Shakespeare builds on virtue ethics’ concern with basic cognitive functions linking attention and intention to sociability and future-oriented deliberation. Aristotle’s virtue ethics, stressing the cultivation of habitual attentiveness to avoiding excess and deficiency is consonant with archaic Greek poetry’s depiction of the divine, human, and natural realms as three mutually interpenetrative orders, each characterized by hierarchical reciprocities whose balancing of forces and claims constitute sociable ecosystems. Similar presentations of mutually interpenetrative, ecosociable divine, human, and natural realms shape the presentation of virtue in Sanskrit epic and African, Australian, and Amerindian oral traditions. In his “Complaint of Peace,” Erasmus recuperates ecosociability for early modernity in the guise of nature infused by divine love. Its instantiation in moral-social life demands a virtue ethics interfusing shrewdness (metis) and righteousness (themis), as in Hesiod. Shakespeare dramatizes in Richard II how failures of virtue rooted in thinking of the state as a possession or entitlement rather as an ecosociable order yield both monstrousness and chaos, while in The Winter’s Tale Shakespeare probes the extent to which what is lost by such failures in familial life may be retrieved.

This chapter traces the dual legacy of Christian asceticism as an art of living with distinct but related rules for virtue in monastic and married life. The forms of ascetic virtue cultivated in the early Church have a significant afterlife in sixteenth century fiction and drama, exemplified in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1610). In Utopia, married couples are essential citizens of an ascetic commonwealth, but also potentially at odds with its communal quasi-monastic virtues. The Winter’s Tale reveals a fault line in marriage as an ascetic mode of life: the tension between marriage as a legal code and marriage as a sacrament and relationship of fidelity can only be resolved by turning to the more radical asceticism of penance. These works demonstrate how ascetic practices mediate between self and society; they reflect on ways to cultivate a virtuous life that extend beyond the household or the cloister to the wider world of public and political action.

Beckett’s works are built around the paradoxical notion of the still life. Suspended between motion and standstill, destruction and creation, a still life conveys the state of a being that is simultaneously lifeless and alive. Still lifes are located at the intersection of life and death, of presence and absence, of the material and the immaterial dimension of a work of art. Beckett, above all in his later prose and drama, uses the still life as a reflection on the creation of a work of art while simultaneously performing this creative process as it were in vivo. This chapter discusses the relation between visual, textual, musical and dramatic still lifes. It analyses the tableaux vivants and nature mortes in works such as A Piece of Monologue, Stirrings Still and What Where in relation to Hamlet, and investigates the notion of ghostly doppelgangers by way of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise that informed Beckett’s late plays. Journeys of dispossession and shrinking, moments frozen in time that approach the condition of a still life will be analysed in Timon of Athens, The End, King Lear, Texts for Nothing, Sonnets 55, 18 and 81, and finally in Breath.

Chapter Five explores the early modern phenomenon of girls “putting on” the minds of others. It argues that, when they engaged in these acts of cognitive play, girls were able to try on alternative perspectives and experiences — not necessarily male ones, but those that belonged to sexually active females: the lover, the harlot, the pregnant woman. It focuses on the girls from John Lyly’s Gallathea, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure, all of whom costume their bodies and put on the minds of sexually experienced females. Their performances allow them to project themselves into these roles without actually becoming “women” in a heteronormative sense that would require their bodies to transform through penetrative intercourse, pregnancy, or birth. The girls who dress up in these plays do so under different levels of duress, but they all share an ability to use their brainwork to manipulate the Protestant girl-to-woman script they were expected to follow — to resist, revise and, in some cases, reject it.

What is confusion? And what does confusion have to do with emotion? This chapter argues that Shakespeare’s depictions of confusion elucidate the care with which he ties affective states and bodily conditions together with rational and intellectual processes. Confusion is a state that grips Shakespeare’s characters in their entirety. Deeper still, Shakespeare’s representations of confusion reveal one of the baseline assumptions in his understanding of human emotional life: no affect, passion, or emotion can ever appear on its own, in isolation. In Shakespeare’s view, feeling always involves mixture and mingling – that is, some degree of confusion. Tracing the contours of a philosophical tradition that illuminates the limitations and affordances of confusion, this chapter explores Shakespeare’s depiction of confusion in such plays as Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and Winter’s Tale, but focuses on Cymbeline, a play in which the lived, felt state of confusion takes centre stage.

This chapter explores the relationship between Shakespeare and climate. Taking its inspiration from weather disruptions to the 2017 Shakespeare Association of America conference, it riffs on the tweets that this climatic disturbance generated and the themes they reveal. It deals with the issues of: climate and its material effects on Shakespearean composition and performance, whereby climate and culture may be said to be co-constitutive; the resistance in Shakespeare’s time to codifying climate, in partial acknowledgement of climate’s unpredictability; and thus the extent to which Shakespearean texts portend human and non-human entanglement in the Anthropocene.

This chapter explores the relationship between Shakespeare and climate. Taking its inspiration from weather disruptions to the 2017 Shakespeare Association of America conference, it riffs on the tweets that this climatic disturbance generated and the themes they reveal. It deals with the issues of: climate and its material effects on Shakespearean composition and performance, whereby climate and culture may be said to be co-constitutive; the resistance in Shakespeare’s time to codifying climate, in partial acknowledgement of climate’s unpredictability; and thus the extent to which Shakespearean texts portend human and non-human entanglement in the Anthropocene.

This chapter explores the relationship between Shakespeare and climate. Taking its inspiration from weather disruptions to the 2017 Shakespeare Association of America conference, it riffs on the tweets that this climatic disturbance generated and the themes they reveal. It deals with the issues of: climate and its material effects on Shakespearean composition and performance, whereby climate and culture may be said to be co-constitutive; the resistance in Shakespeare’s time to codifying climate, in partial acknowledgement of climate’s unpredictability; and thus the extent to which Shakespearean texts portend human and non-human entanglement in the Anthropocene.

Over the past decade, anthropogenic climate change has encouraged authors and readers to confront new modes of imagining time, selfhood, and narrative and to reassess the relationships among experiential, historical, and climatological time. In Western literary culture, historical and climatological time traditionally have seemed one and the same. Working within the 5000-year time frame of biblical history, writers envisioned a world that, since the sixth day of creation, always has been inhabited and therefore always had been shaped and reshaped by humans. In this worldview, ‘nature’ is always a product of anthropogenic intervention. Beginning around 1800, however, work in geology, planetary astronomy, and palaeontology transformed conceptions of climate by decoupling planetary history from human experience, memory, and myth. In giving narrative form to the collision of experiential and climatological time, Anthropocene fiction explores the problem that science fiction often seems more ‘realistic’ than traditional narrative realism.

Chapter Six looks at three plays by William Shakespeare which explores the merry world broadside ballad as a mode of consumption, probing the nature of audience complicity that it invites. It begins with The Winter’s Tale (c. 1610), which interrogates the status of old tales and of happy endings, and the idea – explicitly articulated in Cymbeline (c. 1610–11) – that to be ‘put into rhyme’ is to suffer aesthetic and emotional impoverishment. It then contrasts As You Like It (c. 1598–99) with King Lear (c. 1605–06) as rival disguised-king stories, in which the failure of ballad tropes to reflect reality is played first as farce and then as tragedy.