Virtues that Matter: Ethics and Embodiment in Hamlet.
When Hamlet advises his mother, “Assume a virtue if you have it not,” for many critics he affirms the transformative power of Aristotelian habit (hexis). Yet, in telling his mother to put on a different self in the same fashion that he might advise her to take up a different suit of clothes, Hamlet actually invokes a less embodied form of virtue than that found in earlier renderings. In this paper, I detail the counter tradition of “vertues”—those material powers that enlivened substantial bodies in late medieval and early modern discourse—that Hamlet actively suppresses in its thinking about the female body. In a host of medieval and early modern representations, virtues are not disembodied ideals. Medical and scientific writings refer to virtues as the elemental properties of bodies and their parts, from plants to rocks, or from heads to hands. Similarly, early drama does not suggest that virtues can be donned like “a frock or livery / That aptly is put on”; instead, virtues circulate, suffusing and interconnecting bodies through sensory contact. As Ophelia’s destruction attests, a forgotten legacy of material virtues connects medieval and early modern vernacular writings about women’s ethical action.
[Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities]