Shakespeare’s Epistemology and the Problem of Truth

Abstract

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines epistemology as “the philosophical study of the nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge.” What, according to Shakespeare, was the origin of human knowledge? Various critics have attempted to understand Shakespeare’s epistemology, but most have ignored the blatant evidence in the plays that Shakespeare was, in fact, somewhat obsessed with epistemology. Digging deeper, it would seem that his attitude to the subject was informed by his readings of obscure Greek and Roman philosophers, especially Gorgias. But given that the man from Stratford apparently could not read Greek (it was not taught in 16th-century provincial schools), how could he have been able to read these theoretical and scholarly works? In this essay, I argue that the first Greek sophist, Gorgias, whose work is often associated with the skepticism delivered to early modern England by Sextus Empiricus, was a huge influence on the true author. I show that during the Enlightenment, there was an intellectual war between early scientists who studied nature and the ancient faithful who studied God. Shakespeare neatly skirted this dilemma by focusing on the possibility that art might itself created its own reality — one that was not immutable ‘truth’ in the traditional sense but rather a very mutable fiction that must always necessarily be viewed with suspicion. In the modern world, with the advent of ‘fake news’ — and a new and unsettling relativity concerning facts — Shakespeare’s bold experiment in epistemology becomes startlingly relevant.