‘The Personified Will’ examines how the faculty of the will was depicted as a personified character in English Renaissance plays. The will was portrayed in a variety of benevolent and malevolent guises, yet the function of these characters has not yet been integrated into our appreciation of the era’s dramatic conventions. I argue that we may more fully appreciate the ways that dramatists queried the practical expression of individual liberty, identity, and civil harmony by attending to a historically disregarded set of Will characters (from Sebastian Westcott’s The Marriage of Wit and Science to William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night). The performance of the personified will offers important, but hitherto overlooked, evidence of how playwrights attempted to scrutinize the nature of human freedom and social concord, and the extent to which personifications of the will were used to legitimize contemporary systems of status and authority. Exploring the actions of honourable and corrupt personifications of the will provides a way to elucidate the ethical predicaments associated with will’s performance, which the second chapter of this book examines in more detail.