Why Halls Characters of the Virtues and Vices?
Because Hall was a bishop of the Church of England and a contemporary of Shakespeare, his moral tract is eminently suited to represent for us the symbiotic relationship between Anglicanism and Stoicism that then prevailed. In his preface, Hall practically defines that relationship. He says, Reader, The divines [clergy] of the old heathens were their moral philosophers [e.g., Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, et al.]. These received the acts of an inbred law in the Sinai of nature; and delivered them, with many expositions, to the multitude. In other words, the Word of God, whether it descends directly to Moses and Christ, or indirectly through the medium of Nature to the “heathen” philosophers, is still the same Word. These divines functioned as “the overseers of manners, correctors of vices, directors of lives, [and] doctors of virtue.” Here Hall refers to a historical fact: When the Medieval churchmen, inevitably, assumed the task of “Doctors of Virtue,” they used Christian and pagan
