Cavell’s Tragic Scepticism and the Comedy of the Cuckold: Othello and Montaigne Revisited

Abstract

This chapter challenges the intrinsic connection that Stanley Cavell posits between philosophical scepticism and tragedy in Shakespeare’s plays by expanding on the suggestion in Cavell's essay ‘Othello and the Stake of the Other’ that Montaigne offers a different approach from Shakespeare to questions of doubt, sexual jealousy and witchcraft. Like Shakespeare, Montaigne draws a connection between philosophical scepticism and male anxieties about marriage, but Montaigne’s account of a happy cuckold circumvents the tragic outcomes of the play Othello. While Cavell looks to modernity, specifically Hollywood comedies of remarriage, for a resolution to what he calls the “problem of scepticism,” this chapter argues that Montaigne’s comic approach to scepticism and consequent affirmation of the philosophical end of tranquillity reveals such a resolution already at play during the early modern period.