Introduction

In this chapter, I aim to provide a broad overview of the sorts of thinking about ethics that were swirling around during the period in which Shakespeare lived and wrote. I say ‘swirling around’ for two reasons: first, because I do not think we can make any easy assumptions about the extent to which the philosophical and theological debates of the day carried into everyday life; second, because this is a particularly complicated phase in the history of ethics to navigate. In the early modern period we are dealing with ‘a dizzying moment in the history of heterodoxy’, in which the ‘sudden presence’ of newly rediscovered and reinterpreted ideas from the Hellenistic schools competed for primacy at practically the same moment as the Church was facing its largest major schism since 1054. Perhaps as a symptom of this,

Shakespeare's moment in particular – the 1580s to the 1610s – was a time when the intellectual world was still reeling from the twin effects of High Renaissance humanist philosophy and the Protestant Reformation, but had not yet formulated coherent responses to them as the next few decades would, in the form of thinkers such as Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Benedict de Spinoza. It is a moment that histories of moral philosophy have a habit of skipping over: for example, Henry Sidgwick's classic Outlines of the History of Ethics for English Readers (1886) does not seem to know what to do with the late sixteenth century and so essentially jumps from Martin Luther to Hugo Grotius's De jure belli ac pacis (‘On the Law of War and Peace’) (1625).