‘There is always a choice’: John Vyvyan's maxim has been a consistent refrain in my consideration of Shakespeare's moral compass in Part II of this book. In Chapters 5–10, I have found that the plays emphasise individual free will as a prerequisite for both good and evil. I have argued that in Shakespeare there is no divine, cosmic or poetic justice; wrongdoers seldom look for a final redemption, and find it even less frequently. Characters are not born evil – we watch them choosing to sin, or else giving in to an emotional sense that they have been hard done by. A sense of contingency persists: it might have turned out differently if only people had made different choices. Edmund and Richard III did not have to prove themselves villains; Lear did not have to banish Cordelia; Titus did not need to kill his own son, Martius; Demetrius and Chiron did not need to rape and mutilate Lavinia, and so on. Likewise, the converse is true of good deeds: Adam did not have to sacrifice his savings and ultimately his life for Orlando; Kent did not have to follow Lear; Antonio need not have lent Bassanio the money; Celia need not have given up her inheritance and followed Rosalind into the woods, and so on. Thus, in Shakespeare, liberty – as defined by the ability of the individual to decide on their own course of action – is the engine room of morality. Without it, the entire vehicle grinds to a halt: without the ability to choose, we can travel in no moral direction at all. As I argued in Chapter 9 (see also Chapter 5), this emphasis on individual free will puts Shakespeare firmly in the secular–humanist and Catholic traditions, and at odds with Protestant Reformation thinking, which emphasises divine providence and predestination. Indeed, we have found, as Stephen Greenblatt has observed, that ‘his work … is allergic to the absolutist strain so prevalent in his world’.