The Voice of Grief

To speak of the virtue of grief seems a doubtful undertaking; at the very least it would ask for reimagining what it would mean to live a virtuous life. In what follows I will propose that Shakespeare's characters conduct such a far-reaching reconsideration of the ethical world, in which virtue as traditionally understood has its say, but where the voice of grief will not be silenced. Grief is one of the ‘extremes of passion’ mentioned by Edgar, along with joy (King Lear, 5.3.197). But in most classical and early modern accounts, virtue is understood to be the governance of the passions by reason. Emotional distress brought on by the exigencies of fortune is a disorder of the mind for which virtue is the remedy. In Tusculan Disputations Cicero contends that the wise man does not succumb to grief when faced with misfortune. Reason will be sufficient to overcome every perturbation of the mind: ‘At nemo sapiens nisi fortis; non cadet ergo in sapientem aegritudo’. A wise man is of great soul – magni animi – and therefore ‘invictus’ – unconquerable. The classical ideal of rational self-sufficiency reflects the interests of men who belong to a privileged military caste. Kristina Sutherland reminds us that virtue is derived from Latin virtus, a masculine concept of personal excellence that assigns high value to active dispositions such as courage, fortitude and independence. This understanding of virtue has had enduring currency, persisting in early modern society, and even into our own time.

Michel de Montaigne characterises grief as harmful, noting that ‘the stoics forbid this emotion to their sages as being base and cowardly’. He sees himself ‘among those who are the most free’ from grief, because ‘my sense of feeling has a hard skin, which I daily toughen and thicken by arguments’. In a later essay, however, he qualifies this assertion, maintaining that ‘we should indeed make some concessions to the simple authority of the common law of Nature but not allow ourselves to be swept tyrannously away by her: reason alone must govern our inclinations’.