ABSTRACT
This essay explores something we might call “Shakespearean selfhood,” a way of thinking about sentience and action that is articulated through the unique poetic and theatrical resources of Shakespeare’s art. The essay shows that rather than being a fixed and bounded entity, the self in Shakespeare’s plays and poems emerges from a vital and interdependent world of things. Shakespearean selfhood is a dynamic process involving an assortment of human and non-human agents in environments of exchange. The essay shows how these ideas are grounded in the vernacular intellectual culture of Shakespeare’s own time, but also how they intersect with a rich tradition of materialist philosophy – running from Aristotle to Baruch Spinoza to A. N. Whitehead, Bruno Latour, and Jane Bennett – that has in various ways tried to describe the embedded and transactional aspects of human being. Reference is made to a number of Shakespeare’s works over the course of the essay, but the discussion centers on The Merchant of Venice and the Sonnets. The essay concludes with a consideration of the ethics of Shakespearean selfhood and a shift from what Shakespearean selfhood is to why it matters.
