Abstract

This dissertation examines how skeptical philosophy influenced, and was influenced by, experiments in comedy of the English Renaissance. Skepticism, a philosophical system that espouses both radical doubt as to the possibility of knowledge and suspension of all judgment, and that grounds its position in the rhetorical method of disproving any argument through multiple counter-arguments or "perspectivism," formed part of the epistemological debates of Renaissance humanism, the conflicts over faith and knowledge incited by the Reformation, and the development of rhetorical theory. More specifically, the invention of linear perspective in the visual arts, which parallels the rise of realism on the stage, shows the influence of skepticism in its development of multiple interpretive perspectives, particularly in its self-consciousness of the shifting interpretive authority between playwright, character, and audience. This philosophical context forms the subject of Chapter 1. ;While skepticism's relation to tragedy has been noted, I argue that skepticism exercised a more crucial influence on comedy. Chapter 2 discusses how normative Aristotelian comic theory, requiring unity of plot and a coherent ethical system, denies the skeptical dimensions of comedy; at the same time humanists develop another comic tradition that originates in the skeptical comic dialogues of Lucian, notably Erasmus's colloquies and Praise of Folly and Aretino's Six Days, which make use of skeptical rhetorical techniques of oppositional argument, parody, and the comic grotesque. ;The second part of the dissertation addresses the influence of skepticism on the comedies of Jonson and Middleton. Jonson's career, discussed in Chapter 3, shows a developing dialectic between his own need for comic authority and his renunciation of authority to a judging audience. Chapter 4 analyzes how Middleton, particularly in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, on the one hand tends towards a skeptical fideism, creating Puritanical characters who denounce the theatrical world, while on the other hand constructing a society devoid of moral grounding, certain only of the phenomenality of material desires; these paradoxical discourses construct a skeptical vision of the possibilities of ethical judgment