ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: LAUDING AND LOATHING IN THE WORKS OF SHAKESPEARE: EPIDEICTIC SKEPTICISM AND THE ETHICS OF PRAISE Suzanne Marie Tartamella, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010 Dissertation directed by: Professor Marshall Grossman Department of English My dissertation argues that Shakespeare transforms Aristotelian epideixis (the rhetorical mode comprising praise and blame) into a skeptical mode by laying bare its embedded ethical and epistemological problems. Shakespeare, that is, uses the evaluative procedures inherent within epideictic poetry to scrutinize its own principles of representation, transforming a poetics of praise into a poetics of appraisal. His innovations in the Petrarchan sonnet form stand at the center of my project, but I also illuminate how Shakespeare’s epideictic skepticism underlies his experimentation with tragedy and comedy. In a broader perspective, my project shows how an intimacy between philosophical skepticism and the practice of praise had its roots in the cultural and religious upheavals of the sixteenth century. The cornerstone of my project is Shakespeare’s young-man sonnets, which provide a unique angle from which to understand the dark-lady poems and some key Shakespearean plays. I show that while the first sequence (1-126) investigates the epistemology of praise, the second (127-52) describes the dramatic interactions between lovers who have advanced beyond epideictic poetry and its accompanying skepticism. Chapter 1, primarily an introduction to my study, considers the religious and cultural background for Shakespeare’s epideictic skepticism, reviews classical and Renaissance theories of praise, and closely reads poems by Shakespeare and Petrarch. Chapter 2 explores the canker as the central symbol of Shakespeare’s epideictic skepticism and as a threat to the rose of beauty and praise. Tracing the poet’s struggle with this persistent figure of satire and blame, I contend that the canker is inherent in the practice of praise. My third chapter maps my interpretation of the canker and the rose onto a new reading of Hamlet . I argue that the young-man sonnets provide a paradigm for understanding Hamlet’s relationship with his two fathers, his misogyny and verbal abuse, and the tragic path to which he finally commits himself. Chapter 4 offers a comic resolution to the rhetorical problems emphasized in the previous three chapters. Here, finally, I turn to the sonnets devoted to the notoriously rebellious dark mistress, exploring their relationship to Shakespearean comedy generally and to The Taming of the Shrew particularly. LAUDING AND LOATHING IN THE WORKS OF SHAKESPEARE: EPIDEICTIC SKEPTICISM AND THE ETHICS OF PRAISE by Suzanne Marie Tartamella Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2010 Advisory Committee: Professor Marshall Grossman, chair Professor Theodore B. Leinwand Professor Kent Cartwright Professor Kimberly Anne Coles Professor Giuseppe Falvo ©Copywright by Suzanne Marie Tartamella 2010 Table of Contents Preface 1 1 Shakespeare’s Epideictic Skepticism: Context and Features 17 2 “A Canker in the Fragrant Rose”: Satirical Inquiry and Tragic Form in Shakespeare’s Poems to the Young Man 95 3 The Wonder-Wounded Hearers in Hamlet 157 4 Playing Shakespeare’s Will: Theater and Sexuality in the Dark-Lady Sonnets and The Taming of the Shrew 230 Afterword 296 Bibliography 300 ii Preface The publication of Stanley Cavell’s Disowning Knowledge in 1987 has stimulated a steady interest in Shakespeare’s skepticism. 1 It is not hard to see why. Religious doubt, epistemological uncertainty, and subjective awareness and isolation rest at the heart of Shakespeare’s tragedies. 2 Scholars studying King Lear and Macbeth have found that skepticism provides an analytical structure, a cultural context, even a vocabulary for dealing with Lear’s bewilderment on the heath and Macbeth’s confused sense of reality. In our own culture of doubt, studying Shakespeare’s curiosity and his moral ambivalence deepens our sense of his relevance, convincing us that he could just as easily have traded ideas with Friedrich Nietzsche as with Ben Jonson. Indeed, an overwhelming interest in Shakespeare’s play of ideas has led scholars such as David Bevington and A.D. Nuttall to consider his skepticism more as intellectual recreation than epistemological doubt. 3 Benjamin Bertram, in contrast, examines 1 Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 2 For a discussion of how skepticism found an outlet in Renaissance tragedy generally, see William M. Hamlin, Tragedy and Scepticism in Shakespeare’s England (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005). 3 See David Bevington, Shakespeare’s Ideas (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008) and A.D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Bevington explores the plays’ mixed attitudes toward classical philosophy, religion, and politics. A.D. Nuttall devotes an entire book to Shakespeare’s intellections, covering everything from philosophical nominalism and ontology to stoicism and nihilism. He contends that Shakespeare “shares with…[men like Hume] a knack for asking fundamental (sometimes very simple) questions” (378). Although Nuttall studiously avoids calling such a process skepticism (he prefers to treat doubt locally in Troilus and Cressida ), his book about Shakespeare the thinker-inquirer is really about Shakespeare the skeptic. In many ways, Nuttall’s exploration of Shakespeare parallels the work of Harold Bloom, who claims that Shakespeare “invented the human” when he created characters that develop rather than unfold; that is, he gave us so authentic a “representation of character” that we are revealed in each one of them [ Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 17]. In Bloom’s estimation, however, Hamlet and Falstaff tower over Shakespeare’s other characters because of their superior intelligence, their creative autonomy, and, in Hamlet’s case, his doubt. Bloom remarks that Hamlet’s skepticism “does not merely exceed its possible origin in Montaigne but passes into something rich and strange in Act V, something for which we have no name” (391). 1 Shakespeare’s doubt in terms of specific political and social developments. 4 Still other scholars turn to skeptical tenets to advance arguments about Shakespeare’s religion, his knowledge of Montaigne, his associations with contemporaries like Marlowe and Donne, his mixed allegiance to various classical and medieval sources, and his experimentation with literary forms. Robert Brustein, responding to Stephen Greenblatt’s assertion that Shakespeare “seems at once Catholic, Protestant, and deeply skeptical of both,” argues that Shakespeare eventually ends up in a “very dark place [in his plays] characterized by dawning disbelief in all religions and driven by serious doubts about the existence of a benevolent God.” 5 John D. Cox moves in the opposite direction from Brustein, maintaining that Shakespeare’s skepticism is underwritten by a deep-seated faith in a divine power. 6 The alliance between faith and doubt is the hallmark of sixteenth-century Catholic Pyrrhonism, but Cox refrains from calling Shakespeare either Catholic or Protestant since his plays are doctrinally equivocal. These fundamental ambiguities, however, have not stopped other critics from testifying to Shakespeare’s recusancy. Richard Wilson, for instance, contends that Shakespeare’s skepticism, and his familiarity with Montaigne’s Essays , provides some evidence for his Catholicism. 7 In my view, however, the most valuable studies of Shakespeare’s skepticism also look at how his works deploy specific skeptical strategies. Millicent Bell, for example, draws connections between Montaigne and Shakespeare, but her book is really about the 4 See Benjamin Bertram, The Time is Out of Joint: Skepticism in Shakespeare’s England (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005). 5 See Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004), 103; Robert Brustein, The Tainted Muse: Prejudice and Presumption in Shakespeare and his Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 204-05. 6 John D. Cox, Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeare and Skeptical Faith (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2007). 7 Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion, and Resistance (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2004). 2 problem of causality in Shakespeare’s tragedies – not his Montaignesque Catholicism. 8 As Bell maintains, Shakespeare’s tragedies “flout traditional ideas about human selfhood as a known and consistent quality by which a man or a woman is identified” (x) and so reflect a “potent philosophical skepticism verging on nihilism” (2). 9 The way Shakespeare’s “chief personages often seem to lack clearly defined and consistent characters and motives” shows evidence of this dark philosophy, as does the way in which the “sequence of events in the plays sometimes fails to compose a logical story in which one thing leads to another” (22). 10 While Bell, then, roots her exploration of nihilism and causality in Montaigne, these philosophical dilemmas ultimately transcend him. Indeed, Cavell deliberately avoids Montaigne, staunchly declaring that he will not read Shakespeare’s plays as philosophy or even, really, in their historical context.