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 Routledge Studies in Shakespeare

SHAKESPEARE AND
HAPPINESS
Kathleen French
Shakespeare and Happiness

Shakespeare and Happiness is a study of attitudes to happiness in the

early modern period and in Shakespeare’s plays. It considers the
conflicting influences of religion and Aristotelian philosophy in shaping
attitudes to the possibility of attaining happiness.
By being the first book to focus specifically on the representation of
happiness in Shakespeare’s plays, it contributes to

• feminist approaches to Shakespeare by foregrounding the important

role of women in showing the right way to live and achieve happiness.
• timely criticism, as it considers Shakespeare in the current context of
the #MeToo movement.
• providing new insights to studies of the emotions by approaching them
from the perspective of research conducted by positive psychologists.

This book takes an interdisciplinary approach that combines methodologies

from literature, psychology, philosophy, religion and history, emphasizing
the richness and complexity of Shakespeare’s exploration of the nature of
happiness.

Kathleen French has a PhD from The University of Sydney. She is cur-
rently an Honorary Associate in the Department of English at The
University of Sydney.
Routledge Studies in Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s Sublime Pathos

Person, Audience, Language
Jonathan P. A. Sell

Shakespeare and Civil Unrest in Britain and the United States

Edited by Mark Bayer and Joseph Navitsky

Shakespeare’s Military Spouses and Twenty-First Century Warfare

Kelsey Ridge

Dramaturgies of Love in Romeo and Juliet

Word, Music, and Dance
Jonas Kellermann

The Shakespeare Multiverse

Fandom as Literary Praxis
Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes

Shakespeare’s Returning Warriors – and Ours

Alan Warren Friedman

Shakespeare’s Influence on Karl Marx

The Shakespearean Roots of Marxism
Christian A. Smith

Shakespeare and Happiness

Kathleen French

Shakespeare and Emotional Expression

Finding Feeling through Colour
Bríd Phillips

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/

Routledge-Studies-in-Shakespeare/book-series/RSS
Shakespeare and
Happiness

Kathleen French
First published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2022 Kathleen French
The right of Kathleen French to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested

ISBN: 978-0-367-74220-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-20454-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-15663-5 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003156635

Typeset in Sabon
by MPS Limited, Dehradun
In memory of Tim Kelly
Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1

PART I
Thinking About Happiness 19

1 Happiness in the Early Modern Period 21

2 Approaches to Shakespeare 43

PART II
Happiness Gained: The Merchant of Venice, As You
Like It, and Twelfth Night 67

3 Looking for Different Types of Happiness 69

4 Looking for Happiness in a Fallen World 94
5 Rewriting Eve 119

PART III
Happiness Lost: Hamlet, Measure for Measure,
Othello, and The Winter’s Tale 145

6 Trapped in a Fallen World 147

viii Contents
7 Blaming Eve: Exercises in Power 163
8 And After That Forgiveness? 179

Conclusion 198
Bibliography 204
Index 224
Acknowledgements

The idea of writing about Shakespeare and happiness had its origins in
informal discussions with friends who were working in the field of
positive psychology. My first introduction to positive psychology came
from Toni Noble, who drew my attention to the work of Martin
Seligman. Over the years she has mentored me, providing me with the
names of other researchers in the field, and acting as a sounding board
for me to test my ideas. This book could not have been written without
her unfailing support and advice. My thanks go also to Robin Murray,
who read the sections on positive psychology and offered helpful
comments.
The chapters on the romantic comedies reflect my initial interest in
positive thinking and happiness and are based on the research conducted
for my PhD thesis. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my
supervisor, Huw Griffiths. The extent and depth of his knowledge of
the early modern period was inspirational. He guided and supported me
and after my meetings with him I felt encouraged to believe that I could
do better. As I have moved on to postdoctoral study and extended the
scope of my investigation to include plays in which happiness is
threatened, he has continued to be generous in taking the time to read
my new work and provide thoughtful and stimulating comments.
More generally, my thanks go to the backup supervisor for my thesis,
Liam Semler, and other members of the academic staff in the English
Department of The University of Sydney. They have supported me, both
as a post graduate student and, more recently, as an Honorary Associate
in the Department of English, the University of Sydney. Attending
meetings of the Early Modern Literature and Culture Research Group
(EMLAC) provided opportunities to hear about research being
conducted into varying aspects of the early modern period. Travelling
to conferences hosted by the organization, The Australia and New
Zealand Shakespeare Association (ANZSA), enabled me to test my ideas
by delivering papers and engaging in discussions with other participants.
I particularly valued the opportunity to attend a conference in France on
As You Like It, organised by the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon. My
x Acknowledgements
thanks to the organizers of the conference, Sophie Lemercier-Goddard,
Michèle Vignaux, and Sophie Chiari, who included my paper as a
chapter in their subsequent publication, New Perspectives on As You
Like It. My thanks also go to Mary Farquhar from Griffith University,
who provided thoughtful comments in the final stages of preparation of
my manuscript.
I would especially like to acknowledge members of my family and
friends who have helped me to persist over the years of studying for my
PhD and through the process of additional writing that followed.
And finally, this book is dedicated to the late Tim Kelly, who
encouraged me to believe that connecting Shakespeare to positive
psychology and happiness was a project worth undertaking.

Kathleen French
Honorary Associate
The University of Sydney
Introduction

When I first told friends and colleagues that I was researching happiness
in the early modern period, a common response was a puzzled question,
“But was there any?” This is hardly a surprising reaction; it is easy to
make generalizations about the religious, political, and social realities of
the time. Belief in Original Sin emphasized the impossibility of attaining
true happiness on earth, since happiness could only be found by union
with God in the afterlife. Governments might pay lip service to theories
of the common good, but they were more likely to be autocratic and, in
some cases, despotic. There were recurring disasters of war, plague, and
famine, and continuing inequalities of rank and gender. Yet, in spite of
this, a number of people who were literate and able to leave a record of
their beliefs provide evidence of diversity. In personal records and in
literary works, they express a desire for happiness and explore how they
might achieve this, often focusing on interpersonal relationships as a
source of well-being. Shakespeare and Happiness is a study of attitudes
to happiness in the early modern period, with a particular focus on the
differing ways in which Shakespeare represented it in his plays.
In Shakespeare’s time, ideas about what constituted happiness were
far from uniform and were a product of apparently disparate influences.
The belief that the individual has a right to happiness, and that gov-
ernments have a duty to provide it, would have been foreign to people
living in the early modern period. The classical tradition, represented
especially by the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, saw the
relationship of the citizen to the state in different terms from the
Founding Fathers of America. It placed emphasis on the obligation of
the virtuous individual to contribute to effective government. Happiness
was not a right but a condition attained by moral behaviour in a wider
social and political context. In Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethics,
eudaimonia (which David Ross translates as “perfect happiness”) is
“rational activity in accordance with virtue” and is “a state of character
concerned with choice”, since “it is in our power to be virtuous or vi-
cious”.1 Aristotle offers a teleological explanation in which happiness
comes from virtuous living and can be experienced in this life. An
DOI: 10.4324/9781003156635-101
2 Introduction
alternative, and in many ways conflicting, vision was embedded in
Christian theology. Profoundly influenced by St Augustine, the church
taught that mankind is irretrievably blighted by sin and, as a result, true
happiness cannot be found in this life. However, despite providing dif-
ferent interpretations about the nature and experience of happiness,
most philosophy and theology agreed on a crucial point – the importance
of right living. Although the medieval theologian, St Thomas Aquinas,
believed that happiness is the gift of God, he advised that humans could
contribute to attaining it by developing moral virtues.2 A study of
Shakespeare’s plays draws attention to the diversity and contradictions
in the ways in which early modern people thought about happiness. The
representation of emotions is far from uniform and shows an under-
standing that we live in a world marked by both suffering and joy.
Some characters will earn the right to happiness by virtuous living,
whilst others will be crushed by tragedy and succumb to emotions of
melancholy and despair.
Literature, including drama, has always foregrounded the importance
of emotion in revealing character and contributing to plot development.
However, in the last 20 years there has been an increased interest in
studying the emotions, and disciplines as diverse as anthropology, phi-
losophy, cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, and psychiatry
have complemented research carried out in the fields of literature, cul-
tural studies, and history. Centres for the History of Emotions have been
established, most notably one in London at Queen Mary College, and
the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of
Emotions, located across nine university campuses. The history of
emotions is a discipline that is continually evolving and R. S. White
explains that there is “no single ‘grand narrative’” dominating the study;
instead differing approaches “illuminate some aspect of the primacy of
emotions in interpretations of Shakespeare”.3 My focus on happiness in
Shakespeare is part of this increasing multidisciplinary interest in the
emotions, which draws attention to the complexity of his representation
of real and imagined worlds.
Approaches to emotions through the disciplines of biology and psy-
chology place more emphasis on the mind and body as the product of
forces that have remained stable over long periods of time. This is par-
ticularly the province of evolutionary psychologists, who theorize that
emotions evolved in response to life-threatening situations in which ne-
gative emotions would have functioned to aid survival and contribute to
reproductive success.4 Thus, the sight of a tiger would have produced a
fright and flight response and the emotion of jealousy functioned to alert
a male to a mate’s possible infidelity and the possibility of bringing up a
rival’s children. The problem with some of our ancestral emotions is that
nowadays the negative effects of personal pain often appear to outweigh
any positive evolutionary benefit. As David Buss explains, we have
 Introduction 3
evolved mechanisms that will hurt others, allow us to gain advantage at
their expense, delight in their downfall, and envy their success. In this
reading, Shakespeare’s plays, especially the tragedies, show the de-
structive effects of our evolutionary heritage as negative emotions like
anger, jealousy, uncontrolled ambition, and the desire to take revenge
drive the action. Lear’s anger at Cordelia’s outspokenness leads him to
reject the only daughter who loves him, Othello murders his wife because
he believes she has been unfaithful, Macbeth and Claudius are tempted
by ambition to commit murder and treason, and Hamlet feels compelled
to take revenge on Claudius.
A tendency to search for universal or pan-cultural explanations for the
emotions has proved to be a “particular site of tension” in the broader
field of studies. Some responses attempt to synthesize apparent contra-
dictions. Thus, Marcelo Borge describes emotions as a “biocultural
phenomenon” that is “intrinsically social and embedded in a broader
historical and cultural context”, and Rob Boddice sees the human being
“as bioculturally dynamic, with contingent feelings, expressions, and
experiences”.5 Meaning is “embodied but nonetheless situated, medi-
ated, and constructed” as the histories of the body and brain are en-
tangled with political and cultural history and issues of power and
authority.6 Writing from a philosophical viewpoint, Martha Nussbaum
believes that emotions such a love, anger, fear, jealousy, grief, envy, and
compassion have a biological basis that is likely to be common to all of
us, but these emotions are socially constructed and help us find answers
to questions such as “What is worth caring about? How should I live?”7
Other responses focus less on synthesis of biology and culture and more
exclusively on context. Monique Sheer’s practice theory is designed to
enrich psychological models of embodied cognition by emphasizing the
importance of the social world. Practice theory “emphasizes that the
body is not a static, timeless, universal foundation that produces ahis-
torical emotional arousal, but is itself socially situated, adaptive, trained,
plastic, and thus historical”.8 Katie Barclay, working in the field of the
history of the emotions, believes that things we may be tempted to think
are universal are “actually different across time and space” and that
emotions must be considered in the context of historical, cultural, social,
and material forces.9
The belief that Shakespeare’s plays represent a universal emotional
experience has fallen out of favour as historians of the emotions suggest
a more complex view, in which emotions are a combination of biological
or chemical influences with linguistic and social forces.10 For literary
critics, particularly, the role of culture is foregrounded. Interest in the
emotions as socially constructed coincides with the development of body
studies, as both aim to challenge simplistic accounts of the biological
causes of behaviour and feeling. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe,
Mary Floyd-Wilson, and Michael Schoenfeldt have been influential in
4 Introduction
drawing attention to the Galenic medical model of the humours as an
explanation of the early modern understanding of emotions. This med-
ical theory, they believe, was used by poets and dramatists to account for
the causes of peoples’ actions. Galenism provided an account of the
world and human behaviour in which the cold, hot, wet, and dry hu-
mours “constituted the material basis of any living creature’s char-
acteristic appraisals and response to its immediate environment … and
by doing so organised its ability to act or even think.”11 In a materially
based explanation of early modern understanding of selfhood, the
porous human body was seen to be vulnerable to fluctuation as a result
of temperament and the influence of the environment. However, Michael
Schoenfeldt acknowledges the Galenic discourse is potentially limiting as
a means of representing character. Lynne Enterline and Juliana Schiesari
point out that, in the early modern period, it was used to validate mis-
ogyny through the gendering of emotions, relegating women to an in-
ferior biological and social position, in which they were believed to be
less capable of rational thinking than men. Even their emotions were
considered to have less value and to be more uncontrollable.12 Paster
believes that Shakespeare and his contemporaries took this complex
system literally. Recently, however, critics have criticized the dominance
of humoral belief as an adequate explanation of Shakespeare’s re-
presentation of emotion and Huw Griffiths comments on “the particular
limitations of her argument and of this approach.”13 Adopting the ter-
minology of the humours is one technique that Shakespeare uses to
create a language of psychological inwardness, particularly in drama-
tizing melancholic characters, but focusing only on a psychophysiolo-
gical approach provides a limited response to the originality of
Shakespeare’s representation of character. As an example, Matthew
Steggle discusses the melancholic Jaques from As You Like It, seeing him
as a role player, indulging in “a carefully cultivated addiction”. His
behaviour “interacts with early modern ideas of humours insofar as it
draws on the vocabulary and the assumptions of medical writing,
without necessarily reducing [him] to a simple and generic case study.”14
Shakespeare often appropriated, but also moved beyond, the Galenic
explanation of the relationship between emotion, behaviour, and gender
to develop a more complex understanding of human motivation.
Increasingly, scholars have extended their understanding of the re-
lationship between emotions and the shared and contested ideas, values,
and behaviour of a particular sociocultural context. They examine
the impact of cultural expectations on how people thought and felt, and
consider the extent to which people modified their thoughts and
actions in order to conform. Carol and Peter Stearns, William Reddy,
and Barbara Rosenwein have been influential in formulating key con-
cepts of “emotionology”, “emotives”, and “emotional communities”.
Emotionology, as defined by Carol and Peter Stearns, is “the attitudes or
 Introduction 5
standards that a society, or a definable group within a society, maintains
toward basic emotions and their appropriate expression.”15 Distinguishing
between emotionology and actual emotions, they acknowledge that a so-
ciety’s professed values may not describe an individual’s actual emotional
experience and that emotionology can contribute to definitions of deviance.
It is important to be aware of variations in a particular time period. Reddy
and Rosenwein are also interested in the role that institutions played in
peoples’ lives, and the extent to which they were able to give expression to
alternative viewpoints. Reddy describes a nested hierarchy of social
structures consisting of “emotional regimes” (the codes of expression and
repression that societies and governments create and enforce), “emotional
refuges” (spaces, both social and physical, that provide opportunities for
people to express emotions not legitimized by a dominant regime), and
“emotional liberty” (the freedom to choose different goals).16 His model
explores the fluid nature of emotions, both individual and collective, and
provides an explanation of the connections between emotions and personal
and social change.17 Thomas Dodman believes that Reddy’s conceptual
scaffold is “the most sophisticated proposed to date”, since it “bridges the
divide between inner feelings and outer expression … placing emotions
firmly within a relational network”.18 In slightly different ways, Rosenwein
proposes that people lived in “emotional communities” that were the same
as social communities, and that they constantly moved from one com-
munity to another, adjusting their displays of emotion and their judge-
ments in keeping with these different environments. Each of these societies
evoked, shaped, constrained, and expressed emotions differently, allowing
for the expression of numerous voices and even within them “deviant in-
dividuals” articulated contradictory opinions and were able to find a
place.19 Rosenwein’s model provides an important reminder that most
cultures are not monolithic, and this allows her to express some optimism
about cultural tolerance. Reddy’s concept of “emotional refuges” and
“emotional liberty” and Rosenwein’s theory of “emotional communities”
imply that people were searching for ways to live that would provide
greater life satisfaction. However, they do not overtly deal with the pos-
sibility that these people were searching for happiness. More recently, Bob
Boddice refers to the “culturally bound scripts of expression and action
that provide the building blocks of emotional and sensory lives, and ex-
perience itself”, and Eric Walle points out the important role that social
interactions play in creating a context within which emotions can be ex-
perienced and function.20 These interactions can include religious,
ethical, and philosophical beliefs, internalized by groups and in-
dividuals but created by the community at large in the context of
overarching structures of power. The work of Stearns, Reddy, and
Rosenwein continues to influence publication on the emotions. Susan
Broomhall has been a significant figure in her role as editor of a number
of collections, in which essays “interrogate both how emotions ordered
6 Introduction
systems of thought and how they were themselves ordered by multiple
individual experiences in the world”. She describes “dynamic and
dialogic processes of negotiation, enacting emotional meaning and in
turn producing other facets of self, identity, practices and beha-
viours”.21 However, Broomhall pays limited attention to fictional
writing. Another collection, Sources for the History of Emotions, deals
with the history of emotions, sources, and emerging themes but in-
cludes no discussion of Shakespeare.22 There has been some analysis of
Shakespeare’s plays in the journal Emotion Review, and a few collec-
tions of essays: Shakespeare and Emotions, The Renaissance of
Emotion, Hamlet and Emotions, and Shakespeare and Emotion.23
However, there has been limited focus on positive emotions. A sig-
nificant exception to the prioritization of studies of negative emotion is
Journal of Happiness Studies, but, despite promoting itself as inter-
disciplinary, it does not publish articles on representations of happiness
in literature.
Literary criticism in the last 20 years has focused almost exclusively on
the negative emotions represented by writers in the early modern period.
This is partly a response to the concerns of the time and the influence of
Calvinist Christianity which was based on the writing of St Augustine
and the doctrine of Original Sin. In Augustinian theology, man who was
born in sin was deprived of the possibility of attaining earthly happiness
and women were further demonized as descendants of Eve who tempted
Adam. The preoccupation by critics with negative emotion is also a re-
flection of the long engagement with Freud. In considering the differ-
ences and connections between early modern ideas about the self and
psychoanalysis, Schoenfeldt compares the Galenic belief that illness is
caused by humoral excess with the Freudian theory that repressed
memory is the source of illness. The aim of both regimes, Schoenfeldt
claims, is to “scour the subject of deleterious inwardness”.24 Freud was
pessimistic about the possibility of achieving enduring happiness.
Happiness in the strictest sense, he wrote, comes from the satisfaction of
needs and is only temporary; it is threatened by the body, which is
doomed to decay, by the external world and by our relations with others.
In Civilisation and Its Discontents, he recognizes that people strive for
happiness – what he calls the pleasure principle – but believes that “all
the regulations of the universe run counter to it”.25 Freud has been in-
fluential in foregrounding the negative effects of religion; he wrote about
the sense of guilt that is inextricably linked to the development of civi-
lization and the resulting loss of happiness. He claims:

… the price we pay for our advance in civilisation is a loss of

happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt … religions,
at any rate, have never overlooked the part played in civilisation by a
 Introduction 7
sense of guilt. Furthermore … they claim to redeem mankind from
this sense of guilt, which they call sin.26

Nevertheless, Debora Shuger has pointed out that, despite Freud’s dis-
avowal of religion, its influence still lingers in Freudian psychology as the
theory of the id, the ego, and the superego is informed by Calvinistic
beliefs about the mind.27
As literary criticism has focused so extensively on negative emotions,
attention to the power of positive emotion has come from research in
other disciplines. Recent articles in the journal Emotion Review have
acknowledged “the unique social, behavioral, and physical health ben-
efits of positive emotion and related well-being constructs” and their
ability “to bind individuals together in social relationships by promoting
cooperation and group stability.”28 These insights build on earlier work
done in the field of positive psychology, which emerged as a distinctive
discipline in a 2000 edition of American Psychologist. Positive psy-
chologists set themselves in opposition to a negative view of human
nature and the pathologies which arise from what they label a “disease
model of human functioning”.29 They see their discipline as more than
just a branch of medicine concerned with health or illness, but as being
about positive individual traits, and about civic virtues and the institu-
tions that move individuals towards better citizenship. Fundamental to
positive psychology is Barbara Fredrickson’s Broaden-and-Build theory,
which postulates that positive emotions prompt people to discard au-
tomatic ways of acting in favour of pursuing novel and creative forms of
action and prompt cooperation as they develop emotional connections.
These positive emotions can counter the effects of negative emotions,
what Fredrickson calls the Undoing Hypothesis.30 The goal of positive
psychology is to understand the conditions and processes that contribute
to optimal functioning in individuals, groups, and institutions, placing
emphasis on positive experiences and strengths rather than deficits. It
provides new insights into the power of positive emotions, especially
optimism, resilience, and forgiveness, in enabling people to overcome the
effects of adverse conditions and trauma. Martin Seligman claims,
“Positive emotions … set up an action repertoire and a mindset that
broadens and builds abiding intellectual and social resources. Positive
emotions, in short, build the cathedrals of our lives.”31 Individuals have
choices, preferences, and the possibility of taking charge of the way
they live.
Seligman initially rejected the pessimism and focus on human weak-
nesses and neuroses that he identified in Freudian psychology which, he
claimed, had dragged the doctrine of Original Sin into twentieth-century
psychology. He made a clear distinction between the Judeo-Christian
tradition, with its emphasis on the sinfulness of humanity, which he saw
as the inheritance of Freud, and the secular Hellenic legacy, particularly
8 Introduction
the influence of Aristotle, which informs positive psychology.32 In
Authentic Happiness he represented the alternatives as irrevocably po-
larized, but later, in a joint article (written in collaboration with Tracy
Steen, Nansook Park, and Christopher Peterson), he modified his posi-
tion, acknowledging the debt of positive psychology to Freud’s work:

Research findings from positive psychology are intended to supple-

ment, not remotely to replace, what is known about human suffering,
weakness and disorder … we believe that a complete science and a
complete practice of psychology should include an understanding of
suffering and happiness, as well as their interaction.33

This retraction is significant in recognizing that a study of happiness

must take place within the context of human suffering and weaknesses,
and it suggests a way to access Shakespeare’s representation of char-
acters who attempt to find happiness within the context of fallen worlds,
where people behave with cruelty and intolerance.
Over the last 20 years, positive psychology has evolved in response to
criticism that it still adopts a polarizing perspective in which positive
qualities are seen as beneficial and negative qualities as undesirable.
Second-wave positive psychology continues to be driven by concepts that
characterize the first wave, such as the importance of well-being and
flourishing; however, it avoids what it sees as the simple binaries of a
Manichean approach to create a holistic duality in which emotions and
experiences are not labelled as either all good or all bad. Building on
Seligman’s acknowledgement of the relationship between happiness and
human suffering, it proposes “a more nuanced appreciation of the
complexities of the good life” and a recognition that “specific mental
states inherently involve complex, intertwined shades of light and
dark”.34 This requires recognition of the dynamic interplay of opposites,
the way harmony can be created by balancing these opposites into a
whole, and an acknowledgement that apparently negative states can be
conducive to flourishing. Some Shakespearean characters demonstrate
aspects of what psychologists refer to as post-traumatic stress recovery,
as they are able to learn from their experiences and grow.35 This ap-
preciation of the “ambivalent nature of the good life” coincides parti-
cularly with my analysis of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies in which
people search for happiness in worlds that are characterized by forces
that promote distress and suffering. Weiting Ng goes further, to point
out that recent positive psychology appreciates how “suffering and
dysphoric states form another dimension of human experience and
functioning”.36 I take this argument one stage further to point out that,
in showing how distress and suffering cannot always be overcome,
Shakespeare’s plays demonstrate the complexity of life. In the comedies
not all are included in the happy ending, in the tragi-comedies suffering
 Introduction 9
and loss can be permanent, and in the tragedies happiness is irretrievably
destroyed. In other words, we should recognize that ideas about hap-
piness must be considered in the context of both positive and negative
aspects of life.
Positive psychologists believe in taking an interdisciplinary approach
that unites previously scattered and disparate lines of theory and re-
search about what makes life most worth living. They see themselves as
closing the post-Cartesian split between mind and body and emphasizing
the importance of the inter-connection between the two. As a result, their
research involves a methodology that synthesizes psychology, medicine,
and philosophy.37 Positive psychology gives philosophical depth and
cross-cultural application to its findings by situating itself within the
theories of Aristotle. It has its roots in late twentieth century humanistic
psychology, which emphasizes the importance of a philosophical, as well
as a scientific, understanding of human existence and the need to do
justice to human potential and achievement.38 Humanistic and positive
psychology both look back to the humanism in the cultures of Classical
Greece and Renaissance Europe, when belief in the value and dignity of
man was affirmed. Positive psychology acknowledges its debt to
Aristotle’s theory of eudaimonia – happiness as activity of the soul in
accordance with virtue.39 Aristotle’s exploration of the ethical nature of
happiness in The Nicomachean Ethics is of particular importance to
positive psychology in guiding its research and practice. Positive psy-
chologists believe that an alliance with Aristotelian philosophy provides
an enriched understanding of life as meaningful, one requiring “using
your signature strengths in the service of something larger than you
are.”40 Carol Ryff and Burton Singer emphasize the importance of
personal growth which, they believe, comes closest to Aristotle’s concept
of eudaimonia, since it is concerned with the self-actualization of the
individual.41
Positive psychologists emphasize the importance of identifying and
building on character strengths and virtues to overcome personal neu-
roses and environmental challenges.42 They particularly endorse the
Aristotelian virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, as-
serting that individuals have choices, preferences, and the possibility of
taking charge of their own lives.43 In addition, they identify character
strengths not considered by Aristotle. They emphasize the importance of
resilience that enables people to recover from loss so that they can learn
from positive and negative experiences, grow as a result, and even thrive
in the face of adversity.44 Optimism and hope are linked to resilience,
since they encourage people to persevere in their pursuit of goals, to
persist in the face of challenges, and to have positive expectations that
can be self-fulfilling.45 The capacity to hope can enable people to recover
from traumatic life experiences, and encourages them to believe in
benevolence, rather than malevolence, and to value self-worth over self-
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