Introduction

Shakespeare's Moral Compass is an attempt to uncover and define the moral framework that binds and blinds the characters of the most famous body of plays in world literature. I write at a time when some feel that Western civilisation is at a moment of crisis. It is a moment in which many of us are taking stock and looking for meaning. It is a moment in which it somehow feels apposite to look, as so many previous generations have looked, to the great literature of the past for some insight, and perhaps even for some guidance. Certain commentators worry that many people in Europe and North America appear to have lost ‘the “tragic sense of life”. They have forgotten what the World War II generation so painfully learnt: that everything you love, even the greatest and most cultured civilizations in history, can be swept away by people who are unworthy of them.’ Indeed, in drawing on modern psychological studies, as I do throughout this book, in some sense I prove the idea that ‘it has taken modern science to remind us what our grandparents knew’. What did they know about human morality? What did Shakespeare know about it?

In recent years, studies of Shakespeare's plays have concerned themselves with everyday objects and ‘matter’ rather than with questions of philosophy or moral value. As ideology critique has fallen out of fashion, scholars and critics have turned their attentions from thinking to living: it matters less what Shakespeare and his contemporaries thought and believed, and rather more how they prepared and ate their meals. How did they sleep? How did they arrange their furniture? What did their typical wardrobe contain? These and other such fascinating topics have dominated the past ten years of Shakespeare scholarship. At its best, this work has made us seriously rethink some of our ideas about literature in the early modern period, but at its worst it has been a lapse into workaday positivism – an unwitting winding back of the clock, as if the new historicists had never heard of Hayden White and the cultural materialists had decided that Raymond Williams and Louis Althusser were not worth worrying about after all.