Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

by Stephen Greenblatt

plays thought they could enhance the broad impact they sought to achieve by stripping their characters of all incidental distinguishing traits to get to their essences. They thought their audiences would thereby not be distracted by the irrelevant details of individual identities. Shakespeare grasped that

it was attached not to generalized abstractions but to particular named people, people realized with an unprecedented intensity of individuation: not Youth but Prince Hal, not

LONDON WAS

there And made myself a motley

California Press, 1989). On the presence