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What role did literary character play along the passage from ancient theories of dramatic action to contemporary theories of subjectivity and personhood? What role, specifically, did Shakespearean personhood play in the theorization of literature’s capacity to stage and represent a portable, exemplary “self”? How do group categories of race, gender and class qualify and inflect the ostensive individuation of character outcomes? As test cases, in this course we will consider an array of early modern literary persons from before and after Shakespeare as depicted in poetry, drama and prose : Heywood’s Lucrece, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Cleopatra, Middleton’s Timon, Moliere’s Alceste, Milton’s Christ and Behn’s Oroonoko. This course will range widely across theorists of literary character and the reader/character relationship, considering Aristotle, Theophrastus, Sir Thomas Overbury, Sigmund Freud, Aaron Kunin, Blakey Vermeule, Toril Moi, Rita Felski, Amanda Anderson, and Thomas Metzinger, among others.