Abstract

The hermeneutics of suspicion are a mode of cognition which determine that surface appearances are felt to be the disguise of a deeper truth hidden within an object. The predominance of such a practice in the Renaissance is suggested through a study of the form of aristocratic behaviour prescribed by Castiglione under the term sprezzatura and in the artistic techniques of anamorphosis and trompe l'oeil. However, the real effect of the hermeneutics of suspicion, rather than granting their practitioner a power over those others whose secrets he purports to plumb, is to lead him on a fruitless quest to get past surface appearances which in the end leaves him in possession of no truth other than the fact of his suspicion. Whatever suspicion a subject has of the objects he seeks to master through the hermeneutics of suspicion actually derives from his apprehension of, and his almost paranoid need to maintain, his own secretiveness. ;The main body of the study presents these observations in the light of the way that the hermeneutics of suspicion structure the writings of John Skelton, Sir Philip Sidney, and John Donne. In the last chapter, which compares Shakespeare's approach to the hermeneutics of suspicion to that of Descartes, in whose hands they find their apotheosis in the philosophy of scepticism, I suggest how Shakespeare offers a cure to the problems inherent in the practice of suspicion through an insistence that we recover our faith in the truth of appearances, a faith which is, at the same time, an acknowledgment of our shared humanity.