ABSTRACT
Historians have long argued that a popular or lay scepticism was one major consequence of the extended and strident controversy between Reformers and Counter-Reformers, both on the continent and in Britain. Christopher Hill claims that 'in the long run protestantism worked against all magic, black or white, against charms, spells, incantations, and love potions'. Irving Ribner, for instance, situates Marlowe, Shakespeare and the Jacobean tragedians within the context of a 'spirit of scepticism' that was 'as much a part of Renaissance as its Christian humanism'; but Barbara Shapiro claims that 'the skepticism so often voiced in French intellectual circles was rarely heard in England'. Indeed, it is precisely the partial reliance upon Pyrrhonian and Academic theory that best characterizes the eclectic relation to classical scepticism evident in many late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean philosophical poems. It may not in fact be an exaggeration to claim that Elizabethan and Jacobean writers routinely exhibit sharpness of epistemological discrimination not always evident in modern-day commentators.
