Is civility merely a matter of reinforcing status and exclud-ing others? Or is it a lubricant in a polarized world, enabling us to overcome tribal loyalties and cooperate for the common good? 
In “A Defence of Pretence,” Indira Ghose argues that it is both. 
Ghose turns to the drama of Shakespeare’s time to explore the notion of civility. The theater, she suggests, was a laboratory where many of the era’s conflicts played out. 
The plays test the precepts found in treatises on civility and show that, in the complexity and confusion of human life, moral purity is an illusion.