Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama

PART ONE
Chapter 1
PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM IN THEORY
Acuckolded man yells at his unfaithful wife. She has just written a letter to her lover, which her husband has intercepted. The betrayed husband describes his own experience through a metaphor of authorship:
Thou trothless and unjust, what lines are these?
Am I grown old, or is thy lust grown young,
Or hath my love been so obscured in thee
That others need to comment on my text?
Is all my love forgot which held thee dear,
Ay, dearer than the apple of mine eye?
Is Guise's glory but a cloudy mist,
In sight and judgment of thy lustful eye?
(The Massacre at Paris, xv.23-30)
Imaging his wife as his text (which is only one of several possible readings of the line), turning her from possession into intellectual property, serves to color the meaning of gendered ownership. She becomes words--his words, his lines, his precious production. This constitutes not only an intriguing form of objectification but also of articulating erotic bonding. The beloved, likened to one's expressed language, is being fantasized as the lover's externalized and objectified thought, which is also disturbingly out of control. Beyond ownership or love, figuring cuckoldry in terms of a commented text imports texts into the world of erotic ownership. The alarming perception of one's text being modified by another, noting its loose and prostitute-like nature, says something about the meaning of writing. Metatheatrical awareness deepens this dimension of the metaphor: this text, Marlowe's text, being sold to others to be changed and acted by them--Marlowe himself turning, as it were, into a cuckold forced to watch.
By saying that moments such as these exclamations of the Guise are pregnant with insights--insights about the meaning of erotic possessiveness, about relating to what one writes--we are registering an awareness of literature's capacity to awaken a realization, to inform, to create knowledge. Is this faith in literature's instructive power justified, or does this talk of insight perpetuate a misleading mirage? Does anything distinguish such knowledge, if it is one? Is it possible to strip away the literary dressing from what is credited as knowledge, or is the "medium" somehow necessary, and if so, why? Any examination of the relations between philosophy and literature requires facing these familiar questions. If the above literary excerpt informs, there must be something in the lines, in the configuration of the words, in the arrangement of the images, or the imagined or perceived vocalization of them, which is doing important and mysterious epistemic work.
Five features are needed for the epistemic (knowledge-yielding) linking of philosophy and literature.1 A complete account regarding literature's contributions to knowledge needs to: (I) elucidate how a literary work can support a general claim; (II) show what is uniquely gained by concentrating on such support-patterns as they appear in aesthetic contexts in particular; (III) clarify whether and how features of aesthetic response are connected with knowledge; (IV) maintain a distinction between manipulation and adequate persuasion; (V) achieve I-IV without ending up with what David Novitz has called "a shamelessly functional and didactic view of literature." I shall postpone discussion of the connections between literature, epistemology, and morality until the next chapter.
Literary Language and Literary Experience
Many theories explain the ways by which literature yields knowledge. Some say that literature enables forming hypotheses, thereby creating beliefs--albeit not necessarily justified ones.2 Others argue that reading a literary work creates coherence in our beliefs by revealing possible discrepancies between our general convictions and detailed contexts.3 A third view is that a literary work can advance knowledge by functioning like an example4 or a prolonged thought-experiment5 in which conceptual insights are gained through engaging with the rich and complex contexts of lifelike occurrences. Others maintain that literature establishes knowledge not of the actual but of the possible.6 For the purpose of investigating the relevance of literature to philosophy such suggestions cannot suffice. At best, such accounts will show philosophers that rigorous philosophical reflection requires examples, thought-experiments, or a delineation of the possible, not that it needs literature. In order to convince philosophers that they need "literary" examples, or "literary" thought-experiments, it is necessary to delineate an epistemological gain stemming either from features peculiar to literary language or from the experience that literature creates.