Aristotle links the practice of virtue to the achievement of happiness as both short-term pleasures and a long-term telos. This chapter on eudaimonia concentrates on the ethical dimension of this form of delight as it unfolds in some botanical metaphors in Shakespeare's Henry V and 1 Henry IV. I contextualize Shakespeare's plays with contemporary English Renaissance works in natural philosophy and natural history, which draw from Aristotle's notion of humanity’s tripartite soul to define the good life as dependent on the wellbeing of the civic collective rather than individual growth. In this model, the human spirit shares a lifeforce in common with plants (the nutritive) and animals (the sensitive), while also holding unique access to reason. Delight signals one’s immersion into this vegetative spirit, which functions as the ontological ground of a universal nature that thrives on weedy growth and uncultivated entanglements. At a time when considerations of virtue dominated a range of cultural, ecclesiastical, political, and soteriological theories of human flourishing, Shakespeare keys eudaimonia to the process of moving away from a focus on singular or distinctive excellence to an embrace of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all living things.

The chapter seeks to demonstrate that Shakespeare had two rather different – though not completely unrelated – conceptions of happiness. One is the Aristotelian eudaimonistic conception, which Shakespeare understood well and to which (as with everything he touched) he gave memorable expression. He understood its relation to virtue, to ‘proper pride’, and to social status. The other conception of happiness is more distinctive, and is a conception for which, as far as I know, there is not a standard designation. It might be called (usefully, if anachronistically) the Blakean or Nietzschean conception. Yeats called it the property of being ‘self-delighting’. Eudaimonia includes this property, but in itself this property has nothing to do with any conception of moral virtue, and can – though it need not – stand in sharp contrast with such. It may, on the other hand, have some relation to Machiavellian virtù. Pleasure in performing the self is part of it. It is as strongly manifested in some outright villains as it is in some admirable characters, and it is manifested in some characters who are hard to locate on such a scale.