Modern Age - Spring 2016 - 47

VIRTUE IS NOT BORING

nate with a wider courtly audience. But Hamlet knows as well as
his comrade Marcellus that "something is rotten in the state of
Denmark," that something is deeply inhuman in the manner of
his father's death, his mother's overhasty marriage, and his own
being shunted aside from the throne.
Alasdair MacIntyre, a distinguished modern proponent of the
Virtue Ethics tradition (there was a time when this would have
been a redundancy, but no more), has argued in his widely praised
book After Virtue that coherence in moral thought is only "intelligible in terms of a context of practical beliefs and of supporting
habits of thought, feeling, and action, a context that has . . . been
lost [since the medieval/early modern period], a context in which
moral judgments were understood as governed by impersonal
standards justified by a shared conception of the human good."9
Shakespeare is superb in showing us both the "shared conception of the human good" and the early modern challenges to
it, challenges that have become very nearly our exclusive postmodern assumptions and convictions. When in Othello the poor
sap Roderigo tells his "honest" friend Iago that he has not the
"virtue"-that is, the strength-to abandon his hopeless pursuit
of the beautiful and now-married Desdemona, Iago ridicules the
notion (with an accompanying obscene gesture): "A fig! 'Tis in
ourselves that we are thus or thus." He continues, "Our bodies are
our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners" (1.3.323-24)-
all is within our own power, declares Iago, if we have but the will
to make it so.

T

o complement this discussion of "man," consider one final
word, sense. In a spiritual or immaterial manner, one may
make sense, or talk intelligently; in a physical or concrete way,
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Modern Age - Spring 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Spring 2016

Contents
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