Passion, virtue, and moderation in Shakespearean drama

Unrestricted This study grounds itself in the humanist discourses of the passions, virtue, and moderation. By all accounts of English Renaissance literature and culture, virtue represented an important social ideal as the full realization of the human potential. Virtue, for the early moderns, entailed the interactivity of self-knowledge and moderation -- the self-governance of the passions -- towards the highest goods. Moderation, as broadly conceived for this study, includes both its dispositional and active forms: temperance and prudence, respectively. Drawn from the classical and humanist tradition, moderation becomes the marshaling of affect and action toward best ends.; To this effect, Shakespeare's conception of virtuous moderation, I argue, deploys rather than decries the passions towards the good. As richly illustrated throughout his plays, this integrative moderation also subsumes prudential action within virtue. Situated in the recent return to ethics and classical studies as well as interest in materialist and phenomenological studies of the early modern passions, my project tries to give a fuller account of moral agency by drawing from these various approaches. My neo-Aristotelian, situational method of interpreting human action, I believe, enables valuable, otherwise unattainable insights into character and action, and the early modern ethical and affective experience as it sheds light on twenty-first century grappling with identity and agency.; While grounded in humanist ethics, this study at the same time incisively revises conventional gender conceptions to present a dynamic countermodel to male-inflected virtue. Contrary to classical and humanist notions that moderation is the property of the ideal man, this examination demonstrates abundantly that moderation is rather the special province of the virtuous virago. Such is the result when male-inflected virtue is re-defined as an integrative, human excellence, harmonizing passion and reason. Traversing through The Taming of the Shrew, Othello, All's Well That Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, this project reveals the dynamic complexity and scope of Shakespeare's dramatization of moderation from the domestic, mercantile, and courtly spheres to the imperial and civic arenas.