Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor's Preface
- Part I Conflicting Moral Visions
- 1 Navigating Shakespeare's Moral Compass
- 2 The Constrained Vision of Evolutionary Ethics
- 3 Moral Philosophy in England during the Time of Shakespeare
- 4 The Reformation, Capitalism and Ethics in England during the 1590s and early 1600s
- Part II Shakespeare's Moral Compass
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Moral Philosophy in England during the Time of Shakespeare
from Part I - Conflicting Moral Visions
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor's Preface
- Part I Conflicting Moral Visions
- 1 Navigating Shakespeare's Moral Compass
- 2 The Constrained Vision of Evolutionary Ethics
- 3 Moral Philosophy in England during the Time of Shakespeare
- 4 The Reformation, Capitalism and Ethics in England during the 1590s and early 1600s
- Part II Shakespeare's Moral Compass
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Introduction
In this chapter, I aim to provide a broad overview of the sorts of thinking about ethics that were swirling around during the period in which Shakespeare lived and wrote. I say ‘swirling around’ for two reasons: first, because I do not think we can make any easy assumptions about the extent to which the philosophical and theological debates of the day carried into everyday life; second, because this is a particularly complicated phase in the history of ethics to navigate. In the early modern period we are dealing with ‘a dizzying moment in the history of heterodoxy’, in which the ‘sudden presence’ of newly rediscovered and reinterpreted ideas from the Hellenistic schools competed for primacy at practically the same moment as the Church was facing its largest major schism since 1054. Perhaps as a symptom of this,
many early modern philosophers were extremely (and sometimes overly) eclectic and their influences were not always straightforward: what looks to us as Stoic in an author could just as well be Epicurean … or a mixture of ancient sources, or a modern variant generally influenced by ancient schools without strong commitment to one school.’
Shakespeare's moment in particular – the 1580s to the 1610s – was a time when the intellectual world was still reeling from the twin effects of High Renaissance humanist philosophy and the Protestant Reformation, but had not yet formulated coherent responses to them as the next few decades would, in the form of thinkers such as Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Benedict de Spinoza. It is a moment that histories of moral philosophy have a habit of skipping over: for example, Henry Sidgwick's classic Outlines of the History of Ethics for English Readers (1886) does not seem to know what to do with the late sixteenth century and so essentially jumps from Martin Luther to Hugo Grotius's De jure belli ac pacis (‘On the Law of War and Peace’) (1625).
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- Information
- Shakespeare's Moral Compass , pp. 71 - 138Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017