How would you summarize your research for curious non-experts?

This piece reflects my interest in how people in Shakespeare’s time thought about the role of human effort in pleasing God. It’ll be published as “Hamlet and Hexis”, which is an Aristotelian word for habit, in a volume from Cambridge University Press on Shakespeare and Virtue Ethics.

To summarize the question I tackle, in the famous closet scene, where Hamlet confronts his mother, Gertrude, about his father's death, he starts out saying that he’ll “wring [her] heart” and then he sets her sins before her. She's horrified, exclaiming “Oh, Hamlet, speak no more!/ Thou turns’t mine eyes into my very soul,/ And there I see such black and grained spots.” Now, that's very much a conventional scene of pastoral counseling, where a Protestant pastor would try to open a parishioner’s eyes to the full horror of their sin so that they could turn their life around.

At the same time, though, Hamlet goes on to tell his mother to “assume a virtue, if you have it not.” Act like you have the virtue, keep out of Claudius’s bed, and “that shall lend a kind of easiness to the next abstinence.” Eventually the enacted virtue will become habit, and “change the stamp of nature.” That's the language of Aristotelian virtue ethics. This idea that you can make yourself a better person through your own efforts is anathema to reformation Protestantism, which is all about God's grace; you do not earn your way to heaven through your works. So my research asks how can Hamlet be a Protestant pastoral counselor and an Aristotelian virtue ethics thinker at the same time?

How did you get started on this project?

I have been interested for a long time in the way that religious attitudes and values become part of the discourse of secular culture. In this case, if you have a grace-alone religious culture, how can you teach people how to become good Christians, and then how do those ideas about the cultivation of a godly soul translate into the broader world? With those interests, I noticed a three day long workshop on virtue ethics and Shakespeare at the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC. I applied, was accepted, and joined an international group of participants. We were so excited by the work that everybody was doing that the director of the session decided to collect our work and put it all together into a volume on Shakespeare and virtue ethics.

What are the ethical implications and conclusions of your research? Who might your chapter inspire?

Wow, well, obviously my work is useful for people who are interested in understanding Hamlet and people who study the development of early modern Protestant thought. I think my research also speaks to people who are interested in human efforts to be good, especially people who have an active faith, whether Christian or otherwise, and are interested in the intersection between human effort and some kind of divine inspiration or grace.

This essay helps us consider how we can act well in the world without taking all the credit. What makes goodness possible, besides pure effort? And this is actually something that my agnostic father was interested in. When he heard people who were too confident in their own ability to always be upright, seeing themselves as totally responsible for their own success or failure, his response was, “A heck of a burden.” I think that all of us need to think about how we balance our sense of ethical responsibility with our sense of human fallibility. How do we bear the burden of being good, or failing to be good? Where does habit formation fit into that balance?

What advice would you give to young folks interested in English or research?

On this project, I had the aid of a student, Kari Jacobson, who had shown that she had a keen interest in and ability to understand early modern English, the sort of English that Shakespeare writes, so I invited her to work with me on a summer student faculty collaborative research project. Kari not only did wonderful legwork, amassing a bunch of material for me from early modern texts that I could use, but she became interested along the way in a separate issue, how early modern pastoral counselors tried to console people when bad things happened to them. Kari became so interested that she developed her own essay that she presented at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR).

I encourage students to work at having the confidence (admittedly hard to develop) to pursue the things that get you curious and not only what your professor assigns. If you wonder about something, follow up on it. It's not like, as a student, you're ignorant or don't know enough and so you have to slavishly do what your professor says to do. Follow up on your questions, and engage your professor in conversation and say, “Yeah, I got curious about this, what do you think?” The essay Kari produced was extremely gratifying for her and me, and we learned together on that journey. Students can take that next step to explore.

What are your ongoing research projects?

Oh, boy, I have an ongoing project on a woman who is a contemporary of Shakespeare, who left literally 1000s of pages of manuscript, which exist because she married into a family that was ennobled. A family like that had to keep track of estate records and lawsuits and deeds for property and stuff like that, so there are lots of records. Among them are her religious meditations and records of medical cases that she kept when she treated her household and the local villagers. It's an amazingly rich trove of papers about a woman who lived from 1552 to 1620. What I'm fascinated in right now is how she managed to be in charge of a grand household and yet be devoutly Protestant in her rejection of earthly riches (don’t lay up treasure that moth and rust will consume, but lay up your treasure in heaven). In her meditations, she's always saying don't put any stake in your earthly goods. But then, why did she fight lawsuits over her inheritance with her father and her sister? Why did she join her husband in fighting lawsuits over his inheritance?

Is this a case of cognitive dissonance? Or is there a way that her consciousness of her worldly status, her honor and social position, can mesh with her sense of the role that God has placed her into, allowing her to feel it was a responsibility to God not to overvalue but to be a good steward of these earthly things? That's a current hypothesis. I'll be presenting this research at a conference soon, and we'll see where it takes me.

To learn more about Dr. Kate Narveson, visit her faculty profile.

Published on: October 5, 2022

By: Andy Hageman