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The Deformed Face of Truth in Erasmus, Montaigne and Shakespeare’S the Merchant of Venice’ Author: Sam Hall Source: Exegesis (2013) 1, Pp

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The Deformed Face of Truth in Erasmus, Montaigne and Shakespeare’S the Merchant of Venice’ Author: Sam Hall Source: Exegesis (2013) 1, Pp Title: ‘The Deformed Face of Truth in Erasmus, Montaigne and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice’ Author: Sam Hall Source: Exegesis (2013) 1, pp. 21-31 The Deformed Face of Truth in Erasmus, Montaigne and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice Sam Hall I All humaine thynges are lyke the Silenes or double images of Alcibiades, have two faces much vnlyke and dissemble that outwardly seemed death, yet looking within ye shoulde fynde it lyfe and on the other side what seemed lyfe, to be death: what fayre to be foule what riche, beggarly: what cunnyng, rude: what strong, feeble […] Breifly, the Silenus ones beying vndone and disclosed, ye shall fynde all things [are] tourned into a new semblance [sic] Erasmus1 In The Symposium Alcibiades suggests that Socrates is akin to a ‘Silenus statue’.2 This is because there is an absolute disjunction between the philosopher’s foolish appearance in the world—his notorious ugliness, his incessant infatuations with beautiful young men, his poverty—and the ‘moderation’, ‘strength’ and ‘beauty’3 of his innermost thoughts, which ‘despised all things for which other mortals run their races’.4 These statues, observes Erasmus in his famous adage ‘Sileni Alcibiades’ (1515), were commonly carved in the shape of Bacchus’ tutor Silenus, ‘the court buffoon of the gods of poetry’ (CWE, 34, p. 264). They were ‘small figure[s] of carved wood, so made that they could be divided and opened. […] When they were closed they looked like a caricature of a hideous flute-player, when opened they suddenly displayed a deity’ (CWE, p. 262). It is easy to see how this reversible image came to encapsulate the paradoxical and dialectically engaged wisdom of folly and folly of wisdom, which, from Erasmus to Cervantes, is a striking feature of many of the most significant philosophical and literary texts of the Renaissance. Walter Kaiser explains the seemingly infinite self-generative ironies of the Praise by evoking the idea of the Silenus,5 while Michael Screech examines its surprising centrality to Erasmus’ ‘theology of ecstasy’;6 David Wootton argues that More’s Utopia must be interpreted as a Silenus;7 Terence Cave analyses how this equivocal image plays a role in shaping the philosophical content and literary form of Rabelais and Montaigne’s works.8 Indeed, Claudia Corti describes Erasmus’ ‘enormous’ influence on early modern English literature and literary theory in a deliberately Silenic way: ‘embedded within Shakespeare, Nasche, Ascham, Wilson and Puttenham […] lay Erasmus, with that ironic smile of his as immortalized by Holbein’.9 Through an analysis of the role of the Silenus—explicitly and implicitly, formally and thematically—in Erasmus, 1 The Praise of Folie, trans. by Sir Thomas Chaloner, ed. by Clarence H. Miller, Early English Text Society, 257 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 37. Subsequent references are given in the text. 2 Plato, The Symposium, ed. by M. C. Howatson and Frisbee C. C. Sheffield, trans. by M. C. Howatson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 216c-217a. 3 The Symposium, 216c-217a. 4 The Collected Works of Erasmus, 86 vols, trans. by various (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972-), XXXIV, p. 263. Subsequent references are given in the text. 5 See Praisers of Folly: Erasmus, Rabelais and Shakespeare (London: Gollancz, 1964), esp. pp. 60-62. 6 Ecstasy and the Praise of Folly (London: Duckworth, 1980), p. 3. 7 ‘Introduction’ in Thomas More, Utopia: With Erasmus’ Sileni of Alcibiades, trans. by ed. (Cambridge: Hackett, 1999), pp. 1-30. 8 The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979; repr. 2002), pp. x-40. 9 ‘Introduction’, in Silenos: Erasmus in Elizabethan Literature, Studi di Letterature Moderne e Comparate, 1 (Pisa: Pancini, 1998), pp. 5-13 (p. 5, p. 6). files.exegesisjournal.org/201313.Hall.pdf 21 Title: ‘The Deformed Face of Truth in Erasmus, Montaigne and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice’ Author: Sam Hall Source: Exegesis (2013) 1, pp. 21-31 Montaigne and The Merchant of Venice, this paper contends that this ubiquitous image is key to fathoming the truth- claims of wise folly. This particular constellation of texts, tied together on a close intertextual basis, will unlock the transmission of Silenus in early modern humanist thought. After examining the its pre-history, I turn to Erasmus’ use of it both as a way of explaining the unexplainable, including the incarnation, and as a tool for social and religious critique; I then briefly examine how it shapes Montaigne’s ironical conception of the world and his place in it as a truth-teller. Next I analyse Shakespeare’s most explicit dramatisation of the Silenic nature of things, the casket game in The Merchant of Venice. I conclude by using the Silenus’ slippery ironies, especially those generated by the casket game, as an allegory for interpretation.10 The ironic significance of the specious testimony that Portia gives in the trial scene is best fathomed by seeing it as a reversed Silenus: beneath its eloquence lies an instrumental evocation of mercy that is cynically employed for an earthly end, the destruction of Shylock. II From its inception, the Silenus head has been equivocal. Alcibiades behaves foolishly. Since he wanders into the Symposium late and drunk, we can infer that while he may find Socrates’ ‘moderation’ laudable, he does not feel compelled to imitate it. His encomium to Socrates’ wisdom and ‘moderation’ is decidedly double-edged. Alcibiades is both impressed and appalled that, despite his multiple attempts to entrap him, the philosopher refused to be physically ‘gratified’ by him.11 Socrates refused to ‘strike a bargain’ with him, in which knowledge is traded for sex;12 as he points out, not only does Alcibiades fundamentally misconceive the nature of love, but also, even by market standards, this transaction does not make sense. Socrates would be trading the ‘gold’ of his knowledge ‘in exchange for [the] bronze’ of the latter’s body.13 Moreover, at the end of the Symposium, Socrates contends that Alcibiades’ ‘Silenus-play’ itself has a deceptive double nature, for it furnishes the spurned lover with a way of venting his inner frustrations in the guise of praise.14 But this disjunction between inner and outer is not simply a fixture of Platonic thought that was rediscovered by such editors as Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus. It is present in the vast corpus of medieval penitential and confessional literature.15 As David Aeres argues: ‘the whole medieval penitential tradition involves a fundamental and perfectly explicit distinction between inner and outer’, which harks back ‘at least as far as Augustine’s Confessions’.16 Medieval mystical writing is closely related to the devotional literature that flourished in Latin and the vernacular throughout the Middle Ages. While it is by nature idiosyncratic and thus generically heterogeneous, medieval mystical writing is premised on the idea that there is a distinction between the revelation of divine essence, experienced internally, and experience of external realities; it also concerns itself with the problems of communicating and evaluating this highly idiosyncratic event. Space permits neither a consideration of the ways in which the affective piety of the mystical tradition fed into the devotio moderna, in which Erasmus was brought up, nor how this tradition continued to exert an influence on writing about interiority and duplicity in the early modern period. All that can be done here is to highlight some of the insights and techniques of negation that the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing employs. The visionary cum narrator insists that would-be mystics must renounce positive human categories, images and words 10 See Cave, p. 94. 11 The Symposium, 218d-219e. 12 The Symposium, 218e. 13 The Symposium., 219a. 14 The Symposium., 222d. 15 See Marjorie Curry Woods and Rita Copeland, ‘Classroom and Confession’ in David Wallace ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 376-407. 16 ‘A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics writing “The History of the Subject”, in David Aers ed., Culture and History 1300-1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing (London: Harvester, 1992), pp. 176-202 (p. 185). files.exegesisjournal.org/201313.Hall.pdf 22 Title: ‘The Deformed Face of Truth in Erasmus, Montaigne and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice’ Author: Sam Hall Source: Exegesis (2013) 1, pp. 21-31 to achieve a state of ‘unknowyng’ because ‘þou maist neiþer see [H]im cleerly by liȝt of understonding’.17 Even in this state, free of the mediating influence of ideology and language, the visionary does not see God; rather, he intuits His absence—he must ‘bide in þis derknes […] evermore criing after [H]im’.18 The narrator recurrently attacks what he calls ‘ymaginatiif witte’,19 by which he means the subject. Far from making sense of the world by categorizing and manipulating its objective elements, mediating ‘witte’ falsifies experience by naming and categorizing. It fills man with human knowledge that prevents him from achieving a state of kenosis in which God can be experienced, albeit negatively. III Erasmus Erasmus was the first thinker to connect the Christian via negativa, so powerfully evoked in The Cloud of Unknowing, with the self-revelation of Socrates—considered by the Oracle at Delphos to know something precisely because he admitted that he ‘knows nothing’.20 By 1610 this connection had become, quite literally, commonplace: when these hairy Sileni are opened up we find a cross.21 If we trace the key arguments of Erasmus’ ‘Sileni Alcibiades’, which was translated into every major European vernacular, including English in 1543,22 then many of his chief linguistic, social and theological preoccupations can be discerned.
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