A List of Pre-eminent Ethical Treatises of the 16th Century
                  in conjectural order of importance
 
    Compiled by Ben Schneider, Lawrence University, Appleton, WI
                             August 1994
 
Cicero's *De Officiis*:  "Tully's *Offices*," was well-qualified
to become the gentleman's manual of the age, being short and imparting
all a schoolboy needed to know, from how to make war and peace to how
to behave in company.  It was the first classical text ever printed,
at the Monastery of Subiaco in 1465.  The *British Museum Catalogue*
lists 11 printed editions of it before 1600--8 interlinear
translations, 1 English without Latin, and 2 in Latin, bound with
Cicero's *De Amicitia* and *De Senectute*.  18 more editions were
published before 1700.  For comparison, the *BMC* lists no edition of
any dialogue of Plato in any language printed in England before 1600,
and only one edition of Aristotle's *Ethics*, a translation into
English of Brunetto Latini's compendium of its "preceptes of good
behauour and perfighte honestie."  Erasmus prefaced and anno*tated an
edition of *De Officiis* in 1501.  Sir Thomas Elyot, in his popular
*Governour* (1531), lists three essential texts for bringing up yuoung
gentlemen:  Plato's works, Aristotle's *Ethics*, and *De Officiis*.
"Those three bokes," Elyot says, "be almost sufficient to make a
perfecte and excellent governour" (1.47-8).  King James I's own
version of *De Officiis*, *Basilikon Doron* (1603), in which he tells
his son Prince Henry his duties as man and ruler, refers him to Cicero
55 times, 16 of them to *De Officiis*.  In *The Complete Gentleman*
(1622), *Henry Peacham implies that *De Officiis* is a standard
beginning Latin text (29).  In the preface to his translation of 1681
Sir Roger L'Estrange calls it "the commonest school book that we
have," and goes on to observe, "as it is the best of books, so it is
applied to the best of purposes, that is to say, to training up of
youth in the study and exercise of virtue."   Voltaire said of it, "No
one will ever write anything more wise." (Wells, *Wide Arch*, p. 142)
And Hume preferred its moral teaching to that of Allestree's *The
Whole Duty of Man*, a standard Christian competitor.   (MacIntyre, p.
214).  It gave Wordsworth his first aquaintance with a morality of
nature, when he studied it at Hawkshead school (Schneider,
*Wordsworth, 72ff).   T. W. Baldwin, after exhaustive researches into
Shakespeare's learning, could be certain only that he read one
classic:  *De Officiis*, in grammar school (Martindale 7).
 
Seneca's *Moral Essays* and *Moral Epistles*:  "In the Renaissance no
Latin author was more highly esteemed than Seneca," said T. S.
Eliot.  Montaigne confesses that his oeuvre is totally dependent on
Seneca and Plutarch.  Erasmus, Justus Lipsius, and J. F. Gronovius
published "famous editions" of Seneca's *Essays* in the 16th and 17th
centuries.  The *BMC* shows that in 1547 the first Senecan epistle
was translated into English by R. Whyttynton, Poet Laureate.  In 1578
Arthur Golding translated the *De Beneficiis*, the authority on
reciprocal giving.  Something called *Seneca's Morals*, probably a
compendium of excerpts, was published in English in 1607.  In 1614
Thomas Lodge translated the complete moral works.  Then, in 1678, Sir
Roger L'Estrange published *Seneca's Morals by Way of Abstract*.  By
1793 it had gone into 17 editions.  I found a copy (Cleveland: 1856)
in my mother-in-law's Illinois farmhouse.
 
Epictetus's *Encheiridion*:  the primer of Stoicism.  States the basic
principle that the only things in the world that you can control are
your will and your body.
 
Plato's *Republic*:  Someone said that "all philosophy is only a
footnote to Plato," certainly true of the works in this list.
Although no English translation was available during Shakespeare's
time, learned men draw heavily on it (as did James I in his *Basilikon
Doron*).
 
Plutarch's *Lives*:  Translated from French into English by Sir Thomas
North in 1579.  The fact that Shakespeare used Plutarch's biographies
of *Julius Caesar*, *Antony*, and *Coriolanus* as plots for plays only
begins to convey the impact of the work on early modern Europe.
During this period history in general, and especially Plutarch's
*Lives*, was packaged as a series of moral exempla, and on these we
should focus our attention.  As I have noted, Montaigne gives nearly
full credit for his accomplishment in letters to Seneca and Plutarch.
He uses exempla from Plutarch over and over again.
 
Ruth Kelso's *Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth
Century* (1929) and *The Doctrine for the Lady of The Renaissance*
(1957):  These two works contain bibliographies comprising almost 1500
titles, about one-third in English.  And she does not include 16th-
century publications of classical moralists in their own or modern
languages, which were also profuse.  In her second book she summarizes
her monumental research as follows:  "the bulk of all that these
treatises contain is made up of commonplaces, culled mostly from the
ancients, whose names besprinkle the pages of all writers. (322)  Her
list of those ancients most commonly cited is very short, consisting
solely of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca. (311)
 
Montaigne's *Essays*:  Translated by John Florio in 1603, and
paraphrased at some length in *The Tempest* (1611), with strong
reverberations in *Lear* (1605).  Reading Montaigne shows us how
deeply classical morality dominated the European mind.  Simply by
perusing Montaigne and Plutarch, Shakespeare and his contemporaries
could become "deep learned and shallow read," as Swift put it in *Tale
of a Tub*.  So may we.
 
Elyot's *Governour*:  An outline of subjects necessary to be taught to
gentle offspring, it testifies to the importance of classical morality
in Shakespeare's England.  It was published in 1531 and went into nine
editions before 1600 (xxvi).
 
James I's *Basilikon Doron* (1603):  The king's own version of *De
Officiis, also written as a letter to his son.  It, too, confirms the
presence of classical thought in Shakespeare's England.
 
Joseph Hall's *Characters of the Virtues and Vices* (1608):  Here an
English Bishop praises the Stoicism in his preface, and displays Stoic
virtues in his characterizations.  The eminent 16th-century scholar
Justus Lipsius devoted much of his life to proving that Stoicism
harmonized with Christianity.
 
Castiglione's *Courtier*:  Translated into English by Thomas Hoby in
1561 and into Latin by Bartholomew Clerke (1571) and went into many
editions.  Castiglione's famous virtue "sprezzatura," which Hoby
translates as "carelessness" clearly has its origin in the Stoic
prohibition of affectation (Castiglione--"affetazione;" Hoby--
"precision," "formality").