This chapter examines the role played by various sources – Shakespeare’s ‘inheritances’ – in shaping the dramatist’s treatments of grief, sorrow and a longing for emotional recognition. I argue that warring characters’ competitive displays of feeling, which are central to the drama of affect in Richard III and 3 Henry VI, derive from but intensify comparable scenes in Senecan drama. However, whilst such competitive emoting is affirmed in these early Shakespearean plays, in Richard II, The Merchant of Venice and elsewhere the same phenomenon – now linked to implicit imitations of Christ’s Passion inspired by the medieval mystery plays – instead provokes scepticism. Having explored this, the chapter then turns to a more contemporary source. I consider, specifically, how early modern ways of conceiving credit relations guided Shakespeare and his co-author, Thomas Middleton, in imagining the emotions in Timon of Athens. Timon too, I contend, affirms himself by parading what he conceives as a kind of love – his credit-funded gestures of charity – in a tacitly competitive fashion. Like earlier Shakespearean characters, though, he is led by this into transmuted reworkings of Christ’s Passion and the latter again expose the compromised, inauthentic nature of emotional display.

Nicolas Malebranche, writing in 1674, feared that Montaigne's popularity reflected a dangerous and growing tendency: a propensity to approach moral philosophy less as the product of reasoned philosophical argument (argument of a kind that would promote some single, unified, logical position) and more as the emotive expression of individual imaginations (imaginations productive of pluralist, unsettled visions of ethical goodness). Half a century later, Matthew Prior endorsed the very quality Malebranche had vilified, adding that its dominance was inescapable:

Perhaps more significantly, Francis Hutcheson's associate, James Arbuckle, asserted in 1726 that moralists typically ‘imagine the rest of the World … as themselves’, ‘Selfish and designing Persons’ reducing all goodness to expressions of ‘Interest’ and men of ‘Integrity’ supposing that a ‘noble Disposition runs thro’ the whole Species'. Arbuckle thought it difficult to prove either of these accounts ‘universal’ but deemed the latter the more ‘amiable Conception’ and one that, ‘tho it should really prove a mistaken Notion, yet would there be an advantage to Mankind in believing’.