ABSTRACT
The speeches Shakespeare gives Warwick here mirror the most widespread definition of honour in sixteenth-century England; honour is the reward due to virtuous action. His purpose, therefore, and in general the purposes of most writers who discuss the idea of honour, is of a quite pragmatic and didactic kind. That audience, which saw this play early in the 1590s, and the audiences for which Shakespeare wrote his subsequent plays, nevertheless had, no doubt, mixed and changeable ideas about honour, for the idea was tirelessly debated and amplified in the few decades surrounding Shakespeare's plays. The orthodox idea, however elaborately it was expressed or observed, remained Aristotelian in its assumption that honour is something external to man which may be gained only by virtuously performing appropriate deeds; this other, most significant of the unorthodox attitudes towards honour regarded it rather as an innate moral capacity than as external reward for virtuous action.
