This chapter examines one moment in Shakespeare—from As You Like It—in which Shakespeare might be said to play with skeptical, Pyrrhonist principles: in which opposed positions seem to have lodged themselves within a character. The chapter explores what can happen to philosophical, in this case Pyrrhonist, notions when they are not articulated by characters themselves and are instead embodied in performance; when the character who embodies those notions is not a particularly philosophical character at all; and when philosophical notions are not only performed but also transformed by the passions which Pyrrhonists would curb and without which Shakespeare’s plays would be intolerably boring. Addressing these questions, the chapter considers the form that virtue can take when it arises not as a consequence of, but in the absence of, a philosophy.

Prudence is the ability to determine the right course of action for a given situation. The virtue is fundamentally concerned with what we should do to achieve a desired objective, rather than what we should believe. Prudence is also a translation of Aristotle’s concept of phronesis (practical reason), which the Nicomachean Ethics defines as an “excellence of deliberation” (VI.9.9). In his formulation, Aristotle emphasizes the rightness of the ends being pursued, unlike several premodern and modern theories focusing only on the ability to attain desired ends, and which develop a somewhat uneasy relationship between prudence and virtue. Shakespeare makes the ethical challenges of prudence integral to The Merchant of Venice, a play featuring many deliberations over the means to such ends as happiness, wealth, friendship, and love. Throughout the play, Shakespeare takes a largely Aristotelian approach to prudence: characters who “hazard all” to gain noble ends are depicted as the most prudent, while the “shrewd,” who deliberate well but for immoral objectives, inevitably fail. Still, Shakespeare adds a final constraint to the virtue, suggesting that prudence is not a static trait but a dynamic effort to uncover one’s blind spots – and thus a virtue that few can hope to master.

Black theology is an academic movement calling for the reevaluation of Christian thought based on the claim that God sides with the oppressed – or, put more vividly, that God is Black. From the perspective of Black theology, many virtues turn out not to be virtuous at all but rather practices that secure white supremacy. What are commonly dismissed as vices may, from the perspective of Black theology, turn out to be virtues: practices essential for survival and flourishing in the face of racial domination. The Tempest is, in part, a meditation on domination, and this chapter explores what it would mean to approach the play from the perspective of Black theology. The apparent virtue of Miranda and Ariel turns out to be white virtue, habits that claim objective goodness but that actually affirm and naturalize arbitrary rule. Caliban, attuned to primal enchantment and desiring liberation from arbitrary rule, exhibits habits that appear vicious but that may be read as virtuous from the framework of Black theology.

In the Christian tradition, faith, hope, and charity have God as their object and instigator, and they are the means by which we share in his nature. Hence they are called theological or deiform virtues. But during the Reformation Luther emphatically isolated faith from the other virtues, and from the virtue tradition tout court. This understanding of faith deliberately severed faith from any idea of virtue as human deed, habit, or disposition, and from any works, for that would precisely compromise the exclusive and one-sided donation of faith as a freedom from any necessary conditions of human emotion or thought. In this chapter I examine this trajectory and its logic. I trace the integration of the theological virtues, briefly looking at the allegorical treatment of the virtues in Dante and Spenser, and discussing the implications of this severing in Calvinism especially in its pastoral implications. When it comes to Shakespeare I focus in particular on hope in The Winter’s Tale, and faith in Cymbeline, on the understanding that each play treats these examinations in the context of a ruptured and interrupted love.

This chapter considers grounds for hearing listening in The Tempest as a Jewish, and specifically Rabbinic, virtue, namely, the virtue of a “listening ear” (middat shmiat ha’ozen) described in Pirke Avot, a core text of Jewish ethical literature, published in Latin in 1541. I suggest that this publication witnesses a tension in the Reformation’s re-inscription of supersessionary tropes of Jewish otherness as spiritual deafness. I theorize this tension as sublimation of the memory of Jewish virtue ethics and ethical listening. I trace the oneiric distribution of signifiers of Jewish alterity in the figures of the vengeful, bookish, exiled Prospero and the dispossessed indigene alike, considering the implications of this reading of the spiritual subaltern as one who can hear but not access the spiritual bounty of their birthright. I suggest that the suppressed memory of Jewish virtue ethics in the Tempest surfaces in the memory of drowned books and fathers and in the play’s echoes of the Book of Jonah, particularly its auditory compulsion to mercy and its song of the deep. I demonstrate how the play bears witness to this sublimation in its “sounding” (plumbing and amplifying) of submerged memory and in the auditory virtue demonstrated by its percipients.

Teaching Shakespeare and Moral Agency begins with respect for the unschooled insights students express and supports their emotional engagement with the plays. Students were asked to set aside historical context and to engage directly with the resistant structure of the text. Building from their own background knowledge and the spontaneity of their response, it is then possible to develop their preliminary insights into a more rigorous understanding of the moral seriousness of Shakespeare’s dramatic art. Contrasting styles of moral inquiry can then be used to put questions of this kind into a philosophical context. Required philosophical reading included Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics; Erasmus, Enchiridion; Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to the Metaphysics of Morals; Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals. These ethical encounters between contemporary readers and Shakespeare’s fictional universe often turn out to be profoundly disturbing. To illustrate the ethical distress provoked in these encounters the chapter builds on student responses to Isabella’s moment of decision in Measure for Measure: “More than our brother is our chastity.” What students discover from this program is a distinctively Shakespearean account of virtue ethics - conflicted, panoramic in scope and grounded in the concrete immediacy of experience.

This chapter summarises the core ideas in Neema Parvini’s book Shakespeare’s Moral Compass (2018). It draws on the work of Jonathan Haidt and the idea that humans are ‘pre-wired’ to have certain moral tastes which conform to six foundations: care / harm, fairness / cheating, loyalty / betrayal, authority / subversion, sanctity / degradation, liberty / oppression. It argues that Shakespeare had an intuitive and dynamic understanding of these moral foundations as manifested in his plays. His ethics are always situated and experiential and seldom doctrinaire. Nonetheless, there are definite moral instructions that come through strongly and distinctly in the works that still have much to teach us in the 2020s and beyond.

This chapter considers the role of Shakespearean theater in fostering the cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, temperance, and courage. Shakespeare offers an especially compelling site for investigating this topic in act 3.2 of Julius Caesar. Here, Mark Antony addresses the plebeians in the wake of Caesar’s assassination using the latter’s bloody mantle (i.e. cloak) as an object lesson in civic and moral failure. This scene, the chapter argues, has something important to teach us about the theatricality of the cardinal virtues, including, especially, the object-specific way in which particular things enable general moral insights. As this suggests, the cardinal virtues do not so much offer scripts for the cultivation of inner qualities as they do a community-oriented set of practices grounded in the capacity of humans to think, feel, and discern together. Put another way, the cardinal virtues are a social logic or dynamic, rather than personality traits or individual moral attributes. Like theater itself, they provide a linked set of frameworks for physical, emotional, and ethical participation in the world.

Service is not always a virtue. It can be a drudgery, or an enslavement if not physical or legal, then economic. But Paul inverted this meaning to illustrate the greater commitment of the believer to God, a virtue that levels social divisions and asserts a broader community of faith. This chapter examines the ways that Shakespeare adopts or reshapes Paul’s use of service elevating it as a community virtue where one serves another, often toward no gain for oneself in order to support a greater good. Two plays illustrate this focus of Shakespeare’s, King Lear where service, though more poignant, is more brittle and precarious, and Cymbeline, a play that revels in the necessity of collective service to establish an enduring peace.

This chapter identifies and anatomizes a cruel rite of friendship. In 1 Henry IV, Hal bullies Falstaff by inducing him to fail. Yet the play frames Hal’s comic brutality as an expression of fondness. Because Hal understands Falstaff’s failures as occasions for self-display, he also sees them as opportunities to savor what is distinctive about his friend’s personality. Hal also interprets Falstaff’s ineptitude as evidence of stuckness and thus of the durability of his character. For his part, Falstaff’s readiness to perform shamelessness seems to lower the stakes of his ongoing humiliation; he is habituated to helplessness. The chapter concludes by considering some of the reasons for which Shakespeare might have chosen to narrate the development of trust against the contrastive background of ethical obligation. In a speculative mode, I suggest that any ethical program that does not prioritize the leveling of hierarchy over the inculcation of virtue — any ethical program that is not also (and, indeed, primarily) a politics — will inevitably remain bound up with social subordination. As long as virtue is not the object of collective negotiation but rather an imposition from on high, it will encourage confused and abusive responses such as Hal’s bid for solidarity in wildness. It is telling that Shakespeare locates the resistance to virtue even in the very person who benefits most from the values it reproduces.

Aristotle’s sense of the movement out of dynamis (potential, capacity) and into energia (actuality) was itself ethically neutral, designed to account for a wide range of types of becoming. Yet it also provided a way of conceptualizing the translation of interior states of being into embodied action. Aristotle’s dynamis-energia continuum, along with his taxonomy of voluntary and involuntary behavior, provided the foundational ethical terms by which early moderns negotiated legal cases, theological disputes, and, just as crucially, the regular dilemmas presented by daily social life. Within this context, the Shakespearean stage became a signal space for working out the era’s complicated ways of understanding the move from dynamis to energia as it pertains to intentional ethical action. This chapter focuses on Julius Caesar and Richard II, two plays that take as their central concern the uncertain intentions of potentially rogue agents and the fashioning of multiple forms of community that occurs in response to such ambiguous interior states. By attending closely to the shifts from dynamis to energia within communities as well as individuals – and to variant resonances of these concepts largely lost to modern audiences – Shakespearean drama freshly reimagines classical ethical ideals as a means for fostering communal tranquility within post-Reformation English culture.

Chastity signifies sexual purity and restraint, either through virginity or through fidelity in marriage. While Augustine and Aquinas define chastity as a virtue for both men and women, Shakespeare depicts chastity almost exclusively as a female virtue, repeatedly using the term in connection with feminized representations of nature, the virgin goddess Diana, and young women (married and unmarried). Although Shakespeare’s plays include male characters who fixate on the chastity of female characters, chastity is a virtue of self-government that must, by definition, be under the control of women themselves. For Shakespeare’s female characters, chastity functions as a means of expressing bodily autonomy and rejecting attempts at patriarchal control, concepts that are still relevant for young women today. Shakespeare’s chaste heroines now lend their names and stories to projects designed to promote social justice and advocacy for young women. The cultural authority of Shakespeare’s plays can help provide a historical and ethical reference for a virtue that centers on control over one’s own body. In the context of current global debates about women’s rights and sexual assault, Shakespeare’s plays demonstrate that chastity is not only a relevant virtue — it is crucial to understanding the importance of women’s autonomy.

Shakespeare builds on virtue ethics’ concern with basic cognitive functions linking attention and intention to sociability and future-oriented deliberation. Aristotle’s virtue ethics, stressing the cultivation of habitual attentiveness to avoiding excess and deficiency is consonant with archaic Greek poetry’s depiction of the divine, human, and natural realms as three mutually interpenetrative orders, each characterized by hierarchical reciprocities whose balancing of forces and claims constitute sociable ecosystems. Similar presentations of mutually interpenetrative, ecosociable divine, human, and natural realms shape the presentation of virtue in Sanskrit epic and African, Australian, and Amerindian oral traditions. In his “Complaint of Peace,” Erasmus recuperates ecosociability for early modernity in the guise of nature infused by divine love. Its instantiation in moral-social life demands a virtue ethics interfusing shrewdness (metis) and righteousness (themis), as in Hesiod. Shakespeare dramatizes in Richard II how failures of virtue rooted in thinking of the state as a possession or entitlement rather as an ecosociable order yield both monstrousness and chaos, while in The Winter’s Tale Shakespeare probes the extent to which what is lost by such failures in familial life may be retrieved.

If chastity has for generations served the needs and desires of men, can it still be taken seriously as a virtue? Dismissed in the west as a medieval superstition, or, at best, as a means of escape from an intolerable situation, chastity seems a worn-out version of goodness which belongs in the past. Putting forward a new reading of Pericles (1609), this chapter opens up chastity as forgotten version of agency which, in the most surprising ways, enables new kinds of assertion and affirmation. It offers an account of the Marina Project, an ongoing creative-critical collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company, which has resulted in the creation of a new play entitled Marina. Both the project and the play prioritize the perspective of the protagonist’s daughter, Marina, who powerfully and triumphantly refuses to play the game where women are sold to men. Chastity emerges as a specifically female and remarkably direct kind of action which overturns the withdrawal implied by obedience to a patriarchal frame. Marina’s "radical chastity" disrupts our sense of the way things have to be, opening up a constellation of important issues today.

This short chapter examines the degree to which the communal experiences of political prisoners on what Irving Goffman calls a “total institution” like South Africa’s Robben Island Prison might paradoxically exemplify the kind of community that Aristotle requires for the exercise of virtue proper: a sense of communal friendship built on trust and the virtues celebrated by Nelson Mandela: “Honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, pure generosity, absence of vanity, readiness to serve others”. But at the same time, it complicates that utopian vision with the fact that such communities tend to establish their sense of identity on the exclusion of others, regarded as alien, different, or threatening, a tendency present on Robben Island. The chapter consequently opposes the Aristotelean notion of communal virtue with a very different concept of ethics derived from Levinas: in which no community may be established in opposition to another, but in which the ethical imperative is to be open to otherness, beyond to bounds of the Aristotelian polis. It argues that the prisoner’s signing their names against their favourite passage from Shakespeare, in Sonny Venkatrathnam’s copy of Shakespeare’s complete works, is an exemplum of such openness to the stranger.

This chapter explores a specialized use of the word "free" in Shakespeare's works. It does not deny that Shakespeare often uses term in political and legal senses. What it shows is that Shakespeare also often uses the term to denote a quality of mind or soul, and that this quality can be thought of as a virtue when it is acted upon. The quality is shown to be related to generosity -- or partly constituted by it -- but also to include an element of other-directedness and the possession of what might be called an unarmed ego. The chapter argues that while the term occurs in this sense throughout the Shakespearean corpus, the term is most clearly defined and focused on in one of the great comedies, Twelfth Night. The play is shown to be built around the concept. The chapter then turns to how the term -- that is, the quality -- functions in tragedy. It is shown, in Hamlet, and especially in Othello, to function explicitly as a liability to the protagonist. But this is not seen as undermining its status as a virtue, merely as defining one of the differences between a comic and a tragic world.

Although the dominant meaning of virtue today concerns human ethical capacity, the word had a much broader scope in Aristotle’s natural philosophy and in early-modern herbal and agricultural literature. This chapter tackles this ecological sense of “vertue” (as it was often spelled in the period), unpacking the resilient force it named in natural matter and the skill and virtue of stewardship it solicited from the humans entangled in its management in household, garden, or apothecary. As this chapter shows through readings of examples from Shakespeare, early modern practical texts, and modern environmental thinking, stewardship and resilience promise to capture the skills and virtues of household management in its broadest sense, to include care for the oikos shared by human and nonhuman creatures and systems – especially, in contemporary settings, in times of catastrophe. As keywords of contemporary environmental ethics, however, they have also been criticized for individualizing environmental virtue, undermining necessary structural change in favor of personal care and tenacity. This chapter suggests we might clarify this debate through a return to early modern vertues, by engaging the powers of nonhuman virtues and the legacy of these mixed and distributed agencies in the present.

This chapter examines Shakespeare's response to Cicero's theory of friendship in Two Gentlemen of Verona, before arguing that the comedy suggests that theater itself reconciles the insistence on human perfectibility in classical friendship theory with a Christian awareness of human frailty that characterizes all of Shakespeare's works.