John D. Cox, Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeare and Skeptical Faith Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeare and Skeptical Faith . John D. Cox. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007. Pp. xvii+348.
2011; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 108; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/659617
ISSN1545-6951
Autores Tópico(s)Renaissance and Early Modern Studies
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeBook ReviewJohn D. Cox, Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeare and Skeptical Faith Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeare and Skeptical Faith. John D. Cox. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007. Pp. xvii+348.Dennis TaylorDennis TaylorBoston College Search for more articles by this author Boston CollegePDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAt first, it would seem that John Cox's book is a return to the prestructuralist days of Christian humanistic interpretations of Shakespeare. Cox argues that he is making an intervention in the current New Historicist scene, which has critics debating over the Catholic, Protestant, and secular dimensions of Shakespeare. The most active part of the current critical scene is the Catholic party, composed partly of prominent non-Catholic scholars, who are arguing for the importance of Shakespeare's Catholic contexts (in a very Roman Catholic sense) and for the importance of Shakespeare's sympathy with Catholic culture and its worldview. There is some irony that New Historicism, born out of the poststructuralist era, with its skeptical implications, has resulted in the return of Catholicism, like the ghost of King Hamlet. But Cox would send the ghost packing. It takes a while to discern the originality of Cox's argument. His analysis is always detailed, perceptive, and largely on target, and for long stretches the book, showing the good influence of the [old] New Criticism and old historicism, reads like older books on Shakespeare's portrayal of Christian virtues, on his use of the Bible, and on his adaptation of the symbols from medieval religious plays. There are moments when other kinds of older books seem in process—books on Shakespeare's classical stoicism (but here qualified by the problem of self-deception); on the Sidneyan aesthetic of speaking pictures (though this later is connected with the contemporary image controversy); and on “Comic Faith” (the title of his chapter on the comedies, wherein it is hard to discern departures from an old tradition of such thinking along the lines of Robert Hunter's Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness [New York: Columbia University Press, 1965]). But Cox aims to establish how Shakespeare's Christianity serves as a sort of nonjudgmental frame (though still a norm) in (I would argue) a postmodern way—a measure not directly applied but standing there like an unused ruler stuck, like the black monolith in Stanley Kubricks's 2001, in the landscape. I would argue that this constitutes the originality of the book, which bypasses the perennial debate between believers and skeptics about Shakespeare's beliefs about Providence and other religious problems.Tragedies are important texts for Cox, particularly King Lear, and he readily acknowledges the force of the nihilist interpretation of this play, a nihilism that Samuel Johnson glimpsed to his extreme discomfort. Cox concurs with Roland Frye and William Elton that the play shows no palliation of the suffering of Lear and others, no necessary sense of a happy consequence that justifies the suffering, and no necessary sense of a heaven where Lear and Cordelia enjoy their just rewards. We come face-to-face with the sheer fact of suffering, the “mystery” of suffering. But along with suffering, the Christian paradigm continues, because it is in Christian terms that the moral characteristics of the action are described (Othello's “suffering would not be possible if the object of his faith, which he has now destroyed, were not as true and loving as he once believed” [81]). Christianity is simply a given, not to be forcibly applied to any one human situation but remaining as an item in the landscape where unspeakable suffering is taking place. On Macbeth: “The background of grace is what makes the suffering of his ‘deep damnation’…so powerful” (81–82). On King Lear : “To acknowledge suffering as enigmatic, however, is not to negate the transcendent goodness with which suffering inexplicably coexists” (85). And later, “The undeniable focus of Shakespeare's plays on the secular world does not obviate the moral imperative that is inherent in the Christian sense of destiny, even though the plays assert little, if anything, about how divine providence and human choice interact” (231). The Christian monolith, pointing to the Divine Comedy, stands in the primeval field, observing, observed, just there.Another place where Christianity stands like a sentinel without business to perform is in the history plays, where the kings are portrayed as self-deceived about the real political motivation behind their supposedly magnanimous acts and (also like Lear) about the human vulnerability denied by their grandiose sense of self. Machiavellianism is not the last word in the history plays, because the Christian “drama of salvation history” is still in the background, however ignored by the principals. (Henry VI, who is a bumbling idiot in political terms and yet is still something out of a saint's play, demands further exploration.) Cox finds self-deception foreshadowed in the medieval morality plays, with their allegorized notions of pride and presumption. (Cox identifies self-deception somewhat ambiguously—it can be blind pride or, rather, simply not knowing that you are somebody's sibling—so some distinction of the kinds and sources of self-deception would have been helpful here.)In general, Cox has done something very valuable in reinstating the obvious presence of Christian norms in Shakespeare, a reinstatement that then makes the current discussion of Shakespeare's Christianity an important one. I do not know if he would agree with my postmodern sense of what he is doing. At one point he seems to distinguish Shakespeare not only from Cartesian doubt but from “that postmodern…doubting of consciousness…of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche,” but then he says, “This innovative postmodern doubt, however, is anticipated by premodern reflection on moral deception of the kind that informs Shakespeare's plays” (147). Is Shakespeare's doubt safely shored up by a Christian scheme after all, or is he venturing toward something more radical? The Shakespeare quotation most relevant to Cox may be from All's Well That Ends Well : “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together. Our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not, and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our virtues” (229). Virtues are there and faults are there; crimes are there and also good things; Iagos and Desdemonas and poor twisted Othellos; ordinary life and the Four Last Things. “All is true,” as Shakespeare subtitled what might have been his last play. Traditional Christians and radical skeptics can all play in this field.Cox's major argument is that Shakespeare's “skeptical faith” draws its roots not from Pyrrhonistic sources like Sextus Empiricus but from sources like More and Erasmus. Tellingly, Cox's examples of Christian skepticism are all Catholic: Erasmus, More, then on to Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal. (Cox does not consider the Protestant versions of the “humanist” tradition as discussed by James McConica and Margo Todd.) The “grace” that Cox discusses in All's Well reflects a Catholic more than Protestant theology (as discussed by David Beauregard and others). The sympathy that Shakespeare (along with Sidney and Spenser) has in the edifying power of images tends to move in a Catholic direction (as discussed by Michael O'Connell and many others), though clearly there was always a high Anglican strand (an elite minority) resisting the predominantly Calvinist Protestantism in Elizabeth's Church of England. Cox does not puzzle over these distinctions—indeed, he seems to disapprove of them—leaving us with questions: Is his discussion of Christianity too generic for Shakespeare's times? Is he importing a later ecumenical Christianity, or a later Anglo-Catholicism, into Shakespeare? It may be that the upright monolith standing in the Shakespearean landscape can simply be called Christian, in a way that reaches beneath the sectarian divisions. But if so, this is something that Cox might have better articulated; it is a controversial and somewhat anachronistic notion for its time.More and Erasmus stand for an elusive possibility in the history of sixteenth-century England, the possibility that skeptical and humane currents could have been organically leavened in with the prevailing Catholicism of the times. “Shakespeare inherited a long tradition of combining faith and skepticism in the case of religious reform” (8). It is out of this tradition that Shakespeare in his comedies combined “common suspicion about human nature, and a common ambivalence that derives from a specifically Christian sense of how human beings acquire virtue while never becoming perfectly virtuous in themselves” (25–26). “‘Suspicion,’ or awareness of moral false consciousness, was as old as the Bible” (26) and needs to be distinguished from the more radical skepticism argued by critics like Stanley Cavell and Harry Berger Jr. For Cox (here citing Jeffrey Knapp), such faith-based suspicion bypasses the sectarian controversies and results in “a genial but unusually thoughtful version” (29) of what both Catholics and Protestants believed in common. Cox cites his own earlier review article, which supports Shapiro's diminuendo on “the layered nature of what Elizabethans…actually believed,” “somewhere in the middle of the English Church” ( James Shapiro, quoted in John D. Cox, “Was Shakespeare a Christian, and If So, What Kind of Christian Was He?” Christianity and Literature [2006]: 551, 555).Maybe. But geniality may not be a strong enough response to the horrific religious passions of the Elizabethan age. Victory and proof were in the air, not compromise and balance. The different irenic solutions proposed tended to be sharply Catholic versus Protestant (versus Neoplatonic) approaches: come back to the Roman Church, come forward to the new church, transcend church altogether. Meanwhile, a deeper and more terrific cynicism was being created by the religious wars. One did not need empiricist paradoxes to move toward skepticism, when each side's whole Christian worldview was accused of being a devilish parody of the real thing.If the monolith in the landscape is generic Christianity, the acidic contexts of the Shakespeare's Reformation era eats away at it and leaves it an ambiguous shape. But the monolith may be Catholicism itself, that stubborn entity in English history, the shape that haunts the urbanity of More, Erasmus, Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal, the norm contrasting skepticism (as in Montaigne), the ghost on the stage: Remember me. If so, Cox enables us, though he prefers to look elsewhere, to look more clearly at this obtrusive object in the Shakespearean landscape. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 108, Number 4May 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/659617 Views: 40Total views on this site © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected] Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
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