Introduction

In my account of moral philosophy in Shakespeare's England so far, I have concentrated on traditions of thought inherited from antiquity and refracted through Renaissance humanism. I have painted a picture of four competing moral systems – Aristotelian–Thomist virtue ethics, neo-Roman Stoicism, scepticism and Epicureanism – which swirled around in the social milieu of England at the turn of the seventeenth century: a moment of uncertainty and confusion. In Diarmaid MacCulloch's phrase, ‘if you study the sixteenth century, you are inevitably present at something like the aftermath of a particularly disastrous car-crash’. Into this already messy scene, we must lob another Molotov cocktail. It comprises two parallel social currents with far-reaching consequences: on the one hand, the Reformation, and on the other, the rise of capitalism. In this chapter, I seek to assess their impact on moral ideas in Shakespeare's England. I will do this in two parts. First, I will summarise the most important ideas of the Reformation as they came to be understood in England, and discuss their moral ramifications. I will do this chiefly with reference to John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), William Perkins's A Golden Chain (1591) and Thomas Becon's The Governance of Vertue (1556). Second, I will turn to the question of how increasingly capitalistic modes of thinking in the period further complicate the picture. In so doing, I will consider the famous thesis of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) before contemplating the moral implications of capitalist thinking in Giovanni Botero's Treatise, Concerning the Causes of the Magnificencie and Greatnes of Cities … (1606), John Wheeler's A Treatise of Commerce (1601) and Walter Raleigh's A Cleare and Evident Way for Enriching the Nations of England and Ireland (1650).

The Moral Thought of the Reformation

The seismic events of the Reformation dominated the 1500s in Europe and in England. These events encompass several enormous topic areas, including but not limited to Martin Luther and the German Reformation, Ulrich Zwingli and the Swiss Reformation, John Calvin and the Geneva Experiment, the Anabaptists and the Münster Rebellion, the Reformation in England, John Knox and the Reformation in Scotland, and the extent and efficacy of the Counter-Reformation.