Afterword

Summary

In the preceding pages, readers have encountered a wide variety of ways in which Shakespearean theatre articulates virtue. By way of drawing this volume to a close, I would like to broaden the discussion and reflect on the idea of virtue as ‘everyday dramaturgy’, the applied craft of living among others. I hope this will leave readers with two take-aways: first, that virtue is fundamentally theatrical; and second, that theatre – actual theatre – has an important role to play in the cultivation of virtue at a social scale.

To get to these ideas, though, we first have to step back and take up (once again) the most basic question of all: what exactly is virtue? Of all our inheritances from the ancient world, virtue surely must be one of the most elusive. To the general public, the term will have vaguely Christian, or at least moral, overtones. Some will make a particular association with female chastity. Others might picture a knight ‘pricking’ across a plain (as Edmund Spenser would put it), definitely doing the right thing at every opportunity. But this doesn't help us much with the status of virtue in contemporary culture. Is virtue a concept we still understand, a practice we still engage in? The authors in this volume have different answers to this question, some viewing virtue as undergoing a revival of sorts, others feeling it's rather fallen off the rails of modern life.

There is truth in both appraisals, I think. Leaving aside academic trends like the interest in ‘virtue ethics’, some components of virtue seem to sit well within an increasingly meme-ish self-help industry. Emily Shortslef, for instance, mentions the staggeringly successful Instagram feed of Daily Stoic, which purveys bite-sized morsels of classical wisdom in a you-got-this mode, often having to do with fortitude, courage or other vaguely virtuous attributes. On the other hand, there's something about virtue which can come across as distinctly old-fashioned, something better suited to that chaste maid and that knight than to modern professionals living in a world where success and sanctity have little to do with each other.