Chapter 8 - Cymbeline and the Renewal of Constancy

Summary

Virtue is having a moment. This development owes something to the current political climate, which appears to have disproven Rochefoucauld's maxim that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. But in truth the present sense of urgency has been building over time. I open with a gesture towards history because I am interested in examining the entanglement of virtue ethics with history. While there is much that separates various versions of virtue ethics, these approaches invariably involve a sensitivity to cultural and historical context. In other words, virtue is understood to be a situated practice responsive to the exigencies of a particular shared lifeworld. In what follows, I will provide a description of Shakespearean constancy emerging principally from a reading of Cymbeline, but an important preliminary step in my analysis involves a consideration of the Neostoicism of Justus Lipsius, a Flemish humanist whose De Constantia (1584) presented a Christianised version of Seneca that proved to be enormously popular. This procedure aims to clarify what Roman or Stoic constancy afforded Shakespeare and what, in turn, Shakespearean constancy affords us.

The recent prominence of virtue in Shakespeare studies has many sources, but the emergence of virtue ethics within moral philosophy deserves careful consideration. Many students of literature will immediately recognise names such as MacIntyre, Nussbaum and Williams, but G. E. M. Anscombe is likely less familiar, and yet when philosophers consider the question of modern virtue ethics, she is invariably identified as the starting point. ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ was first published in Philosophy in 1958, and despite its seemingly innocuous title, Anscombe's essay made a significant splash. At the risk of gross simplification, Anscombe's assessment of modern moral philosophy was sharply negative, and her key claim against its defenders was that they illegitimately resort to a version of moral obligation that presupposes the existence of a lawgiver. Though she does not in the essay make an extended case for virtue ethics, she observes that Aristotle's approach provides an alternative to the law-based versions of morality promulgated by Christianity, which ‘derived its ethical notions from the Torah’. Aristotle, in contrast, operates without a term for ‘illicit’, according to Anscombe, and his account of the virtues is not dependent on the idea of a lawgiver.