in the 16th century. “Be cheerful,” commands Prospero – arguably the wisest of all of Shakepeare’s characters – in. Yet the impact of cheerfulness – and the power it gives us to get through difficult moments in our lives – is hard to define and easy to disregard or dismiss, even as we strive to be happy.
Cheerfulness differs from happiness, Hampton says, because you have some control over it. “You can make yourself cheerful – I can tell you to cheer up and you know what that means. But you can’t make yourself happy. You can’t even buy it. Happiness is something you don’t have any control over. ” Most importantly, it is an accessible emotion, even in moments of extreme hardship. “I spent much of my early life in proximity to people who had suffered physical handicaps and been in accidents,” Hampton says, “and for whom getting through the day was very difficult. And cheerfulness, I realised, is a resource – you can make it, manage it and put it into action. And that seemed to me to be a really precious and interesting thing that we don’t think about as much as we should.
It is partly for this reason that Shakespeare, Hampton thinks, is interested in what happens when people lose their cheerfulness. “Across Shakespeare’s tragedies, there are a number of moments where – just before something terrible is about to happen – one of the characters will say to another character: you have lost your cheer.”
For Shakespeare, it’s a deliberate decision to “look on all things well”, while for Montaigne the state of cheerfulness “is like things above the moon, always clear and serene”. “There’s a sense that in a moment of crisis,” says Hampton, “that the community generates its own kind of cheerfulness and even the most melancholy member of the community suddenly becomes cheerful.”