive case for Malvolio as a portrait of the stereotypical Puritan is in J. L. Simmons, “A Source for Shakespeare’s Malvolio: The Elizabethan Controversy with the Puritans,” Huntington Library Quarterly 36 (1972–73): 181–201. For a more balanced attempt at defining Puritanism, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 69–78. See also Maurice Hunt, “Malvolio, Viola, and the Question of Instrumentality: Defining Providence in Twelfth Night,” Studies in Philology 90 (1993): 277–97.
- 39.
Many theories have been proposed regarding the meaning of the puzzle “M.O.A.I” that Malvolio wrestles with. For a review of these theories, see Peter J. Smith, “M.O.A.I ‘What should that alphabetical position portend?’ An Answer to the Metamorphic Malvolio,” Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998): 1199–224.
- 40.
Sextus Empiricus discusses this issue in the fourth mode of ten modes of suspension of judgment at PH I, xiv, 104–13; Cicero considers it in On Academic Scepticism, 2.88–90; Montaigne considers the question in the “Apology” (see p. 674 in the Screech translation). Richard Strier notes that something very similar happens in Comedy of Errors (2.2.183–84), when Antipholus of Syracuse wonders if he married Adriana in his sleep. See “Shakespeare and the Skeptics,” p. 172.
- 41.
“Academics versus Pyrrhonists, reconsidered,” pp. 200–01. She bases her account on a book by the Academic Clitomachus, which Cicero cites at On Academic Scepticism, 2.104.
- 42.
Of course, there are complex implications here about gender identity and sexuality that I do not have space to explore.
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Benfell, V.S. (2018). Disowning Certainty: Tragic and Comic Skepticism in Cavell, Montaigne, and Shakespeare. In: Hagberg, G. (eds) Stanley Cavell on Aesthetic Understanding. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97466-8_5
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