Trying, Knowing and Believing: Epistemic Plots and the Poetics of Doubt

Abstract

In Rabelais’s Tiers Livre, Panurge wants to marry but be certain that he will not be cuckolded, yet the book shows how that can never be; how risk and choice must go hand in hand. It also shows, through his many attempts at interpreting divinations and dreams, how the desire for certainty infects our dealings with the world and distorts our reading of the ‘messages’ the world sends us: it is a matter of hermeneutics as well as ethics. Luckily for his world, Panurge does not try his own theories on other people. But doubting husbands in Renaissance English plays do. In seeking release from gnawing doubt, characters strive to reach what they think is a place of lucidity - a place, to borrow Elizabeth Bishop’s words, ‘like what you imagine knowledge to be: Dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free’.² But only too often, the knowledge arrived at proves to be rather different: dark, perhaps, moving, even, but far from clear, and less than free. An extreme instance is Hermione’s trial in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale

I am grateful to Terence Cave, Helen Cooper and Angela Leighton for reading and commenting helpfully on an early draft of this essay.