Virtue's Own Feature: Shakespeare and the Virtue Ethics Tradition.

David N. Beauregard unrelentingly develops his goal of "explor[ing] the relationship of Aristotelian-Thomistic moral thought to Shakespeare's plays, with particular emphasis on the virtues and vices insofar as they shape character" (9). Part one, comprising two chapters, first delineates Sidney's mimetic-ethical poetic as also applicable to Shakespeare. Chapter two asserts the predominant influence of Aristotle's and Aquinas's ethical views on Elizabethan moral thought, summarizes the major precepts of both thinkers, and claims the central influence of this tradition on Shakespeare.

Part two consists of five chapters and an epilogue, in which Beauregard applies this Aristotelian-Thomistic virtue-vice mode of interpretation to two poems and eight plays by Shakespeare. Rather than organize around a strict chronology or genre, he patterns these sections on virtues and vices explored, coupling Venus and Adonis and The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet, 1 Henry IV and Macbeth, Measure for Measure and King Lear, and concludes with a Tempest chapter and consideration of "The Phoenix and Turtle" in his epilogue.

Some representative interpretations follow: Venus and Adonis portrays Venus as embodying the concupiscible appetites in her advances to Adonis and the irascible appetites in her responses to his death. Relatedly, The Taming of the Shrew distinguishes Lucentio's love for Bianca as induced by passion from Petruchio's love for Katharina as generated by will, with the resolution an indication that Petruchio restores his wife to virtuous loving obedience. Beauregard later discusses Hamlet's revenge motives from the perspective of the Thomistic virtue of vindicatio. Finally, Prospero displays prudential wisdom in The Tempest, while Miranda portrays ignorant wonder when alone and dangerous incontinence with Ferdinand; the various rebellious figures represent malicious ambition.

Such a bare summation, I fear, conveys a misleadingly reductive impression of Beauregard's nuanced applications of Aristotelian-Thomistic ethical distinctions. He makes a strong case for Aristotelian and Thomistic influences on Shakespeare's writing and is impressively versed in the ethical thought of both philosophers. But while this book has value in reminding Shakespeareans of largely ignored influences on Shakespeare's works exerted by two monumental figures in philosophic history, it also displays the shortcomings of an idee fixe.

On a theoretical level, Beauregard telescopes the medieval and Renaissance periods, presenting Shakespeare more as an early fourteenth-century counterpart of Dante than a late sixteenth-century contemporary of Montaigne. Paul O. Kristeller, much relied on by Beauregard, does acknowledge the continuing influence of Aristotle (but not of Aquinas) on Renaissance moral philosophy, but he also calls attention to the eclecticism of most humanists ("Renaissance Philosophy and the Medieval Tradition").

On more pragmatic grounds, the persuasiveness of Beauregard's actual interpretations of Shakespeare's poems and plays deserves consideration. His unwillingness to recognize eclecticism results in a truncated approach to a Hamlet without Stoical influences as well as an unchanging Prospero and badly underrated Miranda, caused by unawareness of Montaigne's contributions to The Tempest. Yet the Aristotelian-Thomistic virtue-vice approach works more convincingly when applied to Venus and Adonis. Could the Sidney poetic have been more influential on Shakespeare as an aspiring poet than as a practicing dramatist? Conversely, the weighty approach to the farcical Shrew transforms Shakespeare into Dr. Johnson's wished-for moralizer.

Shakespeare's exploration of human nobility and failure is so vast and Aristotle's and Aquinas's classifications of virtues and vices so extensive that overlapping concerns are inevitable. Insisting on a nearly exclusive Aristotelian-Thomistic ethic, however, misrepresents the eclectic nature of most Renaissance moral philosophy and of Shakespeare's ethical probing. Moreover, claiming that Shakespeare merely exemplified moral categorizations established by others, however impressive their systems may be, is to deny the originality and development of Shakespeare as a dramatic "thinker" in his own right.

JOHN F. HENNEDY Providence College