Speculative Understanding and Ignorance in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth

In Shakespeare’s time, a mirror in the mind, a speculum, made speculative thought, that is to say, contemplative forms of thought, ultimately possible. I want to get to my analysis of speculation in the playwright’s Troilus and Cressida by way of a not-too-lengthy preliminary account of Early Modern faculty psychology and its incorporation in certain plays of Shakespeare. Sir John Davies’ late Elizabethan popular poem Nosce Teipsum (1599) constitutes a typical account of Early Modern faculty psychology in which the basis for the claim in my first sentence becomes apparent. Davies terms the “Fantasie,” humankind’s faculty of imagination, “Wit’s looking-glasse.”1 According to Davies, the following mental gymnastics then occur: The Wit, the pupill of the Soule’s cleare eye, And in man’s world, the onely shining starre; Lookes in the mirror of the Fantasie, Where all the gatherings of the Senses are. From thence this power [the Wit] the shapes of things abstracts, And them within her passiue part receiues; Which are enlightned by that part which acts, And so the formes of single things perceiues. But after, by discoursing to and fro, Anticipating, and comparing things; She doth all vniversall natures know, And all effects into their causes brings. When she rates things and moues from ground to ground, The name of Reason she obtaines by this; But when by Reason she the truth hath found, She standeth fixt, she VNDERSTANDING is. And as from Senses, Reason’s worke doth spring, So many reasons understanding gaine; And many understandings, knowledge bring; And by much knowledge, wisdome we obtaine. So, many stayres we must ascend vpright Ere we attaine to Wisdome’s high degree; So doth this Earth eclipse our Reason’s light. Which else (in instants) would like angels see.2