SHAKESPEARE AND THE SKEPTICS

Abstract

Let me say at once that this essay is going to be much more limited in scope and argument than its rather grand tide may suggest. It will not (except in passing) address great question of Shakespeare's relation to Montaigne; it will not address the question ofHamlef; and it will not take on question of whether Shakespeare retreats from whatever skepticism he may earlier have manifested in all or some of late romances. It will deal with skepticism in a very literal and straightforward sense, and will treat skepticism, for most part, in terms of skepticism about supernatural intervention and causation-one of many sets of attitudes Renaissance often termed atheism-rather than in general epistemological sense that has become philosophically normal, or in existentialized and psychologized version of this sense that has been eloquently expounded and investigated by Stanley Cavell.1 Much of essay is an attempt to come to terms with what it means that two of Shakespeare's major plays are directly linked to two major skeptical Elizabethanjacobean books: A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595?) to Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) and King Lear (1605) to Samuel Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures ( 1 603) . I will begin, however, with discussion of a play that does not have such a companiontext and that does seem to anticipate skepticism of Descartes, and I will end by suggesting how theological conceptions do operate within radically skeptical Shakespearean contexts. Quite early on in The Comedy of Errors (1589?; 1594?) , Antipholus of Syracuse, stranger Antipholus, comes to lose all sense of reliability of his sense-perceptions and therefore, as in Descartes, of his ability to make sense of his experience.2 Unlike Descartes (or his persona in

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