Shakespeare and the contradictions of honour.

This study explores the concept of honour as it enters
into several Shakespearean plays. It presents an historical
definition of honour in the light of which Shakespeare's
treatment of the concept can be seen as a response to the
complex ethical inheritance of the sixteenth century.
Chapter 1 studies the main classical and medieval
traditions of honour and the reception by the Renaissance of
this plurality of ideas. The first section explores honour in
the context of the pagan concept of social virtue and
identifies it as an unstable secular formulation of virtue
which defines the aristocratic public function. The second
section examines the two principal medieval responses to this
secular ethic: the Augustinian denial of the human capacity
for virtue and the scholastic compromise tradition. which
grants man a limited power for well-doing and. in integrating
secular virtue into the structure of creation. provides the
framework for chivalric honour. The third section presents
honour in the Renaissance as an expression of this diverse
classical and Christian heritage. It identifies three
traditions - the chivalric. the humanist and the Calvinist -
that reflect an age of divided ethical allegiances in which
Shakespeare was led to explore honour as a problematic and
ultimately tragic concept.Chapter 4 discusses Shakespeare's treatment of the
chivalric tradition in Henry Y and Troilus and Cressida. It
argues that both plays. though in very different ways.
interrogate that tradition and its claim to incorporate honour
within the system of natural law - Henry Y by exposing its
weakness as an historical model. Trojlus and Cressjda by
showing its connection to an individualistic honour.
Chapter 5 examines honour in Hamlet in the context of
the revenge ethic. It suggests that the protagonist's
contradictory task - the virtuous cause that is a mandate to
exact private vengeance - enacts the self-defeating tensions
in honour. and that this tragic conflict is played out within
a Christian universe which offers the possibility of the
transcendence of honour.
Chapter 6 explores Shakespeare's treatment of the pagan
concept of public service in Juljus Caesar and Corjolanus.
It attempts to show that Shakespeare portrays this concept
as tragically flawed because reliant for social order on an
aristocratic honour which makes individual excellence
inseparable from self-assertion.