Print as pdf<\/a><\/span><\/p>\nIn recent years we have seen a renewed interest in Shakespeare as an intellect, a mind at work on problems we could properly consider \u201cphilosophical.\u201d\u00a0 Not only have we seen literary critics writing about philosophy\u2014David Bevington\u2019s Shakespeare\u2019s Ideas<\/em>, Jonathan Bates\u2019s The Soul of the Age <\/em>and A.D. Nuttall\u2019s Shakespeare the Thinker<\/em>, just to name three books of the genre\u2014but also we have seen philosophers engaging in literary analysis, in works such as Colin McGinn\u2019s Shakespeare\u2019s Philosophy<\/em>.\u00a0 The subtitle of McGinn\u2019s book is \u201cDiscovering the Meaning behind the Plays,\u201d which can only lead us to heave a sigh of relief and say \u201cThank god somebody has finally got around to doing that.\u201d\u00a0 It is not clear which requires more of the ar\u00eate<\/em> we name Courage: for those of us trained in poetry to dabble in philosophy, or for philosophers to engage in literary criticism.\u00a0 What is clear to me is that it is essential that both parties do attempt to cross these disciplinary divides if we are to attain the transdisciplinary thinking that has always led to the richest insights in both philosophy and criticism.\u00a0 What follows here is an attempt to think about Shakespeare as an ethicist by looking at the role of uncertainty in the moral agency issues wrestled with in Hamlet<\/em>, and the place a corollary notion\u2014what I refer to as \u201cifness,\u201d plays in the references to Virtue in As You Like It<\/em>.\u00a0 I capitalize Virtue here because my underlying assertion is that Shakespeare’s overriding ethical assumptions seem to me to be more akin to the aretaic tradition of Aristotle, what we now commonly call Virtue Ethics, than to the deontic ethical paradigm that predominated in humanist thinking.<\/span><\/p>\n1. Grounds More Relative<\/span><\/p>\nMost of us would agree that Hamlet<\/em> is a complex case study in moral agency and ethical reflection, contextualized in a challenging and peculiar situation.\u00a0 Where we disagree, generally, is on the question of whether or not Hamlet\u2019s delay is proper philosophical deliberation or merely dithering predicated by a variety of psychological accounts, dressed up in scruples.\u00a0 I take the former view, with the caveat that of course even serious moral thinker\u2019s may also<\/em> have serious psychological issues\u2014perhaps most do\u2014and I believe if we assume that, the play reveals itself as a truly fascinating critique of the dominant Humanist approaches to practical ethics.\u00a0 I take that dominant Humanist approach to be largely deontic in nature, using as a source for their rules and obligations a heady blend of holy writ and classical writing.\u00a0 Erasmus spent his entire life collecting adages, and not just for rhetorical purposes but because they delivered the promise of ancient wisdom about how we ought to live our lives.\u00a0 His Adages<\/em> was not exclusively an aid to eloquent rhetoric; it was a compendium of practical ethics.<\/span><\/p>\nAdages or commonplaces, however, have to be deployed in particular instances and by particular characters, reminding us that ethics can never be practically considered without concurrently considering epistemology.\u00a0 To know which commonplace one ought to select requires that we know what the truth of the present situation is.\u00a0 The work of a jury in determining guilt or innocence is a matter of shifting through evidence that allows its members to establish a satisfactory degree of certainty about the facts.\u00a0 Lack of certainty about the facts is not only the driving force of plot in detective fiction, it is one of the overarching philosophical concerns of Hamlet<\/em> as a play. Horatio begins the play claiming he will believe nothing without the true avowal of his own eyes, but ends the play urging his friend Hamlet to trust his deepest intuitions.\u00a0 While many dismiss Hamlet\u2019s own struggles with determining what exactly the apparition he has seen might actually be, the play is so permeated with the epistemological problem of separating \u201cseeming\u201d from \u201cbeing\u201d that I tend to take Hamlet\u2019s struggle in Act 2 seriously, as when Hamlet muses:<\/span><\/p>\nThe spirit that I have seen<\/span>
\n May be a de\u2019il, and the de\u2019il hath power<\/span>
\n To assume a pleasing shape. Yea, and perhaps<\/span>
\n Out of my weakness and my melancholy,<\/span>
\n As he is very potent with such spirits,<\/span>
\n Abuses me to damn me!\u00a0 I\u2019ll have grounds<\/span>
\n more relative than this (2.2.533-539). 1 <\/sup><\/span><\/p>\nHamlet is genuinely caught in an epistemological as well as ethical quandary, and the epistemology has to be ironed out before good ethical choices can happen.\u00a0 Alasdair MacIntyre wrote about epistemological crises forty years ago, and found in Hamlet the perfect literary example (MacIntyre, \u201cEpistem\u201d 454). Hamlet\u2019s worldview, predicated largely on a set of assumptions about his parents\u2019 relationship, encounters in Gertrude\u2019s \u201co\u2019er-hasty marriage\u201d one of those disjunctures that bring about an epistemic revolution of Kuhnian proportion\u2014on a Danish level (2.2.57).\u00a0 He can no longer \u201csave the appearances,\u201d as it were, and needs to formulate a new family narrative and a new philosophical paradigm.\u00a0 All these uncertainties serve to highlight how closely knowing the truth<\/em> and doing what is right<\/em> are linked.\u00a0 Before embarking on the morally and spiritually dangerous course of executing another human being, Hamlet wants to make sure he has his facts straight.\u00a0 What could be more reasonable, or more virtuous?<\/span><\/p>\nAdages as a guide to ethical decision-making are deployed in parallel scenes in Hamlet<\/em>, in which fathers and sons discuss what those sons ought to do.\u00a0 In 1.3, Polonius provides his famous catalog of adages to Laertes, preceded with this admonition \u201cthese few precepts in thy memory \/ Look thou character\u201d (1.3.57-58).\u00a0 Critics have largely been hard on old Polonius, dismissing him as either merely cynical or merely foolish\u2014and he certainly is both those things at times\u2014but I think that pat profile obscures something crucial about this speech: what Polonius gives is good, humanist advice drawn from Isocrates, and he is, like many another Elizabethan opportunist, convinced that the humanist educational paradigm is good for individuals and for the state.\u00a0 As Alan Fisher once said of Polonius, he is \u201cShakespeare\u2019s Last Humanist,\u201d and whatever elements of satire and folly he may at times represent, he is also \u201crepresentative of a whole manner of thinking of which the play is aware and which it examines critically\u201d (37).\u00a0\u00a0 Polonius is not only \u201ca sadly ordinary person caught up in events too large for his mediocrity,\u201d he is also \u201ca recognizable version of the kind of man that a humanist training was supposed to produce\u201d (37).\u00a0 It is important to note that the word character<\/em>, as Polonius uses it here, evokes both notions of moral character, and the act of writing these well-phrased bits of wisdom down, as if the mind were a commonplace book.\u00a0 And indeed, the commonplace book itself appears in 1.5 when another father, Old Hamlet, lectures his son on what he must now do.\u00a0 But the effect of this second interview on the humanist deontics that Polonius cherishes is devastating:<\/span><\/p>\nYea, from the table of my memory<\/span>
\n I\u2019ll wipe away all trivial fond records,<\/span>
\n All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past<\/span>
\n That youth and observation copied there<\/span>
\n And thy commandment all alone shall live<\/span>
\n Within the book and volume of my brain<\/span>
\n Unmixed with baser matter\u2026. (1.5.98-104)<\/span><\/p>\nThe epistemic paradigm shift has become an ethical paradigm shift, marked first by erasure rather than the constructive charactering <\/em>of the commonplace book.<\/span><\/p>\nHowever, the takeaway from these parallel scenes is not the complete rejection of rules, or adages, as guide to ethical decision-making, and the gap between erasure and the tentative construction of a new ethic is brief indeed. Hamlet immediately starts refilling the commonplace book he has just wiped clean with new insights phrased as adage: \u201cMeet it is I set it down \/ That one may smile and smile and be a villain\u2014\/ At least I\u2019m sure it may be so in Denmark\u201d (1.5.107-109).\u00a0 But this is also a kind of anti<\/em>-commonplace\u2014it articulates uncertainty, the \u201cseem-ness\u201d of life, and even to that adds conditionals\u2014at least this might<\/em> be the case\u2026and maybe only here in Denmark.\u00a0 The impression left with the reader is one of the inadequacy, not the irrelevance, of rules and commonplaces.\u00a0 \u201cNeither a borrower not a lender be\u201d may serve perfectly well, most of the time, in common circumstances.\u00a0 But where in Polonius\u2019s tome of proverbs does one turn for Hamlet\u2019s case?\u00a0 \u201cFather poisoned by his younger brother, possibly with the aid of my incestuous and adulterate mother\u201d\u2014what does one do?\u00a0 The problem with commonplaces is not that they are false, but that they are common, and we know from his first speech in the play how Hamlet feels about the \u201ccommon.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nSo what does Shakespeare provide in place of the venerable humanist deontics?\u00a0 If we piece together what happened to, and within, Hamlet over the remainder of the play, three salient features central to a Virtue Ethics model of moral decision-making take shape.\u00a0 One is the importance of what Martha Nussbaum calls narrative imagination (Nussbaum 85-103), a capacity of mind that MacIntyre places at the center of his ethical paradigm in After Virtue<\/em>.\u00a0 Not surprisingly, for Shakespeare narrative largely equates to theatre: \u201cThe play’s the thing \/ Wherein I\u2019ll catch the conscience of the King\u201d (2.2.539-540). What is really meant is both that the story of the murder of Gonzaga will work upon the king, and Hamlet himself will find his moral way by seeing himself as an actor in an unfolding story.\u00a0 Claudius\u2019s response to The Mousetrap<\/em> is undoubtedly a blend of extreme emotions, including the terror of discovering a deadly opponent in the nephew he has heretofore disregarded perhaps as a non-entity, but it must also include the sense of shame and guilt Hamlet intends him to feel, and to reveal.\u00a0 Shakespeare has already taken pains to show us in 3.1 that Claudius\u2019s guilt lies just below the surface, and his immediate action following The Mousetrap<\/em> is not to begin his schemes to do away with a dangerous Hamlet, but to go to the Chapel to pray.\u00a0 Dealing with Hamlet comes after repentance proves to be beyond his grasp.\u00a0 Shakespeare provides his audience reassurance that his own life\u2019s work as a dramatist does precisely as Hamlet foretold\u2014the \u201cpurpose of playing\u201d is indeed to \u201cshow Virtue her feature, Scorn her own image\u201d (3.2.20; 22-23).<\/span><\/p>\nA second feature is the raising value of what we might call intuition\u2014by the end of the play, when Hamlet expresses his misgivings about the coming fencing match, even that arch-empiricist Horatio is moved to say, \u201cIf your mind dislike anything, obey it\u201d (5.2.195).\u00a0 Perhaps intuition, here, is merely rational judgment operating at a speed fast enough to keep up with immediate narrative demands.\u00a0 The narrative context of a moral decision becomes paramount, and the key mental process according to Aristotle is phronesis<\/em>\u2014the practical wisdom needed to size up a narrative situation and intuitively determine what the virtuous course of action would be, and to do that \u201con the fly\u201d (312).\u00a0 After four hours on stage agonizing on if<\/em>, when<\/em> and how<\/em> to exact revenge, Hamlet finally does so in a matter of moments\u2014because that is where his phronesis <\/em>leads him: certainty, opportunity and necessity have all come to one inescapable action at one irredeemable moment.\u00a0 Phronesis<\/em> is a mental function that relies on pulling together a mature understanding of what the virtues are with a capacity to analyze the truth of a moment in time in context so swiftly as to be, for all intents and purposes, instinctive.<\/span><\/p>\nThe third feature is a new focus on character over action, in which the pursuit of the same action\u2014revenge for a father\u2019s violent death\u2014when played out by the careful, deliberate Hamlet stands in stark contrast to both the impetuous Fortinbras and the surprising vicious Laertes, who says he would willingly \u201ccut his throat i\u2019 th\u2019 church\u201d to achieve this end (4.7.124).\u00a0 The audience response\u2014over four hundred years\u2014largely affirming Hamlet\u2019s ultimate revenge on Claudius, while feeling as uneasy about Laertes as that young man does about himself, points toward a new focus on character over the action itself.\u00a0 Hamlet seems to have earned our confidence as a virtuous character, and we are bolstered in that opinion by the reliable Horatio.\u00a0 This is not a matter, as some Virtue Ethicist would maintain, that if a virtuous character does a thing, it is virtuous\u2014a notion sometimes associated with the so-called \u201cunity of the virtues.\u201d2<\/sup>\u00a0\u00a0 Laertes strikes most of us as a likeable, if feckless, young man drawn into vice by a deceptive Claudius. But does Laertes possess any obvious positive virtues? Perhaps not. It should be also pointed out that Hamlet has moments when virtue fails him, most notably at the moment he kills Polonius in a fashion that would have been shameful even if it had<\/em> been Claudius behind the arras, and in the rhetorical evasions he makes about that act when \u201capologizing\u201d to Laertes prior to the duel he is certainly less than truthful.\u00a0 But clearly, when Hamlet dissembles madness, we are meant to see the uncomfortable parallel between that and Claudius as a hypocrite who smiles and smiles while being a villain, but we are also meant to discriminate between the two actions as well.\u00a0 Here is virtuous character playacting; there is a villainous hypocrite. They are simultaneously a razor\u2019s edge and a universe apart.<\/span><\/p>\nSo taken together, these elements of the ethical decision-making at the end of Hamlet <\/em>suggest to me that Shakespeare finds wanting the commonplace-driven deontics that typified humanist thinking at the end of the sixteenth century, and is advancing in its place a narrative and character informed paradigm closely aligned with what we have come to call in our time Virtue Ethics.\u00a0 The natural sympathy between the power of drama with its focus on character and narrative and the role of narrative at the heart of the Virtue Ethic model may be all that is at work here, but the explicit attention played to the limits of commonplace and proverbial moral insight suggest to me that Hamlet <\/em>marks an epochal turning point in ethical thought, and that what Shakespeare is offering in its place is something like a recovered Aristotelian ethic.<\/span><\/p>\nWhile getting the facts straight is essential to virtuous action when action is necessary, in Hamlet<\/em>, <\/em>when characters are overly certain without proper and sufficient grounds, very bad things happen.\u00a0 When we consider what the essence of Polonius\u2019s foolishness is, for example, it seems to reside largely in his need to be right from the beginning<\/em>.\u00a0 Obsessed with the certainty of his own judgment, he has lost the intellectual honesty that allows one to admit an error and change one\u2019s mind, a trait essential to the true Humanism of Erasmus.\u00a0 He settles on unrequited love as the core of Hamlet\u2019s distemper, too soon and with too little evidence. Then, he doggedly persists in his error even when presented with contrary evidence convincing enough for Claudius to conclude, rightly, \u201cLove! His affections do not that way tend” (3.1.161).\u00a0 Had Hamlet latched onto his conviction that the Ghost was \u201chonest\u201d with a Polonial certainty, we would have a much shorter play before us.\u00a0 But far less satisfying, since it is Hamlet\u2019s caution, his intellectual capacity to see multiple possibilities, in short, his uncertainty, that makes the violence of his final actions morally acceptable to the audience.\u00a0 One of the paradoxes of Hamlet is that while his virtue insists on certainty before he acts, his virtue also resides in his recognition of the limits of his own knowledge and judgment.<\/span><\/p>\n2. Much Virtue in If<\/span><\/p>\nThe problematic nature of certainty and its discontents takes a significant turn in As You Like It<\/em>.\u00a0 While in Hamlet <\/em>doubt and uncertainty are authentic epistemological issues, asking us to consider how crucial right knowing is to right action, even while representing the dangers of over-certainty in the figures of Polonius and Laertes, the very different world of As You Like It<\/em> suggests to us that a degree of postured uncertainty may produce through inaction as much ethical good as certainty is able to produce in properly ground action.\u00a0 Perhaps it is true that most of the wrong done in life is the result of people doing things they are absolutely certain is the right thing to do.<\/span><\/p>\nOne of the challenges intrinsic to Virtue Ethics is the problem of a shifting inventory of what the virtues are, as they differ across cultures and through time.\u00a0 While the Nichomachean Ethics<\/em> provide a starting point for the neo-Aristotelian, clearly other traits are viewed as virtues in the Judeo-Christian worldview\u2014such as Meekness\u2014that would have seemed anything but virtuous to one of Aristotle\u2019s compatriots.\u00a0 In As You Like It<\/em>, the predominant non-Aristotelian virtue is Gentleness.\u00a0 Juliet Dusinberre has pointed out how pervasive this word and concept are in As You Like It\u00a0 <\/em>(31), as one might expect in what Nuttall called \u201cthe greatest pastoral in the English language\u201d (235). Between the Christian gospels and the pastoral tradition, \u201cgentle shepherd\u201d has virtually become a tautology.\u00a0 What is crucial to note is that Gentleness here, as often as not, is a character trait rather than an accident of social status.\u00a0 The parallel contrasts between Duke Senior and his brother Duke Frederick, and the brothers Oliver and Orlando, signal that \u201cgentleness\u201d is a moral virtue that one aristocrat may possess while another does not.\u00a0 In As You Like It<\/em>, Dusinberre points out, the opposite of gentleness is not social baseness as it is in Henry V<\/em>, but savagery (31).\u00a0 The play is permeated with instances of the contrast between the savagery of court life and the inherent gentleness of the pastoral ethos, largely epitomized in the aged shepherd Corin.<\/span><\/p>\nThe centrality of the virtue \u201cgentleness\u201d in Arden illuminates one of the great comic scenes in the play: Touchstone\u2019s tour de force<\/em> elaboration on the various degrees of insults and \u201cgiving of the lie\u201d in the deontic ethos that rules courtly behavior.\u00a0 When pressed to prove his \u201ccourtly\u201d credentials in Act 5, Touchstones recites a litany of aggressive, indeed vicious <\/em>(in the sense of vice-like) behaviors he has to his credit like ruining the careers of three tailors and involving himself in four quarrels.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In his account\u2014granted, undoubtedly apocryphal\u2014of the quarrel over his appraisal of the beard of a fellow-courtier, Touchstone outlines a deontic system of rules byzantine in their intricacy and set down \u201cby the book\u201d:\u00a0 Here is his summary of types of offense: \u201cThe first, the retort courteous; the second, the quip modest; the third, the reply churlish; the fourth, the reproof valiant; the fifth, the counter-check quarrelsome; the sixth, the lie with circumstance; the seventh, the lie direct\u201d (5.4.91-95).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (He has already provided clarifying illustrations of these degrees of infraction.)\u00a0 At this point, he goes on to outline what might at first appear merely a footnote of legalese to this highly structured set of rules and obligation, but which is actually \u2013in my view\u2014a profound shift of perspective away from rules and toward virtues and character:<\/span><\/p>\nAll these you may avoid but the lie direct, and you may avoid that too with an \u201cif.\u201d\u00a0 I knew when seven justices could not take up a quarrel, but when the parties were met themselves, one of them thought but of an \u201cif\u201d:\u00a0 as \u201cif you said so, then I said so\u201d; and they shook hands and swore brothers.\u00a0 Your \u2018if\u2019 is the only peacemaker; much virtue in \u201cif.\u201d (5.4.95-101)<\/span><\/p>\nPeacemaker is certainly not among the virtues examined in the Nichomachean Ethics<\/em>, but it is in the Gospels, where we are told Peacemakers \u201cshall be called sons of God\u201d (Matt. 5.9).\u00a0 In the Forest of Arden, the Gentleness<\/em> that Dusinberre finds so pervasive is characterized by the intrinsic impulse to consider others as much as oneself, and the desire to live peaceably with all.\u00a0 Even Orlando, with his interest in wrestling and his fight with Oliver, has much to learn about Peacemaking\u2014although I think we are meant to take him as inherently gentle.<\/em>\u00a0 It is a virtue discovered and eventually attained by Oliver and even Duke Frederick.<\/span><\/p>\nIt stands in sharp contrast to the putative attribute called Honor, taken in the courtly world as a virtue superior to almost all others\u2014that strong sense of self-pride that leads one to fight duels over the cut of one\u2019s beard, and which Falstaff so thoroughly anatomizes in I Henry IV<\/em>: \u201cWho hath [Honor]? He that died o\u2019 Wednesday\u201d (5.1.135-136).\u00a0 One or both of the belligerents in Touchstone’s anecdote found within themself a preference for Peace over Honor, and articulated that in the word if<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 Much of the comedic satire in Touchstone\u2019s exposition here is predicated on the subject of this particular quarrel:\u00a0 I don\u2019t like the cut of your beard.\u00a0 These are the matters that Honor causes great men to fall out about?\u00a0 When that silliness is added to the humor intrinsic to these finely delineated levels of snarkiness, it is easy to conclude this is a questioning of conventional social rules as much as Hamlet\u2019s blank tablets question humanistic commonplaces.\u00a0 In Hamlet\u2019s most philosophically dubious moment, even he concludes:<\/span><\/p>\nRightly to be great<\/span>
\n Is not to stir without great argument<\/span>
\n But greatly to find quarrel in a straw<\/span>
\n When honour\u2019s at the stake.\u201d (4.4.52-55)<\/span><\/p>\nOne would like to think Hamlet is himself scornful of this idea, but it is certain that it has no place in the pastoral of As You Like It<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\nBut to be fair we need to recall that while the cut of man\u2019s beard may be a frivolous instance, the accusation of lying is not, and certainly truth-telling and its attendant virtue, Honesty, is not a frivolous matter, even in Arden. Nevertheless, Shakespeare\u2019s thinking about truth-telling includes a great many examples suggesting that Shakespeare takes a supple and nuanced stance on lying, if it is in aid of peace, harmony and forgiveness.\u00a0 King Lear<\/em> is a play where truth-telling and plain-speaking take center stage, but telling the truth is not always virtuous, and lying in a redemptive cause may not be a vice.\u00a0 When Kent looks about him, and says:<\/span><\/p>\nSir, \u2018tis my occupation to be plain:<\/span>
\n I have seen better faces in my time<\/span>
\n Than stands on any shoulder that I see<\/span>
\n Before me at this instant,\u201d (2.2.90-93)<\/span><\/p>\nhe may well be telling the truth, but this not a moment of notable virtue\u2014certainly not of gentleness or peacemaking.\u00a0 And when Lear admits to Cordelia that, while her sisters have no cause to hate him, she has cause to hate him, and she replies with \u201cno cause, no cause\u201d (4.7.75), this archetypal truth-teller may be telling the biggest whopper in the Shakespearean canon.\u00a0 But in this context, she is virtuous in saying it: it is gentle, kind and restores their relationship, a version of Plato\u2019s \u201cnoble lie\u201d writ small.\u00a0 Sissela Bok, whose Lying<\/em> articulates a very strict deontic position on the act of truth-telling, would undoubtedly disapprove, which serves to highlight how this moment evinces Shakespearean shift from deontic rules to the virtues.\u00a0 What Sonnet 138\u2014\u201cWhen my loves swears that she is made of truth, \/ I do believe her though I know she lies\u2026\u201d\u2014says whimsically about the role that suppressing truth plays in aid of redeeming relationships\u2014Lear <\/em>also says in profound seriousness.<\/span><\/p>\nWhen we recall how central sharply defined knowing <\/em>is to the phronesis<\/em> in Hamlet<\/em>, this retreat of Touchstone\u2019s to conditionality, contingency, doubt\u2014whatever we find encoded in IFNESS\u2014is a curiosity.\u00a0 Of course, we quickly recognize that whatever ifness is in this instance, it is not genuine doubt.\u00a0 It is, rather, a posture\u2014an assumption of open-mindedness as opposed to dogmatism.\u00a0 It is an expression of willingness to suspend even truth and personal conviction (under certain circumstances) in favor of peacemaking and gentleness.\u00a0 There may be circumstances in which the virtuous person would go to the block or to the stake for their conviction of what truth is\u2014maybe even, in yet rarer circumstances, kill for it. But it need not be about the cut of beards. Since Touchstone\u2019s example\u2014liking or not the look of a man\u2019s beard\u2014entails an aesthetic conviction rather than some verifiable fact to which \u201cgiving the lie\u201d might be rationally confirmed or disproved, I would even suggest Shakespeare is inviting his audience to consider what virtue might be found in \u201cprincipled tolerance\u201d on matters of religious belief and modes of worship.\u00a0 If the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could have invoked ifness with regard to their questions of religious conviction, it would have proved that If was indeed the only peacemaker.<\/span><\/p>\nA somewhat different sort of contingency is represented in Act 2 Scene 7 when Jacques expresses a desire to take up motley moralizing and become the Peter Singer, or perhaps the Amos, of Arden:<\/span><\/p>\nGive me leave<\/span>
\n To speak my mind, and I will through and through<\/span>
\n Cleanse the foul body of th\u2019 infected world,<\/span>
\n If they will patiently receive my medicine. (2.7.58-61)<\/span><\/p>\nThe Duke thinks Jacques\u2019s libertine past combined with this direct exhortation to virtue would be worse than ineffective\u2014it would be itself a sin.\u00a0 But Jacques argues that satire, the mode of discourse owned by Touchstone, would be effective even from him because of the contingency inherent in the form\u2014a wise man will take the general chidings of a licensed fool or satirist to heart without revealing that he has been touched by them.\u00a0 As they are broadcast to all the watching world, their chastisements can hit their marks, without the audience knowing who they were truly aimed at.\u00a0 Here uncertainty or indeterminacy aids in moral self-reflection in that one can say to oneself, \u201cWell, clearly the satirist did not have me in mind, and yet\u2014well\u2014he makes a point worth thinking about.\u201d\u00a0 Such postured self-deception may, in the long run, even make moral reflection possible in a mind unprepared for more forthright self-knowledge.\u00a0 Hamlet uses this gambit with regard to the Mousetrap<\/em> when he says, \u201cYour majesty, and we that have free souls, it touches us not\u201d (3.2.234-235).<\/span><\/p>\nThe telos <\/em>of living as a virtuous rather than a vicious person, according to Aristotle, is \u201chappiness,\u201d which is a woefully inadequate translation of eudaimonia <\/em>(307).\u00a0 It is \u201cflourishing,\u201d as well as contentment, and the fruition of becoming just as a person should be.\u00a0 It is almost itself a tautology\u2014the end of being virtuous is to be thought to have been<\/em> virtuous by other wise people\u2014which is why both Sophocles and Herodotus articulate the principle that you cannot say whether a person was happy or not until after he or she has died.\u00a0 As difficult to pin down what eudaimonia<\/em> is in As You Like It<\/em>, Duke Senior seems to have found this fruition\u2014his end is surely meant be seen as fortunate, and along the way he is able to live in a relentlessly virtuous way.\u00a0 He even has mastered the amorphous quality of ifness, as we see in his first great speech about the uses of adversity.\u00a0 Nature stands in contrast to the court in the speech, yes, but more important is the Duke\u2019s capacity to find good in everything, even the biting cold of the wind.\u00a0 Amiens sums up the telos<\/em> of eudaimonia<\/em> when he says, \u201cHappy is your grace \/ That can translate the stubbornness of fortune \/ Into so quiet and so sweet a style\u201d (2.1.18-20).\u00a0 Nuttall and many others have discussed the internal paradoxes of this speech by the Duke, and if it is mere rhetorical self-deception, then it would reflect small virtue in the Duke.\u00a0 But if there is something more genuine in his capacity to embrace the contingencies of life and find a way to flourish in Arden, even if that requires some suspension of a natural bitterness he could justifiably feel toward his usurping brother, we have to put him among the truly virtuous, in whom ifness brings about a profound gentleness toward other human beings.\u00a0 In the end, we find that there is indeed much virtue in if.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0Notes<\/span><\/p>\n1.\u00a0 All quotations are from the Arden Shakespeare 3rd<\/sup> Series.\u00a0 Citations of Hamlet<\/em> are from Q2 edition by Thompson and Taylor.<\/span><\/p>\n2.\u00a0 For an overview of reservations regarding the Virtue Ethics enterprise, see Robert Loudon, \u201cOn Some Vices of Virtue Ethics,\u201d in Virtue Ethics<\/em> ed. Roger Crisp and Michael Slote (201-216). For responses to criticism particularly regarding the unity of the virtues issues, see MacIntyre, \u201cThe Virtues, Unity of Life and Concept of a Tradition,\u201d in After Virtue<\/em> (204-225) and Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics<\/em> (153-157).<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0Works Cited<\/span><\/p>\nAristotle.\u00a0 Nichomachean Ethics<\/em>.\u00a0 Trans. Martin Oswald.\u00a0 New York:\u00a0Macmillan, 1962.\u00a0 Print.<\/span><\/p>\nBate, Jonathan.\u00a0 The Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William <\/em>Shakespeare<\/em>.\u00a0 New York: Random House, 2009. Print.<\/span><\/p>\nBevington, David.\u00a0 Shakespeare\u2019s Ideas: More Things in Heaven and\u00a0<\/em>Earth<\/em>.\u00a0 Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.\u00a0 Print.<\/span><\/p>\nBok, Sissela.\u00a0 Lying<\/em>: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life<\/em>. 2nd<\/sup> ed.\u00a0New York: Vintage, 1989.<\/span><\/p>\nDusinberre, Juliet.\u00a0 Introduction.\u00a0 As You Like It<\/em>. 3rd<\/sup> ser.\u00a0 By\u00a0William Shakespeare. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006.\u00a0 1-142.\u00a0Print.<\/span><\/p>\nFisher, Alan.\u00a0 \u201cShakespeare\u2019s Last Humanist.\u201d\u00a0 Renaissance and\u00a0<\/em>Reformation<\/em>\u00a0 14.1 (1990): 37-47. Print.<\/span><\/p>\nHerodotus.\u00a0 The Landmark Herodotus: the Histories<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Robert\u00a0Strassler.\u00a0 Trans. Andrea Purvis.\u00a0 New York: Random House, 2007.\u00a0Print.<\/span><\/p>\nHursthouse, Rosalind.\u00a0 On Virtue Ethics<\/em>.\u00a0 Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.<\/span><\/p>\nLoudon, Robert B.\u00a0 \u201cOn Some Vices of Virtue Ethics.\u201d\u00a0 Virtue Ethics<\/em>. Ed. Roger Crisp and Michael Slote.\u00a0 Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. 201-216. Print.<\/span><\/p>\nMcGinn, Colin.\u00a0 Shakespeare\u2019s Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning\u00a0<\/em>behind the Plays<\/em>. New York: Harper Collins, 2006.\u00a0 Print.<\/span><\/p>\nMacIntyre, Alasdair.\u00a0 \u201cEpistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and\u00a0the Philosophy of Science.\u201c\u00a0 Monist<\/em> 60.4 (1977): 453-472.\u00a0 Print.<\/span><\/p>\n—.\u00a0 After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory<\/em>. 2nd<\/sup> ed.\u00a0 South Bend:\u00a0Notre Dame UP, 1984. Print.<\/span><\/p>\nNew Oxford Annotated Bible<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Herbert May and Bruce Metzger.\u00a0 New\u00a0York: Oxford UP, 1973. Revised Standard Edition.\u00a0 Print.<\/span><\/p>\nNussbaum, Martha.\u00a0 Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of\u00a0<\/em>Reform in Liberal Education<\/em>. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998.\u00a0Print.<\/span><\/p>\nNuttall, A. D.\u00a0 Shakespeare the Thinker<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 New Haven: Yale UP, 2007.\u00a0Print.<\/span><\/p>\nShakespeare, William.\u00a0 As You Like It<\/em>.\u00a0 3rd<\/sup> ser. Ed. Juliet\u00a0Dusinberre.\u00a0 London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006.\u00a0 Print.<\/span><\/p>\n—.\u00a0 Hamlet<\/em>. 3rd<\/sup> ser. <\/em>Ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor.\u00a0London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n—. Henry IV<\/em>.\u00a0 3rd<\/sup> ser. Ed. David Scott Kastan. London: Arden\u00a0Shakespeare, 2002. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n—.\u00a0 King Lear<\/em>. 3rd<\/sup> ser.\u00a0\u00a0 Ed. R. A. Foakes.\u00a0 London: Arden Shakespeare,\u00a01997. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n—.\u00a0 Shakespeare\u2019s Sonnets<\/em>. 3rd<\/sup> ser. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones.\u00a0 London: Arden Shakeseare, 1998.\u00a0 Print.<\/span><\/p>\nSophocles. Oedipus the King<\/em>. The Complete Greek Tragedies:\u00a0<\/em>Sophocles I<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. David Grene & Richmond Lattimore.\u00a0 Chicago: U\u00a0Chicago P, 1954.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"David Summers,\u00a0Capital University\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1384,"featured_media":0,"parent":51,"menu_order":6,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"full-width-page.php","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-707","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1384"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=707"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/707\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1942,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/707\/revisions\/1942"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/51"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}