Renaissance humanists believed that if you want to build a just society you must begin with the facts of human nature. This book argues that the idea of a universal human nature was as important to Shakespeare as it was to every other Renaissance writer. In doing so it questions the central, defining principle of postmodern Shakespeare criticism. By ‘postmodern’ I mean criticism that's informed by what is generally termed ‘Theory’ (either spelt with a capital letter, or enclosed by inverted commas, or both, to distinguish it from the literary theory that existed before Barthes, Derrida and other French thinkers began to dominate Anglo-American criticism in the late 1960s). There are of course significant differences between Cultural Materialism and New Historicism, and between different kinds of feminism; where necessary I'll try to make these differences clear. But since anti-essentialism – the belief that there is no such thing as a universal essence of human nature – is a core principle shared by most versions of ‘Theoretically’-informed criticism (but not by liberal feminism), I thought it best to avoid repetition of awkward lists of titles of critical schools by using the general term ‘postmodern’ when writing about critics who claim that Shakespeare was an anti-essentialist. However, with the exception of chapter 9, where I consider Althusser and Foucault and the strange history of anti-essentialism, I've tried to keep discussion of ‘Theory’ to a minimum.