Labor

Shakespeare lived during an era that had a profoundly ambivalent relationship to the idea of labor. Protestant Christian ethics, and particularly the rising subculture of Puritanism, held that work was where virtue stemmed from.

However, this was also a society where the highest-ranked individuals definitively avoided doing any physical labor. Shakespeare’s England was ruled by nobles who would quite literally never do any physical labor for themselves: they did not cook or clean or even dress themselves. Though cultural praise was heaped on the idea of working, status also stemmed from being of a class that never had to work at all.

Furthermore, the religious origins of the value of labor are murky. They stem primarily from the Christian reception of the story of the Garden of Eden, in which God expels Adam and Eve from the Garden with the commandment: “You shall live by...