Edward Dowden, an Irish professor of English literature, is best known for having applied the term “romance” to four of Shakespeare's plays as part of two books of criticism published in 1872 and 1877 respectively, whose intent was to place the whole of Shakespeare's literary production into a developmental narrative tracing, to use Dowden's terms, the “growth of his intellect and character from youth to full maturity” (A Critical Study xiii). The two books, Shakspere, A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875) and Shakspere (1877), are the originary descriptions of four of Shakespeare's later plays as “romances” – a label that has since expanded to include other plays and the work of other playwrights. Dowden's work covers the whole Shakespearean corpus and divides the plays into a twelve part chronological sequence, from the “Pre-Shaksperian Group” (Titus Andronicus and 1 Henry VI) to “Fragments” (Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII). The influence of the romance label far exceeds his other divisions because it introduces a term not found in the Folio that brings together plays which appear under the comedy and tragedy rubrics in the Catalogue in the First Folio in ways that recognizes their affinities in terms of content. The other divisions add chronological labels to traditional genres (early, middle, late), and the plays of the Pre-Shaksperian Group and the Fragments have been more happily assimilated into the broader corpus of Shakespeare's plays than appears to have been the case in the later nineteenth century.

It is not news to argue that Shakespeare's contemporaries did not use the label “romance” for plays, despite it being an available and widely used term for long narratives in prose and verse dating back medieval literature. Nor should it be a shocking discovery that Dowden's description of romance does little to situate these plays in the dramatic context in which they were composed beyond considering Shakespeare's career and some cursory reference to some of the work of his contemporaries. Much of his lack of interest in plays other than Shakespeare is, of course, due to his time period and differences in the project of literary study in the nineteenth century. His biographical explanations of the shape of Shakespeare's career have not had much purchase, and most of the rest of both books have been forgotten.

The Voice of Grief

To speak of the virtue of grief seems a doubtful undertaking; at the very least it would ask for reimagining what it would mean to live a virtuous life. In what follows I will propose that Shakespeare's characters conduct such a far-reaching reconsideration of the ethical world, in which virtue as traditionally understood has its say, but where the voice of grief will not be silenced. Grief is one of the ‘extremes of passion’ mentioned by Edgar, along with joy (King Lear, 5.3.197). But in most classical and early modern accounts, virtue is understood to be the governance of the passions by reason. Emotional distress brought on by the exigencies of fortune is a disorder of the mind for which virtue is the remedy. In Tusculan Disputations Cicero contends that the wise man does not succumb to grief when faced with misfortune. Reason will be sufficient to overcome every perturbation of the mind: ‘At nemo sapiens nisi fortis; non cadet ergo in sapientem aegritudo’. A wise man is of great soul – magni animi – and therefore ‘invictus’ – unconquerable. The classical ideal of rational self-sufficiency reflects the interests of men who belong to a privileged military caste. Kristina Sutherland reminds us that virtue is derived from Latin virtus, a masculine concept of personal excellence that assigns high value to active dispositions such as courage, fortitude and independence. This understanding of virtue has had enduring currency, persisting in early modern society, and even into our own time.

Michel de Montaigne characterises grief as harmful, noting that ‘the stoics forbid this emotion to their sages as being base and cowardly’. He sees himself ‘among those who are the most free’ from grief, because ‘my sense of feeling has a hard skin, which I daily toughen and thicken by arguments’. In a later essay, however, he qualifies this assertion, maintaining that ‘we should indeed make some concessions to the simple authority of the common law of Nature but not allow ourselves to be swept tyrannously away by her: reason alone must govern our inclinations’.

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture may, as a series title, provoke some surprise. On the one hand, the choice of the word ‘culture’ (rather than, say, ‘literature’) suggests that writers in this series subscribe to the now widespread assumption that the ‘literary’ is not isolable, as a mode of signifying, from other signifying practices that make up what we call ‘culture’. On the other hand, most of the critical work in English literary studies of the period 1500–1700 which endorses this idea has rejected the older identification of the period as ‘the Renaissance’, with its implicit homage to the myth of essential and universal Man coming to stand (in all his sovereign individuality) at the centre of a new world picture. In other words, the term ‘culture’ in the place of ‘literature’ leads us to expect the words ‘early modern’ in the place of ‘Renaissance’. Why, then, ‘Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture’?

The answer to that question lies at the heart of what distinguishes this critical series and defines its parameters. As Terence Cave has argued, the term ‘early modern’, though admirably egalitarian in conception, has had the unfortunate effect of essentialising the modern, that is, of positing ‘the advent of a once-and-for-all modernity’ which is the deictic ‘here and now’ from which we look back. The phrase ‘early modern’, that is to say, forecloses the possibility of other modernities, other futures that might have arisen, narrowing the scope of what we may learn from the past by construing it as a narrative leading inevitably to Western modernity, to ‘us’. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture aims rather to shift the emphasis from a story of progress – early modern to modern – to a series of critical encounters and conversations with the past, which may reveal to us some surprising alternatives buried within texts familiarly construed as episodes on the way to certain identifying features of our endlessly fascinating modernity.

My goal in this chapter, as in the previous chapter on the appropriation of a specifically medieval tradition, is to examine generic innovation in the later Shakespeare (post-1600) as responses, reconsiderations, or revisions of earlier generic experiments. If Winter's Tale looks back to Greene's Pandosto as a source of narrative material, might Shakespeare not also look back to Spenser's Faerie Queene as a source for narrative form? Spenser's shifting and non-unified narrative in Book III of the Faerie Queene bears a suggestive resemblance to Shakespeare's narrative technique in the tragedies and the romances. In this chapter, the innovation I am interested in operates across kinds, altering the way that Hamlet presents revenge tragedy and producing the unsettled and unsettling treatment of Troy in the roughly contemporaneous Troilus and Cressida. Both plays approach their central stories from deliberately complicated and multiple perspectives, and this proliferation represents their intervention in the generic system. While both Spenser and Shakespeare respond to and revise tradition, neither writer can or desires to break completely with the past. Their interventions in the field are better and more easily understood as position-takings in the field of cultural production. The shape of the field enables and constrains the breaks from tradition. As demonstrated by the history of the two plays this chapter focuses on, some innovations find audiences more readily than others. In the case of Hamlet, Shakespeare's innovation was successful and popular, while Troilus and Cressida's reception appears to have been rather less enthusiastic.

This chapter and its companion on medieval legacies are Shakespeare-centric in a way that other chapters in this book are not. There are several reasons for this focus, the first being rooted in the history of criticism.

So writes Gabriel Harvey in one of hundreds of ecstatic invocations of Eutrapelus, chief among the dramatis personae or alter egos that strut and fret on the margins of hisbooks –in this case, his double-bound copy of Lodovico Domenichi's Facetie, motti, et burle di diversi signori et persone private and Lodovico Guicciardini's Detti, et fatti piacevoli et gravi, two Italian collections of jests and apophthegms (see figureopposite). In Harvey's rhapsodicaccount –which traverses Latin, English and occasionally Italian and Greek, and which is so voluminous that it can only be lightly sampledhere –Eutrapelus is ‘a peerles Artist: a matchles Professour: & a most excellent man, at euerie proofe of the Worthiest men’, possessing ‘a unique zeal for words, things, and actions, and a singular abundance of the highest faculties’; he ‘surpasses all in the elegant art … [adding] grace and dignity to his profession and to every pragmatic ability’. A ‘living mirror of every excellence’, Eutrapelus is ‘the onlie surprising Witt, toung, hand, foote, & sowle of the World… . A man for all seasons: a philosopher therefore for all things; a most capable actor for singular matters: most timely in all things. Ahead in the beginning, last at the end; one worth all the rest.’

This essay explores the relationship between Harvey's virtuous marginalia and Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, two unrelated creations that are nevertheless strangely entangled through their mutual engagement with eutrapelia, the Aristotelian virtue of conversational wit that forms a central element of Renaissance discourses of civility and courtesy. In making this juxtaposition I am not suggesting that Harvey's marginalia, or Harvey himself, operates as a ‘source’ for the play (although there is a long, albeit somewhat outdated, critical tradition of reading aspects of Love's Labour's Lost as direct references to the Harvey–Nashe quarrel). Rather, I want to highlight some fundamental homologies between how Harvey formulates the relationship between eutrapelia, practice and virtue and how Love's Labour's Lost orchestrates its witty engagements.

The enduring popularity of Much Ado About Nothing suggests that we, the public, make much of Shakespeare's characters indeed. The play can easily be considered one of Shakespeare's top ten scripts, and the castings of Benedick and Beatrice suggest that they are part of the play's success. With A-list actors such as Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson or television stars David Tennant and Catherine Tate portraying these bantering lovers, one gets a sense of not only the importance of these characters, but also their popularity. Despite the brutal depiction of the consequences of the cult of chastity, in which a villain's word can bring dishonour and death to a virtuous woman, audiences still delight in the ‘kind of merry war betwixt’ the two avowed bachelors (1.1.57). It is not star power alone that brings spectators to these performances of Shakespeare's witty couple on stage and film, but the depiction of something greater, a love story founded in what I will term ‘virtue virtuosa’ – a performance of ingenuity, strength and fidelity that transcends and transforms the stifling patriarchal structure of Messina.

The engagement of Hero and Claudio highlights the tension inherent in the social conditions of court life by contrasting the behaviours that early modern society idealised for each gender: latent virtues such as chastity, modesty, obedience and fidelity for women, and the more active quality of virtù, a combination of strength, ingenuity, talent and other abilities for men. Early modern social constructs did not restrict all these qualities to one gender or the other, but certain aspects were deemed more important for women than men, and vice versa. For women, the virtue of chastity was elevated above all else. The priority of chastity as the primary feminine virtue is seen in Juan Luis Vives's chapter ‘On Virginity’ in The Education of a Christian Woman, as well as Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, where it is alluded to using the Italian terms ‘onestà’ (honesty) and ‘continenzia’ (temperance or self-restraint).

Thomas Middleton's Vindice asserts that murder is a (perhaps the) tenant to tragedy in his 1607 The Revenger's Tragedy, offering a straightforward, if minimalist, way to recognize tragedy. Tragedy's tenants change throughout the period, and if murder is a pretty constant one, others move in and out of tragedy. Inventing such categories as the “tragedy of blood,” “Jacobean tragedy,” or “revenge tragedy” helps to specify some of those changes but does not do much to explain where they come from. As I have just argued, narratives of decline pervade discussions of the “history play” as well and are belied by both print and performance history. Placing plays before authors and before genre in this chapter locates them in the moment of production and reception before making larger conclusions about the shape of the field or about generic change more generally. These changes take place in a field that enables, structures, and is structured by such changes. Old plays like The Spanish Tragedy or Titus Andronicus remained popular enough to draw Ben Jonson's ire well into the seventeenth century in the induction to Bartholomew Fair. Multiple editions of both old plays (especially of Kyd’s) in the first decades of the seventeenth century support Jonson's claims that they remained popular with the theatre-going public. The fact that these notionally out of date plays remained in the bookstalls suggests in turn that they remained in the repertory, which means that these plays from the 1580s and 1590s continued to shape part of the conversation in the field.

This chapter opens with a brief discussion of the “invention” of revenge tragedy, an invention that only took place in the early twentieth century, to suggest that such labels are useful but do not necessarily reflect the thinking of the writers whose work falls under such labels. I turn to a series of inductions, prologues, choruses, and epilogues because they offer contemporary insight into how playwrights and acting companies saw the genre system. These performed paratexts offer representations of dramatic kinds, stage confrontations among them, and outline a hierarchy. Unlike the prefatory materials added by stationers for readers, they are designed to introduce plays to theatrical audiences. The chapter treats John Marston's Antonio plays, George Chapman's Bussy plays, Thomas Middleton's Revenger's Tragedy, and Shakespeare's (and Middleton’s) Timon of Athens before returning to Middleton and his Women Beware Women.

As the essays in this volume by Carolyn Sale and Katie Adkison clearly demonstrate, King Lear is centrally concerned with virtue. France makes it a priority when choosing Cordelia for his wife, telling her ‘Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon’ (1.1.250). Similarly, Cornwall cites Edmund's ‘virtue and obedience’ when deciding to ‘seize on’ Edmund as his own (2.1.115, 118). The fact that characters as opposite as Cordelia and Edmund are alike ‘seized’ upon on account of their virtue underscores how difficult it can be to determine who and what is truly virtuous. Lear highlights this very problem when he frets and rages about the ‘simular [man] of virtue’ who is actually perjurious and incestuous, as well as the ‘simp’ring dame’ who ‘minces virtue’ but goes to it with ‘riotous appetite’ (3.2.54; 4.5.116, 118, 121). At the end of the play, Albany raises hopes that the problem of virtue's indeterminacy will be fully and finally sorted when he optimistically announces that ‘All friends shall / Taste the wages of their virtue and all foes / The cup of their deservings’ (5.3.278–80). Of course, these hopes are dashed almost instantly by the death of Lear, leading to widespread disappointment at the play's dramatisation of virtue. This was one of the chief concerns motivating Nahum Tate to revise the play in 1681. In Tate's rewrite, both Lear and Cordelia survive the conflict, and in the play's last lines Edgar offers up a pat moral message. Gesturing to Cordelia, Edgar exclaims: ‘Thy bright Example shall convince the World / (Whatever Storms of Fortune are decreed) / That Truth and Vertue shall at last succeed’ (5.6.159–61). This virtue-rewarded ending was preferred by English audiences, and for nearly 150 years Tate's version was the only Lear to be performed. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, Shakespeare's version had retaken the stage, once more challenging us with its unflinching moral and ethical vision and forcing us to think long and hard about virtue: what it is, what it does, and what it demands of us.

Shakespeare's allegories testify to his – and his culture's – infinite curiosity about the human mind: what it is made of, how it works, what controls it, where it resides, how it changes over time. Staging the mind through allegory does not provide definitive answers to these questions, but it does offer a flexible, experimental model, while adding depth or emblematic value to the staged character.

Shakespeare's use of ‘grounded’ allegory as a tool for characterisation brings with it some of the inherent ambiguities that I discussed in the Introduction. In particular, the issue of whether allegory deals in particulars or universals is brought to the fore. In the first pages of this book, I argued for ‘grounded’ allegory as being rooted in the material conditions of theatrical performance. To some extent, this implies that Shakespeare's images of the mind will vary along with venue, cast, historical context and other contingencies. For example, the allegorising effects I discussed in the Macbeth and Coriolanus chapters are venue specific. In other cases, such as the gesture-based allegories of Cymbeline, the effect will carry over to different venues. Concerning Troilus and Cressida, the choice of textile used for Cressida's veil or mask will affect the degree of deliberateness associated with her blush. Recent productions have displayed great creativity in the use of blush-signifying props, as with Trevor Nunn's use of a red ribbon worn as a choker in his millennial production at the National Theatre. Bridget Escolme notes that in Nunn's production, ‘Cressida has various degrees of ownership of the ribbon’ implying ‘varying degrees of agency’.

In other ways, however, the grounded nature of Shakespeare's staged allegories has a generalising effect. This is especially the case when allegories tap into the audience's collective experience. I made this point explicitly for Coriolanus and The Merchant of Venice, but it is to some degree valid for all the plays. In contrast to prosopopoeia, or explicit personification, staged allegories are not self-evident. Instead, they work by triggering recognition in the audience, based on personal and cultural memory and on an integration of the play's own structuring patterns.