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Othello, I Henry IV, Antony and Cleopatra
from Part II - Emotions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 October 2020
The chapter seeks to demonstrate that Shakespeare had two rather different – though not completely unrelated – conceptions of happiness. One is the Aristotelian eudaimonistic conception, which Shakespeare understood well and to which (as with everything he touched) he gave memorable expression. He understood its relation to virtue, to ‘proper pride’, and to social status. The other conception of happiness is more distinctive, and is a conception for which, as far as I know, there is not a standard designation. It might be called (usefully, if anachronistically) the Blakean or Nietzschean conception. Yeats called it the property of being ‘self-delighting’. Eudaimonia includes this property, but in itself this property has nothing to do with any conception of moral virtue, and can – though it need not – stand in sharp contrast with such. It may, on the other hand, have some relation to Machiavellian virtù. Pleasure in performing the self is part of it. It is as strongly manifested in some outright villains as it is in some admirable characters, and it is manifested in some characters who are hard to locate on such a scale.
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