Jessica’s Silence and the Feminine Pyrrhonic in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice

Abstract

ance 39/ cholarship on Shakespeare’s skepticism has rightly explored what his characters do and, more importantly, say in expressing their conflicting values and points of view, their moral uncertainties, and their limited powers of perception. Shakespeare often uses those moments to register doubt about language itself—about the ability of words to convey precisely what we mean to say or, in some cases, to help us discern what we mean. Building on the rhetorical underpinnings of literary skepticism but offering a new interpretive angle, this essay focuses on the skeptical, specifically Pyrrhonian, dimensions of Shakespeare’s dramatized silences. His Sonnets (1609) provide some clues about his perspective. There, Shakespeare compares himself to a tongue-tied “actor on