Chapter 6 - Hexis (Habit)

Summary

When Hamlet instructs Gertrude to “assume a virtue if you have it not,” since “use almost can change the stamp of nature,” his counsel echoes Aristotelian ethical concepts such as “nature” and “habit” (hexis). Those concepts supplied terms used in English Protestant pastoral guidance but took on new freight given Reformation revaluations of human effort. By 1600, religious concerns – the fallen person’s capacity to perform virtuous acts, the relationship between inward disposition and outward appearance – put pressure on Aristotelian ideas. Protestant clergy rejected Aristotle’s teaching on habit because it made virtue the result of human effort and yet their recommendations for devotional practice called for the cultivation of dispositional habits in all but name. While habit as formation of character finds little representation on stage, since drama rarely shows the slow formation of character, Hamlet’s preoccupation with custom allows us to listen in on someone thinking about what the springs of action and change are, in terms fully alive to the public discourse of late Elizabethan England, and the pastoral inflection he places on hexis shows us how an inherited ethical idea can take on a fresh livery in Shakespeare’s plays.