"A Kind of Character in thy Life": Shakespeare and the Character of History

Abstract

This article explores the early modern concept of “character” – and Shakespeare’s use of the word – as a way to rethink the nature of Shakespearean biography. Through the material of evidence of Shakespeare’s character, his writing, I turn to the figuring of “history” in Shakespeare’s plays, the writing of letters (leaving traces of characters as writing), before finally imaging a different kind of Shakespeare biography.