ABSTRACT
This chapter examines aesthetics and ethics as inextricable. Interpreting Shakespeare combines separate close reading and historical contextualization. There are many ways to discuss aesthetics generally and in Shakespeare, and I have chosen to return to Plato to see how he relates representation to aesthetics and ethics and how that provides a background to examine Shakespeare in these terms. Shakespeare puts himself so much into each world, line, sentence, into each voice and character that involves his investment of the aesthetic and the ethical. Besides discussing Shakespeare, I examine other writers in the Renaissance, such as of Bartolomé de Las Casas and Michel de Montaigne.
