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Rethinking Art and Virtue in Shakespeare's As You Like It.
Mugg, Sharon
Mugg, Sharon
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Abstract
This thesis argues that a re-examination of the similarities and differences between Shakespeare’s As You Like It and its primary narrative source, Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde (1590), reveals important insights that would help to resolve recent scholarly disputes surrounding the ethical aims of As You Like It. Indeed, the transparent nature of Lodge’s ethical and artistic aims in Rosalynde offers an intriguing contrast to As You Like It, a play in which Shakespeare seems to have self-consciously removed all the elements of Lodge’s text that ask us to read for a clear moral point. I propose that As You Like It does not have such a point, at least not in the way that scholars have been imagining. While Lodge’s text affirms that art relates to ethics in a straightforwardly didactic way, Shakespeare’s play obscures the moral point, suggesting that he may be working from a much less didactic view of how art and ethics relate. Moreover, because Rosalynde explicitly references Aristotle’s ethics, I further suggest that a re-examination of Aristotle’s position may yield insight into the ways As You Like It reconfigures Lodge’s assumptions on the relation between art and ethics. I contend that As You Like It dramatizes the action of art teaching and thus queries the purpose of art and its relation to living well. Through this dramatization, Shakespeare re-inflates and recuperates a nuanced Aristotelian position on the relationship between art and ethics, according to which the purpose of art is to help us see and understand the world more fully in order that we might act more discerningly within it; art teaches us not a Lodgian formula for virtuous living but the intellectual virtue of phronesis (practical wisdom), which involves a nuanced and perceptive view of the world, and ourselves in the world, and forms the basis of virtuous character.
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Date
2021-05-31
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University of Kansas
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English literature, Ethics, Aesthetics, Aristotle, As You Like It, Poetics, Shakespeare, Virtue Ethics