It’s unsurprising, though, that the reaction against character criticism germinated in Shakespeare studies. Shakespeare’s characters had long been treated as if they were not only real people but exemplary ones. In Character. The History of a Cultural Obsession, Marjorie Garber notes that, for European culture since the seventeenth century,【T1】Shakespeare was the author who provided, through his dramatic characters, not only powerful “imitations” of human conduct, emotion, and attitude, but the blueprint, the language, and the responses that taught us how to be us.

Figures like Hamlet and Romeo were endlessly analyzed for clues to human nature and made into models of conduct, both good and bad. The idea that Shakespeare’s characters are somehow quintessentialy human even left its mark on the sciences. Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals cites passages from Henry V to illustrate anger and Titus Andronicus to depict shame. A generation later, Freud drew on Richard Ⅲ , among other Shakespearean characters, for his 1916 paper “Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work”: “【T2】We all think we have reason to reproach Nature and our destiny for congenital and infantile disadvantages; we all demand reparation for early wounds to our narcissism, our self-love.”

We could chalk all of this up to Bardolatry (莎士比亚崇拜), of course; something about Shakespeare seems to make people (especially English people) act a little funny. For Garber, though,【T3】Shakespeare is merely a privileged example of a cultural dynamic operating across the centuries: the way specific literary characters inform a more general conception of human psychology, and vice versa. Reading about characters, it has long been thought, builds character; it also helps us to define and understand it.【T4】In the fourth century BC, Theophrastus (提奥夫拉斯图斯), a disciple of Aristotle, wrote a literary work entitled Characters, a collection of thirty brief descriptions of characters such as the Flatterer, the Chatterer, the Superstitious Man…

【T5】There’s already a tension here, one that will continue to haunt literary characters over the course of their history, between typicality—the Gross Man obviously is meant in some sense to represent all gross men—and specificity: the details need to be convincingly concrete in order for the imaginative exercise to have any value at all. Who is the Gross Man? A fiction? A satirical portrait of a real Athenian? A model for playwrights to copy? A type to watch out for, or avoid becoming oneself?

【T5】