This chapter considers the role of Shakespearean theater in fostering the cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, temperance, and courage. Shakespeare offers an especially compelling site for investigating this topic in act 3.2 of Julius Caesar. Here, Mark Antony addresses the plebeians in the wake of Caesar’s assassination using the latter’s bloody mantle (i.e. cloak) as an object lesson in civic and moral failure. This scene, the chapter argues, has something important to teach us about the theatricality of the cardinal virtues, including, especially, the object-specific way in which particular things enable general moral insights. As this suggests, the cardinal virtues do not so much offer scripts for the cultivation of inner qualities as they do a community-oriented set of practices grounded in the capacity of humans to think, feel, and discern together. Put another way, the cardinal virtues are a social logic or dynamic, rather than personality traits or individual moral attributes. Like theater itself, they provide a linked set of frameworks for physical, emotional, and ethical participation in the world.

Picture Macbeth alone on stage, staring intently into empty space. ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me?’ he asks, grasping decisively at the air. On one hand, this is a quintessentially theatrical question. At once an object and a vector, the dagger describes the possibility of knowledge (‘Is this a dagger’) in specifically visual and spatial terms (‘which I see before me’). At the same time, Macbeth is posing a quintessentially philosophical question, one that assumes knowledge to be both conditional and experiential, and that probes the relationship between certainty and perception as well as intention and action. It is from this shared ground of art and inquiry, of theater and theory, that this series advances its basic premise: Shakespeare is philosophical.

It seems like a simple enough claim. But what does it mean exactly, beyond the parameters of this specific moment in Macbeth? Does it mean that Shakespeare had something we could think of as his own philosophy? Does it mean that he was influenced by particular philosophical schools, texts and thinkers? Does it mean, conversely, that modern philosophers have been influenced by him, that Shakespeare's plays and poems have been, and continue to be, resources for philosophical thought and speculation?

The answer is yes all around. These are all useful ways of conceiving a philosophical Shakespeare and all point to lines of inquiry that this series welcomes. But Shakespeare is philosophical in a much more fundamental way as well. Shakespeare is philosophical because the plays and poems actively create new worlds of knowledge and new scenes of ethical encounter. They ask big questions, make bold arguments and develop new vocabularies in order to think what might otherwise be unthinkable. Through both their scenarios and their imagery, the plays and poems engage the qualities of consciousness, the consequences of human action, the phenomenology of motive and attention, the conditions of personhood and the relationship among different orders of reality and experience. This is writing and dramaturgy, moreover, that consistently experiments with a broad range of conceptual crossings, between love and subjectivity, nature and politics, and temporality and form.

Picture Macbeth alone on stage, staring intently into empty space. ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me?’ he asks, grasping decisively at the air. On one hand, this is a quintessentially theatrical question. At once an object and a vector, the dagger describes the possibility of knowledge (‘Is this a dagger’) in specifically visual and spatial terms (‘which I see before me’). At the same time, Macbeth is posing a quintessentially philosophical question, one that assumes knowledge to be both conditional and experiential, and that probes the relationship between certainty and perception as well as intention and action. It is from this shared ground of art and inquiry, of theatre and theory, that this series advances its basic premise: Shakespeare is philosophical.

It seems like a simple enough claim. But what does it mean exactly, beyond the parameters of this specific moment in Macbeth? Does it mean that Shakespeare had something we could think of as his own philosophy? Does it mean that he was influenced by particular philosophical schools, texts and thinkers? Does it mean, conversely, that modern philosophers have been influenced by him, that Shakespeare's plays and poems have been, and continue to be, resources for philosophical thought and speculation?

The answer is yes all around. These are all useful ways of conceiving a philosophical Shakespeare and all point to lines of enquiry that this series welcomes. But Shakespeare is philosophical in a much more fundamental way as well. Shakespeare is philosophical because the plays and poems actively create new worlds of knowledge and new scenes of ethical encounter. They ask big questions, make bold arguments and develop new vocabularies in order to think what might otherwise be unthinkable. Through both their scenarios and their imagery, the plays and poems engage the qualities of consciousness, the consequences of human action, the phenomenology of motive and attention, the conditions of personhood and the relationship among different orders of reality and experience. This is writing and dramaturgy, moreover, that consistently experiments with a broad range of conceptual crossings, between love and subjectivity, nature and politics, and temporality and form.

Picture Macbeth alone on stage, staring intently into empty space. ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me?’ he asks, grasping decisively at the air. On one hand, this is a quintessentially theatrical question. At once an object and a vector, the dagger describes the possibility of knowledge (‘Is this a dagger’) in specifically visual and spatial terms (‘which I see before me’). At the same time, Macbeth is posing a quintessentially philosophical question, one that assumes knowledge to be both conditional and experiential, and that probes the relationship between certainty and perception as well as intention and action. It is from this shared ground of art and inquiry, of theatre and theory, that this series advances its basic premise: Shakespeare is philosophical.

It seems like a simple enough claim. But what does it mean exactly, beyond the parameters of this specific moment in Macbeth? Does it mean that Shakespeare had something we could think of as his own philosophy? Does it mean that he was influenced by particular philosophical schools, texts and thinkers? Does it mean, conversely, that modern philosophers have been influenced by him, that Shakespeare's plays and poems have been, and continue to be, resources for philosophical thought and speculation?

The answer is yes all around. These are all useful ways of conceiving a philosophical Shakespeare and all point to lines of enquiry that this series welcomes. But Shakespeare is philosophical in a much more fundamental way as well. Shakespeare is philosophical because the plays and poems actively create new worlds of knowledge and new scenes of ethical encounter. They ask big questions, make bold arguments and develop new vocabularies in order to think what might otherwise be unthinkable. Through both their scenarios and their imagery, the plays and poems engage the qualities of consciousness, the consequences of human action, the phenomenology of motive and attention, the conditions of personhood and the relationship among different orders of reality and experience. This is writing and dramaturgy, moreover, that consistently experiments with a broad range of conceptual crossings, between love and subjectivity, nature and politics, and temporality and form.

Picture Macbeth alone on stage, staring intently into empty space. ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me?’ he asks, grasping decisively at the air. On one hand, this is a quintessentially theatrical question. At once an object and a vector, the dagger describes the possibility of knowledge (‘Is this a dagger’) in specifically visual and spatial terms (‘which I see before me’). At the same time, Macbeth is posing a quintessentially philosophical question, one that assumes knowledge to be both conditional and experiential, and that probes the relationship between certainty and perception as well as intention and action. It is from this shared ground of art and inquiry, of theatre and theory, that this series advances its basic premise: Shakespeare is philosophical.

It seems like a simple enough claim. But what does it mean exactly, beyond the parameters of this specific moment in Macbeth? Does it mean that Shakespeare had something we could think of as his own philosophy? Does it mean that he was influenced by particular philosophical schools, texts and thinkers? Does it mean, conversely, that modern philosophers have been influenced by him, that Shakespeare's plays and poems have been, and continue to be, resources for philosophical thought and speculation?

The answer is yes all around. These are all useful ways of conceiving a philosophical Shakespeare and all point to lines of inquiry that this series welcomes. But Shakespeare is philosophical in a much more fundamental way as well. Shakespeare is philosophical because the plays and poems actively create new worlds of knowledge and new scenes of ethical encounter. They ask big questions, make bold arguments, and develop new vocabularies in order to think what might otherwise be unthinkable. Through both their scenarios and their imagery, the plays and poems engage the qualities of consciousness, the consequences of human action, the phenomenology of motive and attention, the conditions of personhood, and the relationship among different orders of reality and experience. This is writing and dramaturgy, moreover, that consistently experiments with a broad range of conceptual crossings, between love and subjectivity, nature and politics, and temporality and form.

Theatrical epilogues – onstage speeches addressed to the audience at the end of a performance – were a common feature of English Renaissance plays. They were typically read rather than memorized, sometimes by a character in the play, sometimes by someone else. An epilogue asserts the merits of the play it punctuates and asks for audience approval in the form of applause. Far more epilogues occurred in performance than survive in print and of those that do survive, most were occasional. That is, they were designed for particular venues, particular audiences, or particular performances, though some epilogues may have been more permanent features of the plays they accompanied. What all epilogues have in common is their capacity to effect what Robert Weimann describes as a “redistribution of authority in the playhouse.” When an epilogue speaker requests applause, this changes the relationship between actors and audience and between fiction and life. Playgoers are now expected to do something, to respond based on the kind of emotional and intellectual experience they have had up to that point. The epilogue, in other words, draws attention to the active and participatory nature of theatrical spectatorship and the degree to which audiences were implicated in the imaginative world of the plays they attended.

This chapter concerns Prospero's epilogue in The Tempest, a particularly well-known example of the form and one that has become a standard feature of the play in performance. It occurs in the final moments of the play, just after Prospero has released the island castaways and set his servant Ariel free. Addressing the audience directly, Prospero says,

Shakespeare and Judgment. It's a simple enough proposition. “Shakespeare” and “judgment”: two keywords, both fairly recognizable, each offering a context for the other. And yet the title of this book immediately raises some questions. First of all, what exactly is “judgment”? Is it an act or a process? A concept or an experience? To which cultural or theoretical field does it belong, and to what set of social practices? Also – and perhaps most importantly – what does it have to do with Shakespeare? Given how many items have appeared on the other side of the “Shakespeare and” formulation – from religion, law, appropriation, the book trade, and national culture to masculinity, republicanism, Ovid, music, and language – what justifies adding yet another? What, that is, does judgment offer Shakespeare studies as a category of critical inquiry? This introduction will begin to provide some answers to these questions, setting the scene for the more specific projects that follow. Grounding the volume are two core contentions: (1) that attending to Shakespeare's treatment of judgment leads to fresh insights about the imaginative relationship between theater, law, religion, and aesthetics in early modern England; and (2) that judgment offers new ways of putting the historical and philosophical contexts of Shakespeare's plays into conversation.

This is a new undertaking, the first attempt to articulate the central place of Shakespearean drama in the cultural and intellectual history of judgment. That said, the volume builds on a number of earlier studies. Richard Strier, for instance, discusses what he views as Shakespeare's skepticism about moral judgment in chapter three of The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton, and returns to the idea in an essay called “Shakespeare and Legal Systems: The Better the Worse (but Not Vice Versa).” Julia Reinhard Lupton explores the idea of judgment at a number of points in Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life, especially in a chapter devoted to The Winter's Tale which draws compelling parallels between Shakespeare's and Hannah Arendt's conceptions of judgment. Lupton extends this line of thought in a more recent essay dealing with the relationship between judgment and forgiveness in The Winter's Tale.