Evolutionary theory expects to find that kin loyalty is stronger than group loyalty, which, in turn, is stronger than loyalty to all of mankind (see Chapter 2). Shakespeare seems to have had a special interest in the tension between loyalty to one's family and loyalty to the group or the nation. We can see this most violently in a play such as Titus Andronicus. It is striking, then, that Shakespeare's most loyal characters pledge their allegiance to neither kin nor country, but instead to their friends. ‘Friendship always meant much to him.’1 Studies in both psychology and sociology have found that while men tend to value group-level social relations within a hierarchy, women tend to value their individual relationships more highly. It is therefore interesting to find that when Shakespeare deals with loyalty, he focuses on individual relationships, as opposed to groups. This renders his friendships, and by extension his concept of loyalty, ‘feminine’, even though the friendships he depicts are between both men and women. In this chapter, I will approach the topic primarily through the lens of Antonio's devotion to Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice and Celia's to Rosalind in As You Like It. I argue that although these pairs of friends are differently gendered, they are structurally very similar, and marked by their total imbalance. Both Antonio and Celia demonstrate exceptional selflessness in their loyalty, despite the fact that neither Bassanio nor Rosalind comes close to ever repaying their kindness. I suggest our difficulty in processing these disproportionate relationships is because they upset the moral foundation of fairness, but loyalty is not transactional. It seems, rather, that Shakespeare's notion of friendship rested partly on the Christian (Thomist) virtue of charity.

We can divide Shakespeare's most loyal characters into two types: first, faithful servants such as Adam in As You Like It, Kent in King Lear, or Flavius in Timon of Athens. As I argued in Chapter 6, I believe that these bastions of good service respond primarily to the moral foundation of authority rather than that of loyalty. In the second category of Shakespeare's most loyal characters we find the devoted friends. As Kate Emery Pogue has shown convincingly in Shakespeare's Friends (2006), Shakespeare's obvious and deep interest in friendship as a structuring principle in his plays is rooted in his real-life relationships.