I now want to pursue my analysis of Shakespeare's ingenuity beyond exposition of its cognitive, self-fashioning role in literary imitation and, expanding upon Leontes’ self-deluding visions, focus on its manifestation as the imaginative activity performed by a dramatized subject who enunciates that activity on the stage. In my study of Othello and rhetorical anthropology, I argued that we should make a distinction in Shakespeare's work between dramatis persona and character, following the usual practice of Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights as they composed their scripts. A dramatis persona is literally a “person of the play,” required by the plot as it's sketched out—Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, for example—while character emerges from the dramatis persona when solicited by the particular circumstances of a scene that has been developed from the plot. Thus one dramatis persona can generate as many characters as scenic occasion demands, yet subtends them all, just as—outside the drama—the self, which we might think of as the substratum of the subject, holds infinite subject-possibilities which it yields up to varying interpellations—yet is itself a “residual subject,” both origin and repository of different “circumstantial subjects.”

Through this practice, Shakespeare approximates our modern sense of the self as an entity subject to multiple interpellations, and represents this condition in his plays. We can think of the Prince of Denmark as the originary if not pristine self, born into expectation and subject to his birth, hailed, as it were, into that expectation and, in the course of the plot, qualified by further interpellations—student, mourner, friend, lover, revenger, play doctor, drama critic, providentialist, and so on. This is also true of such dramatis personae as Shylock the Jew, Othello the Moor, Henry Bolingbroke, “legitimate Edgar,” the Thane of Glamis, Cressida, Desdemona, Cleopatra—the list is extensive, as we shall see, only delimited by the degree to which Shakespeare provides scenes in which a given dramatis persona is drawn by circumstances into becoming a character.