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This chapter explores Lucrece in the context of Ciceronian skepticism. Doing so clarifies the status, in Shakespeare, of an issue of crucial importance: the mind-body problem. Many critics have argued that Shakespeare’s works in general, and Lucrece in particular, evince a resolutely monistic outlook. These critics form part of a much broader cross-disciplinary trend aimed at displacing dualism and attending instead to politically productive aspects of refusing to separate body and mind. This chapter challenges the sweeping nature of this largely salutary trend, and in doing so also challenges the idea that early modern conceptions of selfhood are useful only or even primarily when they conceive of selfhood as fundamentally unified, embodied, and monistic. Both Cicero and Lucrece present a difficult vision, infused with skepticism about selfhood’s structure; both also suggest that one ought to act as though the self may be both monistic and dualistic, may shade from one into the other and back again.

This chapter reflects on the cognitive value that reading Shakespeare can have. In particular, I show how one of his late plays, Timon of Athens, is informed by a skepticism that induces a wrenching but rewarding disorientation. Timon’s disjointed structure, often easily dismissed, is precisely what makes Timon’s skepticism most interesting and cognitively rich. In particular, the play’s structure urges a distinctly skeptical—and specifically a Pyrrhonist—form of doubt, eliciting from the reader a disorienting attempt to look two ways at once. In one direction is a world of scarcity, the world of Athens, where personal boundaries must be preserved and a possessive relation to the world maintained; in the other is an abundant world, the wild where boundaries ought to dissolve. The attempt to look both ways, to see both worlds at once, leaves the reader in a cognitive world without fixed coordinates, incapacitated yet eager for more.

The epilogue considers how the value I find in reading Timon in particular, and Shakespeare in general, cannot be counted among the values that cognitive scientists and literary critics often attribute to Shakespeare: that his work clarifies our sense of ourselves, of others, and of the world; heartens us about human capacity for insight and invention; sharpens our ability to appreciate and adjudicate complex problems of ethics and politics; and supplies us with aesthetic satisfactions that offset the sundry disappointments of everyday existence. The experience of reading Timon offers only the most vexed pleasure. The play’s skepticism scrambles my sense of myself, unsettles grounds for ethical action, and impairs my capacity for insight rather severely. Shakespeare’s works, I show throughout, are full of cognitive discomforts: about our sense of self-control, love, ethics, and freedom. Yet it is these discomforts, I maintain, that make the plays worth reading.