Shakespeare’s Political Skepticism in His Roman Plays

Abstract

Shakespeare lived on epistemological faultlines: knowledge with knowledge confounds itself. As John Donne says in his poem, “philosophy calls all in doubt” and “all coherence [is] gone.” Shakespeare’s age was the era of thought experiments and controversies: whether man is free or bonded, whether the transubstantiation is substantial or metaphorical, whether the paternalistic moral economy or the market economy is better to the commonwealth, and whether republicanism or monarchy is the best policy, among many others. The Erasmus-Luther controversy on the free will is the example par excellence of these controversies. The English Renaissance-Reformation puts all the established values into radical doubts, especially the Henrican 1534-35 reformation. Shakespeare reflects/refracts this controversial spirit of his age in his epistemological and political skepticism in his Roman plays: Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra. Skepticism doubts all received truth and suspends judgment thereof, and it often takes the form of mental jousting on both sides of a question. Duncan’s lament at the incapacity to know the mind of man by reading his face reflects the typical question of classical skepticism: is it possible to know the mind of other men? His assassination ironically enacts his agonic skepticism. Renaissance skepticism was strengthened by the rhetorical education. Arguing on both sides(in utramquem partem) was taught in Shakespeare’s grammar school in order to enhance the children’s mental exercise in logic and dialectic. This rhetorical exercise seldom leads to a third-term resolution: it just reveals all the apparent and hidden aspects of a problem at issue. Shakespeare’s Roman plays, especially his Julius Caesar, demonstrate this skeptical attitude, leaving the judgment to the audience. The question, is it right to kill Caesar or not to kill Caesar, is the pivotal question to drive the tragedy, with no answer suggested in the text.