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Metaphor, Epistemology, and Shakespeare's Sonnets

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Metaphor, Epistemology, and Shakespeare's Sonnets “TRUE IMAGE PICTUR’D”: METAPHOR, EPISTEMOLOGY, AND SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS Amanda O. Kellogg Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS May 2014 APPROVED: Jacqueline Vanhoutte, Committee Chair Kevin Curran, Committee Member Alex Pettit, Committee Member David Holdeman, Chair of the Department of English Mark Wardell, Dean of the Toulouse Graduate School Kellogg, Amanda O. “True Image Pictur’d”: Metaphor, Epistemology, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Doctor of Philosophy (English), May 2014, 187 pp., references, 152 titles. In this dissertation, I examine the influence of Pyrrhonist skepticism over Shakespeare’s sonnets. Unlike academic skepticism, which begins from a position of doubt, Pyrrhonist skepticism encourages an embrace of multiple perspectives that, according to Sextus Empiricus, leads first to a suspension of judgment and ultimately to a state of tranquility. The Pyrrhonian inflection of Shakespeare’s sonnets accounts for the pleasure and uncertainty they cultivate in readers. By offering readers multiple perspectives on a given issue, such as love or infidelity, Shakespeare’s sonnets demonstrate the instability of information, suggesting that such instability can be a source for pleasure. One essential tool for the uncertainty in the sonnets, I argue, is the figurative language they draw from a variety of fields and discourses. When these metaphors contradict one another, creating fragmented images in the minds of readers, they generate a unique aesthetic experience, which creates meaning that transcends the significance of any of the individual metaphors. In the first two chapters, I identify important contexts for Shakespeare’s sensitivity to the pliability of figurative language: Reformation-era religious tracts and pamphleteers’ debates about the value and function of the theater. In Chapter 3, I examine Shakespeare’s response to the Petrarchan tradition, arguing that he diverges from the sonneteers, who often use figurative language in an attempt to access and communicate stable truths. Shakespeare creates epistemological instability in sonnets both to the young man and to the dark lady, and, as I argue in Chapter 4, this similarity offers readers an opportunity to think beyond traditional divisions between the two sonnet subsequences. Copyright 2014 by Amanda O. Kellogg ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My research and writing have benefitted tremendously from the generosity and wisdom of my dissertation committee. I have used Kevin Curran’s scholarship and pedagogy as models for my own academic and professional work. The high standards he sets for himself and his students challenge me to think deeply about my methodology. Alex Pettit has also been integral to my professional development. In particular, I will seek to emulate his unflagging work ethic and his considerate approach to the work of other scholars. Most of all, I am indebted to my dissertation director, Jacqueline Vanhoutte, a brilliant teacher and scholar, whose poise, wit, and discernment show young graduate students that feminist scholarship is necessary and important in early modern literature. For her willingness to read every essay, abstract, and conference paper I have written over the last seven years, and for her energetic, insightful approach to studying literature, I will always be grateful. I hope we will watch many more plays together. My dissertation writing group has also devoted much time and consideration to this project. Thank you, Hella Bloom Cohen and Lindsay Emory Moore, for your help and for your friendship. Finally, I want to thank my family for their love and encouragement. Thank you to my husband, David, who always expresses confidence in me and who has supported me unwaveringly through my studies; to my sister, Ashton, with her sympathetic disposition and refreshingly optimistic outlook; and to my mother and father, who taught me to be a good listener, which is, I now recognize, the most important characteristic of a scholar. This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of my grandfather, Chesley Franklin McPhatter, Jr.: “Think how I loved your Music, / Not for itself alone, / But for the hands that played it / The mind that felt its tone.” iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................................. iii Chapters 1. INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................1 2. METAPHOR WARS .............................................................................................22 3. THE POET “NEVER LIETH” ..............................................................................68 4. PYRRHONIST PETRARCHANISM ..................................................................113 5. MASK OF BLACKNESS ...................................................................................148 6. CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................186 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................189 iv CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In this dissertation, I approach the concept of Shakespeare’s skepticism from a new perspective, which benefits from the more nuanced approach to skeptical thought made available through the study of Pyrrhonist philosophy. Over the past thirty years, scholars have written extensively on early modern epistemology, focusing on Shakespeare and his response to the problem of knowledge. Stanley Cavell argues that Shakespeare’s plays “find no stable solution to skepticism, in particular no rest in what we know of God.”1 Paul Kottman extends Cavell’s representation of skepticism as destabilizing when he claims that “reflection on the inadequacy of our inherited ways of making sense of our shared words and deeds” leads an audience “to learn, through the endurance of suffering, just what it means to live with the breach, with an irreparable split.”2 Robert Watson depicts skepticism as a profoundly disruptive force by chronicling the late-Renaissance search for an “epistemological solution” to the philosophical crisis spurred by the reintroduction of the skeptical writings of Sextus Empiricus, an “ancient ghost who returned to haunt the Renaissance with rumors of a death of meaning.”3 These scholars consistently represent responses to skepticism as attempts to resolve the problem of knowledge by searching for ways to repair the “irreparable split” between appearance and reality. While these and similar works on skepticism have made readers sensitive to the epistemological anxiety in Shakespeare’s corpus, the modern emphasis on skepticism as a 1 Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3. 2 Paul Kottman, Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare: Disinheriting the Globe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 14. 3 Robert N. Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2006), 28, 20. 1 problematic, destabilizing philosophy is inconsistent with the original practices of Pyrrhonist skeptical philosophy, the tenets of which, I argue, inform Shakespeare’s works. To regard skepticism merely as an epistemological problem, a source of anxiety that prompts resistance, is to overlook the constructive possibilities of Pyrrhonist philosophy in Shakespeare’s works. Shakespeare takes from Pyrrhonism the notion that epistemological uncertainty can be a productive state. For Shakespeare, individuals confronted with the limitations of their own knowledge may work together to construct new realities absent of empirical truth, a process I call meaning-making. Shakespeare’s emphasis on the meaning- making potential of uncertainty is an important framework for understanding his sonnets, the ambiguity of which continues to puzzle and captivate readers. Readers of the sonnets may have to acknowledge the imperfection of human expression and interpretation; however, the sonnets demonstrate that imperfect understanding can still be a source of creativity, intimacy, and pleasure. Epistemological uncertainty in the sonnets is not a problem to be solved or an unstable foundation from which to seek refuge. It is the basis from which meaning-making begins. I argue that Shakespeare’s skeptical outlook correlates to that of the Pyrrhonists, and that his use of uncertainty in the sonnets therefore contributes to a Pyrrhonian argument about the epistemological and social value of uncertainty. I will focus primarily on Shakespeare’s figurative language, especially metaphor and simile, which simultaneously emphasize the inability of readers to access empirical truth and offer a model of collective meaning-making in the place of epistemological stability. In the introduction I first offer an overview of the significant scholarly works concerning Shakespeare’s skepticism, which I argue have not sufficiently identified the nuances of early modern skepticism. By focusing primarily on the sonnets, where Shakespeare’s complex and sustained examination of metaphors associated with 2 the Petrarchan tradition provides the readers with a unique experience of multiple perspectives, I identify a positive, edifying strain of skepticism in Shakespeare’s corpus. I provide a brief overview of Pyrrhonist philosophy, describing early modern engagement with its conception of epistemological uncertainty
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