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Some years ago i taught a graduate seminar called "Shakespeare and Moral Agency." The course syllabus included readings from Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Kant, while deliberately avoiding discussion of historical background. At the first meeting of the class I assigned Macbeth to explore ideas about dramatic character and agency. One year I had a student with a first-class honors degree from Oxford who, as the class unfolded, became increasingly agitated. Finally, he exclaimed that "no one can understand Macbeth unless they have studied Jacobean politics." I asked my student to explain why he was so definite and what grounds he might have to support such a strong claim. "Well, you have to read Macbeth in its historical context." I said nothing. After a brief pause he went on, "I guess that's what they call begging the question, isn't it?"
Begging the question is an informal fallacy. In a formal debate one side is said to "beg" the question when it requests that the other side concede one or more premises in its own position. An argument begs the question any time its conclusion is already implicit in its premises. The term of art for such a demand is "petitio principii," though more often than not the demand-petition-is not openly stated. When questions are begged, the resulting argument is circular, though this in itself does not necessarily mean that it is formally invalid. The argument might be sound if the premises and the conclusion are both true, but it will lack dialectical force. In current usage "begging the question" has become a confusing term, often used as a substitute for "raising the question," and generally it would be better simply to refer to the circularity of an argument. In the case of my student however, there really was an important question posed by his insistence on Jacobean politics as indispensable knowledge for understanding Macbeth.
The point that one is asked to concede has to do with what is meant by "context" and how it relates to "understanding." The potential relevance of history for the appreciation of texts is not at issue here, but rather the unacknowledged assumption that "context" in the sense of specialized background knowledge is a necessary condition for understanding a work of literature. Anything...