Stoic virtue relies on the judgment of internal impressions. This aesthetic and ethical process echoes Shakespeare’s theatrical art, which frequently focuses on its own artifice and capacity to affect reality. While early modern dramatists frequently mocked Stoicism as stuffy and impractical, a closer look at fundamental texts by Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius reveals their interest not in attaining perfect sagacity but instead in the day-to-day reality of attempting to live better. Stoicism, thought of in this way, becomes what Pierre Hadot calls “a way of life,” and allows us to read Shakespeare’s drama more charitably as a mode of philosophical exercise. This chapter surveys Stoic understandings of virtue before turning to A Midsummer Night’s Dream to examine how the play’s testing the imaginative powers of theatricality mirrors the Stoic’s internal processes of judgment. Drawing on key Stoic texts as well as the 1581 translation of Seneca’s Hippolytus, a source for Midsummer, I propose that the play reveals the potential for imaginative impressions to become mere fantasy — but also admits to their power over our consciousness. While this may appear anti-Stoic, Midsummer in fact mounts its apology for the imagination by practicing mercy, a key Stoic virtue.

The introduction to this volume captures virtue's dizzying variety by explaining its roots in classical ethics, transformation through theological appropriation, and engagement with global wisdom traditions. We propose that the work of Shakespeare patches together virtue's many realizations, active both on the horizontal axis of Aristotelian capacity and dynamism and the vertical axis of Judeo-Christian valuation. Threading together exemplary passages from Shakespeare and previews of the volume's contributions, the introduction proposes that Shakespeare creates virtue ecologies -- worlds that allow for person-affirming capacities to be tested and flourish. Alive to virtue's textual and performative dimensions, we establish a vocabulary and background for the essays that follow.

The Merchant of Venice pits relentlessly economising forces against figures who insist on unknowable interiority. The play, in its compulsive acts of accounting, repeatedly measures, weighs, and translates value into tangible replacements, stand-ins, and prostheses. As Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy observe, one can simply flip ‘through the text to almost any passage’ to discover ‘variants on owing, exchanging, bequeathing, expending, accounting, and converting applied as the default vocabulary for all manner of subjects and phenomena one would not normally consider to be “economic” ’. Antonio and Shylock, seeming antagonists, both stubbornly and even perversely oppose this radical broadening of economic processes, and as a result, they share an uncanny bond beyond their actual bond of monetary promise. Both have a deep disdain of explaining their motives, and their expressions of denial lend symmetry to the dramatic action: the play opens with Antonio dismissing attempts to identify the cause of his sadness, and the trial climaxes with Shylock dismissing attempts to identify the cause of his hate. Throughout, both of them resist, with varying repertoires of techniques, any attempt to place their inner selves on a grid of valuation.

Looked at differently, the conflict of the play could easily be described in terms precisely opposite to what I have sketched out here. Shylock could represent the more economic side with Antonio, along with his fellow Venetians, embodying a belief in grander and more abstract principles, such as mercy, friendship and love. As a Jewish usurer, Shylock accommodates – and as a canny performer, he manipulates – a host of associations that characterise him as obsessively valuing, counting, assessing and correlating worth. And the Christian citizens of Venice habitually deny the seduction of surface value; they celebrate instead the moral lesson impressed onto Bassanio at Belmont: ‘The world is still deceived with ornament’ (III, ii, 74).

This chapter will try to have it both ways. Shylock is indeed an economising figure, but in a radically different manner than the Christian Venetians. When read as an elaboration of the soul's placement in the ‘tough world’ of space and tangibility surveyed in the previous chapter, Merchant reveals a deeper negotiation of how the unknowable can be reflected – though not determined – through the ornament of physical means.

In this pastiche dialogue, Greenblatt's famous confessional opening to his Shakespearean Negotiations finds a bewildered answer from the angels that attend Jesus's empty tomb. The angels’ words reappear in the Quem Quaeritis liturgical trope, which, according to a popular genealogy, theatricalised the medieval church: a dramaturgical climax that hinges on a revelation of absence, which in turn confirms an awakened presence elsewhere. The mildly necromantic impulses of the present-day early modern scholar, then, mimic the motivating mystery of the theatre: Why do we try to find signs of life in a medium that, as Herbert Blau memorably has put it, consists of watching people ‘dying in front of your eyes?’ What do we desire when we see a reflection of our consciousness, embodied and oftentimes bloodied, but not altogether alive, in the traffic of the stage?

This book has found in Shakespeare's drama the suggestion that these questions mirror the means by which early modern England explored the precarious limits of death and life through the figure of the soul. But for Shakespeare, these limits, culturally parsed out carefully in rituals of death – reciting the mythology of metempsychosis, effacing the material monuments, marking the limits of sense-making and mastery in poetic elegies – are also the limits of the human within the human. Each ritual, furthermore, carries with it a self-collapsing knowingness. Metempsychosis is acknowledged as false, the monuments must be dissolved to be realised, and the elegy admits its own incapacity as the source of its potency. The ritual, like the mnemosunon of wasted ointment that Jesus valorises, consists of conscripting its own seeming failure as a form of affirmation. So too does the soul bury within the living the potential of life's undoing, a fragment of death that threatens to cancel out confirmations of full-bodied existence. Shylock, Coriolanus and Leontes each encompass the contact point that comprises the soul, and they do so in relentlessly mimetic worlds that insist, desperately at times, on clearer partitions of livelihood.