Introduction

Summary

‘Fair virtue's force’

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the newly transformed Bottom, abandoned by his friends, comforts himself with a simple ditty that awakens Titania from her drugged sleep:

I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing again.

Mine ear is much enamored of thy note;

So is mine eye enthrallèd to thy shape,

And thy fair virtue's force perforce doth move me

On the first view to say, to swear, I love thee. (3.1.121–5)

The comedy of the encounter rests in the mismatch between Titania's heightened language and Bottom's asinine form: when she praises ‘thy fair virtue's force’, audience members likely note that hairy Bottom is neither fair nor especially virtuous. Yet the phrase speaks to the vitalist understanding of virtue that runs beneath and alongside more personal understandings of virtue in the classical tradition and helps infuse the fairy forest with animate agency. Titania's pairing of ‘virtue’ and ‘force’ indicates the roots of virtus in ideas of power, potentiality, virility and vitality that are tapped and disciplined in the individual exercise of ethical capacities such as courage and liberality. Greek arete, like Roman virtus, could simply refer to ‘the quality or proficiency of men, gods, animals and things. [In Homer,] there can be an arete of feet, of fighting, of shoemaking, or of the mind’. Indeed, the streaked flower harvested by Puck is possessed of a ‘virtuous property’ (3.2.367), a hidden efficacy, that is already acting upon Titania in this scene. We might extend the phrase ‘virtuous property’ to any object wielded on stage to build worlds and effect change. The virtuous properties of plants, books, skulls and swords are called forth by the skill and judgement of the persons who handle them, and both actor and actant subsist within an environment of forces and factors, from the epidemiological to the civic, that can stymie or amplify the actualisation of powers and projects. Virtue encompasses the broadest possible range of potentiality, both human and non-human, with everything that entails for Shakespearean drama, which so often witnesses one person's pursuit of virtue in conflict with the projects of others, and sometimes supports enterprises that are anything but virtuous.