Civilization #51: Shakespeare's Language of Empire¶

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Core Thesis: The Linguistic Crucible of Empire and Shakespeare's Invention of the Modern Psyche¶

To understand the global dominance of the modern world, one must analyze the four great imperial civilizations that contested mastery over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the British, the Americans, the Germans, and the Russians. Each of these rival civilizational powers claimed to be the ultimate heir to European Christendom, yet each possessed a fundamentally different psychological matrix.

In this lecture, Prof. Jiang Xueqin explores the cultural and linguistic foundation of the first of these superpowers: Great Britain. While economists and historians attribute the British Empire to the Royal Navy, coal deposits, or the Bank of England, Prof. Jiang advances a deeper civilizational thesis: The British Empire was forged by the poetic and linguistic revolution of William Shakespeare.

Great art does not merely entertain; it alters the collective consciousness of a civilization, creating an entirely new way of seeing, feeling, and thinking. Just as Homer forged the heroic consciousness of Classical Greece, and Dante Alighieri gave birth to the moral architecture of the modern Renaissance, William Shakespeare (1564–1616) engineered the psychological and linguistic medium of the British global ascendancy.

Writing during an Elizabethan cultural tabula rasa created by the Protestant Reformation, Shakespeare transformed English from an obscure, provincial dialect into a universal, polyphonic medium of global exchange. By synthesizing aristocratic Latinate elegance with earthy Anglo-Saxon vigor, Shakespeare invented modern human interiority—the self-reflective, doubting, introspective individual dramatized in Hamlet—and provided the imaginative breadth that enabled a small island kingdom to govern disparate cultures across six continents.

flowchart TD
    subgraph FourImperialSouls["The Four Imperial Civilizations of Modern Hegemony"]
        Britain["<b>1. The British Empire</b><br/>• Philosophical Matrix: Commercial Empiricism & Common Law<br/>• Defining Voice: <b>William Shakespeare</b><br/>• Vehicle: Royal Navy & Bank of England"]
        America["<b>2. The American Empire</b><br/>• Philosophical Matrix: Puritan Zeal & Enlightenment Deism<br/>• Defining Voice: <b>The Puritans & Deist Founders</b><br/>• Vehicle: Continental Scale & Corporate Capitalism"]
        Germany["<b>3. The German Realm</b><br/>• Philosophical Matrix: Metaphysical Idealism & Will to Power<br/>• Defining Voice: <b>Goethe, Kant & Hegel</b><br/>• Vehicle: Prussian Military & Chemical/Steel Industry"]
        Russia["<b>4. The Russian Empire</b><br/>• Philosophical Matrix: Mystical Orthodox Slavophilism<br/>• Defining Voice: <b>Fyodor Dostoevsky</b><br/>• Vehicle: Autocratic Centralism & Tragic Suffering Soul"]
    end

1. The Four Imperial Competitors for Modern Hegemony¶

Prof. Jiang establishes the analytical framework for the concluding movements of the course:

Imperial Civilization	Defining Philosophical Matrix	Primary Vehicle of Geopolitical Power	Historical Archetype & Legacy
The British Empire	Commercial Empiricism & Common Law: Pragmatic compromise, maritime trade, and Shakespearean linguistic hybridity.	The Royal Navy, the Bank of England, and global industrial manufacturing.	Created the first truly global oceanic empire and the universal lingua franca of commerce.
The American Empire	Puritan Zeal & Enlightenment Deism: The melting pot of democratic universalism and messianic exceptionalism.	Continental scale, industrial technology, financial hegemony, and global cultural projection.	Inherited British global primacy, combining missionary religious idealism with corporate capitalism.
The German Realm	Idealism & The Will to Power: Systematic metaphysical philosophy (Kant, Hegel), romantic nationalism, and extreme societal synchronicity.	The Prussian military machine, heavy chemical/steel industry, and bureaucratic statecraft.	Contested Anglo-American liberalism through two cataclysmic World Wars driven by Faustian striving.
The Russian Empire	Mystical Orthodox Slavophilism: The tragic suffering soul (Dostoevsky), Third Rome messianism, and vast continental depth.	Autocratic centralism, land armies, and apocalyptic ideological messianism (Bolshevism).	Counter-weight to Western commercialism, prioritizing spiritual collective salvation over individualistic liberty.

Prof. Jiang stresses that each of these civilizations was animated not merely by material armies, but by a supreme literary or philosophical voice that defined its national soul: Shakespeare for Britain, the Puritans and Founding Deists for America, Goethe and Hegel for Germany, and Dostoevsky for Russia.

2. Art as the Matrix of Collective Consciousness¶

Prof. Jiang introduces a foundational aesthetic and psychological principle: Great art permanently alters the collective psychology of a society:

Civilizations do not operate solely on rational calculations, legal treaties, or military decrees. Beneath political structures lies a collective consciousness—a shared pool of myths, archetypes, metaphors, and linguistic patterns through which individuals interpret existence.
When a supreme artist of the caliber of Homer, Dante, Vermeer, or Shakespeare creates a new aesthetic universe, they introduce new cognitive pathways into their culture.
They teach human beings how to feel grief, how to articulate jealousy, how to perceive nature, and how to deliberate moral choices.
In the case of Shakespeare, he endowed the English-speaking world with a unique capacity for psychological empathy, self-irony, narrative flexibility, and rhetorical persuasion—the exact cognitive attributes required to administer a complex, multinational global empire.

3. The Elizabethan Tabula Rasa: Why Shakespeare Was Possible¶

Why did this literary explosion occur in late sixteenth-century England rather than in France, Spain, or Italy? Prof. Jiang identifies the unique historical conditions of the Elizabethan Golden Age:

flowchart TD
    subgraph TabulaRasa["The Elizabethan Cultural Vacuum & Theatrical Explosion"]
        Reformation["Protestant Reformation (Henry VIII & Edward VI)<br/>• Dissolution of Catholic Monasteries<br/>• Banning of Saints' Days & Miracle Plays<br/>• Altars Stripped Bare of Visual Iconography"]
        Vacuum["Cultural Tabula Rasa (Blank Slate)<br/>• Common People Starved of Spectacle & Story<br/>• Latin Liturgy Replaced by Vernacular English"]
        Playhouse["Rise of Secular Commercial Playhouses<br/>• The Globe & The Rose Built Outside City Jurisdiction<br/>• Radical Social Melting Pot: Lords to Illiterate Groundlings"]
        Shakespeare["William Shakespeare<br/>• Writes Musical, Rhythmic Verse for Groundling Ears<br/>• Fills Sacred Vacuum with Secular Human Drama"]
    end
    Reformation --> Vacuum
    Vacuum --> Playhouse
    Playhouse --> Shakespeare

Historical Condition	Pre-Reformation England	Elizabethan England (1558–1603)
Religious Monopolies	Dominated by the universal Roman Catholic Church, monastic orders, and Latin liturgy.	Henry VIII’s Reformation destroyed monastic institutions; Catholic mystery plays banned, creating an imaginative vacuum.
Linguistic Hierarchy	Latin was the language of law, science, and theology; Anglo-Norman French was the language of court; English was for commoners.	National vernacular pride; printing press expanded literacy; English became the unvarnished medium for creative synthesis.
Institutional Theater	Medieval religious pageant wagons performing biblical scripture in churchyards.	Secular, commercial, public playhouses (The Globe, The Rose) independent of church control, competing for paying audiences.
Social Audience	Segregated ecclesiastical or aristocratic ceremonies.	Radical social integration: aristocrats, merchants, apprentices, pickpockets, and illiterate sailors crowded into the same theater yard.

4. Shakespeare as Musical and Visual Spectacle¶

Prof. Jiang corrects a widespread contemporary misconception taught in modern academia:

Today, high schools and universities force students to analyze Shakespeare as dense, difficult, printed literary texts sitting silently on a library page.
In Elizabethan England, almost nobody read Shakespeare; they experienced him live as a musical and sensory spectacle:
The majority of London theatergoers were illiterate or semi-literate commoners, known as groundlings, who paid a single copper penny to stand in the open-air yard of the Globe Theater.
Shakespeare’s plays were performed with live musicians, trumpets, drums, cannon detonations, elaborate costumes, physical slapstick, swordplay, and energetic dance numbers (jigs) at the conclusion of every tragedy.
The spoken verse was delivered with rhythmic, musical cadence: the iambic pentameter (blank verse) mirrored the natural heartbeat of human speech while elevating it into a hypnotic melodic flow.

Language as Cinema: The Visual Ear¶

In an open-air theater with zero artificial lighting, minimal stage scenery, and no digital special effects, the spoken word had to function as visual cinema:

When Hamlet cries:

"Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by opposing end them"
The audience did not parse abstract philosophical propositions; they saw vivid cinematic pictures inside their imagination: physical stones whistling through the air, iron-tipped arrows striking armor, and an armed warrior charging into crashing ocean waves.
Shakespeare’s linguistic genius lay in his ability to paint instantaneous, high-definition visual imagery onto the minds of ordinary, uneducated people through the sheer power of metaphor.

5. Hamlet and the Invention of Modern Interiority¶

Prof. Jiang examines Hamlet (c. 1600) as the supreme turning point in the history of human consciousness, echoing literary critic Harold Bloom’s famous thesis in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human:

flowchart TD
    subgraph EvolutionConsciousness["The Evolution of Western Human Interiority"]
        Homer["<b>Homer (c. 750 BC) - Classical Heroic Fate</b><br/>• External honor (Arete), divine curses, warrior glory<br/>• Achilles, Hector, Odysseus: Heroic action without hesitation"]
        Dante["<b>Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) - Christian Moral Agency</b><br/>• Conscience, Free Will as God's supreme gift, Divine Love<br/>• Soul's pilgrimage through Hell to Heaven"]
        Shakespeare["<b>William Shakespeare (1564-1616) - Modern Interiority</b><br/>• Hamlet: Self-reflective consciousness overhearing itself<br/>• Radical doubt, existential hesitation, moral complexity"]
    end
    Homer --> Dante
    Dante --> Shakespeare

Dimension of Character	Classical / Medieval Drama (Sophocles, Seneca)	Shakespearean Modernity (Hamlet)
Primary Motivation	External fate, blood vengeance, divine curses, fixed social honor codes.	Internal moral questioning, psychological hesitation, and existential introspection.
Character Development	Static archetypes; characters act out their preordained mythical destiny without changing.	Fluid, self-overhearing minds; characters listen to their own thoughts and transform dynamically through soliloquy.
The Nature of Action	Immediate, heroic, unhesitating action; Hector fights Achilles; Oedipus gouges out his eyes.	Paralysis of over-thinking; consciousness questions the moral legitimacy of action itself.
Epistemological Stance	Certainty of external reality and divine will.	Radical doubt: Is the ghost real or a demonic illusion? Can human judgment ever discern ultimate truth?

The Paralyzed Modern Prince¶

Hamlet is a student returning from the University of Wittenberg—the intellectual cradle where Martin Luther launched the Protestant Reformation:

In a traditional Viking or Anglo-Saxon revenge tragedy, when a son discovers his father was murdered by his uncle, the heroic duty is simple: kill the uncle immediately and claim the throne.
Hamlet cannot do this. Because he possesses modern self-consciousness, he is paralyzed by philosophical reflection:
What is the nature of justice?
If I kill the king while he is praying, will his soul go to heaven while my father burns in purgatory?
What happens after physical death? "The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns."
In Hamlet, Shakespeare created the modern individual: alienated, self-critical, torn between emotional impulse and rational doubt, observing oneself from the outside.

6. Political Rhetoric in Julius Caesar: The Art of Mob Psychology¶

In Julius Caesar (1599), Shakespeare dissected the mechanics of political rhetoric and crowd manipulation with terrifying realism. Prof. Jiang analyzes the iconic confrontation between Brutus and Mark Antony at Caesar's funeral:

flowchart TD
    subgraph RhetoricalDuel["The Funeral Orations in Julius Caesar"]
        Brutus["<b>Brutus: The Stoic Philosopher</b><br/>• Spoken in Dry, Rational Prose<br/>• Abstract Appeals to Honor & Liberty<br/>• Maintains Aloof Distance on the Pulpit<br/>• Outcome: Mob Politeness & Misunderstanding<br/>('Let him be Caesar!')"]
        Antony["<b>Mark Antony: The Psychological Master</b><br/>• Spoken in Emotive, Subversive Verse<br/>• Descends into the Dirt with Commoners<br/>• Visual Props: Slashed Tunic & Caesar's Will<br/>• Outcome: Ignites Uncontrollable Mob Rage<br/>('Mischief, thou art afoot!')"]
    end

Rhetorical Dimension	The Oratory of Brutus	The Masterclass of Mark Antony
Style & Form	High-minded, rigid, stoic prose; appeals to abstract reason, honor, and civic duty.	Emotive, rhythmic, subversive verse; appeals to grief, greed, visual gore, and latent anger.
Core Argument	"Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more." Demands the crowd accept abstract republican liberty.	Repeatedly calls Brutus "an honourable man" while systematically disproving Brutus's claims with tangible evidence.
Use of Props & Body	Stands on the pulpit; maintains aloof philosophical distance from the common citizens.	Descends into the dirt among the plebeians; displays Caesar's bloody, slashed mantle; reads Caesar's private will leaving seventy-five drachmas to every citizen.
Psychological Outcome	The mob intellectualizes the speech politely, shouting: "Let him be Caesar!" (completely misunderstanding republicanism).	Ignites uncontrollable popular rage; transforms the crowd into an anarchic, arsonist mob screaming for the conspirators' blood.

Prof. Jiang observes that Shakespeare understood mass political psychology centuries before modern political science:

Masses of people are completely unmoved by dry, moralizing philosophical logic (Brutus).
They are captivated by emotional storytelling, apparent humility, shared grief, concrete financial self-interest, and theatrical demonstrations of grievance (Mark Antony).
This deep insight into human persuasion formed the core of British parliamentary debate and imperial diplomacy.

7. The Great Poetic Founders: Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare¶

Prof. Jiang places Shakespeare within the grand historical triumvirate of Western civilizational poets:

Foundational Poet	Civilizational Creation	Core Spiritual Principle	Linguistic & Political Achievement
Homer (c. 750 BC)	Classical Greek Civilization	*Heroic Honor (Arete) & Fate*: The tragic glory of mortal action against inescapable mortality.	Standardized the Pan-Hellenic oral dialect; provided the shared ethical scripture that unified the fragmented Greek city-states.
Dante Alighieri (1265–1321)	The Modern Renaissance & Conscience	*Divine Love (Amor) & Moral Agency*: The individual soul traveling through suffering to divine transcendence.	Elevated the Tuscan vernacular over ecclesiastical Latin; created the psychological architecture of individual accountability.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)	The British Imperial Consciousness	Human Polyphony & Secular Empathy: The boundless drama of human nature in all its contradictory glory.	Transformed English into a global imperial instrument; synthesized high rhetoric with vernacular realism for a universal audience.

The Democratic Heart of the Master Poets¶

Prof. Jiang highlights a vital commonality among Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare: all three were democrats in their spirit:

Homer was an itinerant, roaming bard singing to crowds of farmers and warriors in village squares.
Dante was an exiled political revolutionary who chose to write his supreme vision not in elite scholarly Latin, but in the vulgar tongue of Florentine washerwomen and merchants.
Shakespeare was a provincial glovemaker’s son from Stratford-upon-Avon who wrote not for royal academic patrons, but to fill the Globe Theater with rowdy common apprentices and laborers.
True civilizational art does not emerge from insular aristocratic salons; it is forged in the open air, addressing the universal passions, terrors, and humors of ordinary humanity.

8. English as the Global Medium of Cultural Exchange¶

Prof. Jiang formalizes Shakespeare’s linguistic revolution: Shakespeare turned the English language into an open, universal medium of global exchange:

Linguistic Stream	Expressive Function & Register	Shakespearean Synthesis & Imperial Impact
Germanic Anglo-Saxon Vigor	Earthy, physical, direct monosyllables (blood, sword, heart, bone)	Provides raw emotional power and visceral clarity accessible to common groundlings
Norman French Elegance	Aristocratic, legal, diplomatic, and courtly nuance	Enables high-status political maneuvering, courtly wit, and international statecraft
Classical Latin Precision	Abstract, philosophical, scientific, and theological terms	Elevates tragic grandeur and metaphysical inquiry, coining over 1,700 new words for global empire

1. Coining the Modern Lexicon¶

Before Shakespeare, English was viewed by continental scholars as an impoverished, barbarous northern dialect lacking the expressive nuance of French or Italian.

Shakespeare single-handedly introduced over 1,700 new words into the language by inventing terms, converting nouns into verbs, and blending roots:
Words like eyeball, champion, majestic, critical, dwindle, swagger, generous, gloomy, lonely, submerge, and courtship.
Idiomatic phrases that define modern thought: break the ice, heart of gold, wild-goose chase, love is blind, vanished into thin air, and wear one's heart upon one's sleeve.

2. High and Low Linguistic Polyphony¶

In any single scene, Shakespeare moves effortlessly between high philosophical grandiloquence and gutter slang:

In Macbeth, after murdering the King, Macbeth stares at his bloody hands and speaks in Latinate, polysyllabic, tragic majesty:

"Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine..."
And then instantly translates that abstract majesty into monosyllabic, direct Anglo-Saxon clarity:

"...making the green one red."
This duality gave English unmatched expressive range: capable of drafting precise legal contracts, conducting scientific inquiry, and communicating visceral human emotion.

9. Shakespeare vs. Milton: The Closed vs. Open Civilizational Soul¶

To illustrate Shakespeare’s unique openness, Prof. Jiang contrasts him with England’s other supreme epic poet, John Milton (1608–1674):

Literary Dimension	John Milton (Paradise Lost)	William Shakespeare (The Complete Plays)
Religious Worldview	Rigid, moralistic Puritanism; theology centered on the Fall of Man and divine punishment.	Expansive, secular humanism; embraces saints, kings, clowns, whores, and villains with equal empathy.
Linguistic Structure	Heavy, dense Latinate syntax; classical epic similes requiring classical humanist erudition.	Dynamic, fluid, vernacular energy; accessible to common ears while challenging philosophers.
View of Human Nature	Categorical moral division: total obedience to God vs. eternal demonic rebellion (Satan).	Boundless moral complexity: recognizes humanity in the treacherous Iago, the corrupt Falstaff, and the fragile Ophelia.
Civilizational Impact	Inspired religious intolerance and puritanical exclusivism (carried by Pilgrims to New England).	Provided the open, empathetic, worldly imaginative framework that enabled global administration.

Prof. Jiang observes that while Milton wrote the greatest epic poem in English, a global empire could never have been governed by Milton's puritanical rigidity. An empire requires the soul of Shakespeare: the capacity to inhabit diverse cultures, tolerate foreign idiosyncrasies, laugh at human absurdity, and maintain emotional balance amidst moral ambiguity.

10. The First Folio and the Fluidity of Living Language¶

During the seminar discussion, a student asks about the textual transmission of Shakespeare’s work: Were these plays published during his lifetime, and why do scholars fight over tiny textual variants?

Prof. Jiang provides a refreshing historical perspective:

Shakespeare himself never published his collected plays. To him, they were not sacred, untouchable scripture meant to be frozen in leather-bound volumes; they were living scripts constantly adapted for the stage.
If an actor fell sick, if the audience grew restless, or if political censorship intervened, Shakespeare altered lines on the spot.
It was only in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, that his fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell compiled the First Folio to prevent his theatrical legacy from disappearing.
Prof. Jiang critiques modern pedantic academia: scholars who spend decades debating whether a line originally read "dagger" or "dasher" miss the entire genius of Shakespeare. Shakespeare treated language not as a frozen grammatical museum, but as a fluid, dynamic, musical instrument designed to capture the living pulse of reality.

11. Master Synthesis: The 8-Point Civilizational Blueprint¶

#	Civilizational Pillar	Analytical Meaning & Historical Realization
1	The Four Imperial Souls	Modern global history was shaped by four competing imperial civilizations (Britain, America, Germany, Russia), each driven by a distinct metaphysical poet.
2	Art as Neurological Matrix	Supreme art alters the collective consciousness of a society, introducing new emotional, moral, and perceptual pathways.
3	The Elizabethan Vacuum	Henry VIII’s Reformation destroyed Catholic visual and theatrical pageantry, creating an imaginative tabula rasa filled by secular commercial theater.
4	The Musical Groundling Theater	Shakespeare’s plays were popular musical spectacles performed in verse for illiterate groundlings who paid a penny to stand at the Globe.
5	Visual Cinema in Language	Lacking scenery and lighting, Shakespeare deployed vivid sensory metaphors that allowed audiences to see dynamic pictures within their minds.
6	The Birth of Modern Interiority	Hamlet invented the modern self-conscious individual: alienated, self-reflective, doubting, and paralyzed by existential moral inquiry.
7	The Oratory of Mass Psychology	Julius Caesar laid bare the mechanics of rhetoric: exposing how emotion, props, and grievance consistently defeat abstract logic before mobs.
8	The Open Linguistic Platform	Shakespeare synthesized Germanic vigor and Latinate precision, transforming English into an adaptable medium for global imperial administration.

12. Key Civilizational Takeaways¶

Language Precedes Imperial Power: Long before the Royal Navy blockaded continents and British merchant houses dominated global trade, Shakespeare engineered the linguistic vehicle capable of articulating complex law, commerce, and diplomacy across the globe.
The Power of the Secular Stage: When a religious establishment is overthrown, the spiritual hunger of a population does not vanish; it migrates into secular storytelling, transforming theaters into the new temples of communal self-discovery.
The Invention of the Self-Reflective Mind: Prior to Shakespeare, theatrical characters were driven by external fate, honor, or divine decree. In Hamlet, Shakespeare created the modern psychological self: a mind capable of questioning its own motives and hesitating before moral action.
Mass Persuasion Relies on Emotional Storytelling: As demonstrated in Mark Antony's funeral speech, human crowds are never governed by abstract rational philosophy. Political power belongs to those who master the art of emotional metaphor, theatrical timing, and symbolic grievance.
Cultural Openness Is Strategic Power: Milton's Puritan intolerance produced sectarian division, while Shakespeare's polyphonic empathy produced cultural flexibility. An empire that cannot inhabit the perspectives of different human beings will collapse under its own dogmatic weight.

13. Seminar Discussion Questions¶

The Language of Empire: How did Shakespeare’s expansion of the English vocabulary enable the British to administer a multi-ethnic, global commercial empire more effectively than rigid linguistic systems?
Hamlet’s Paralysis: Why does Hamlet’s inability to take immediate revenge make him the quintessential modern hero? How does his internal alienation mirror the anxieties of the contemporary individual?
Rhetoric in Democratic Politics: In Julius Caesar, Mark Antony turns the Roman mob against the republican conspirators with ease. What does this play teach us about the inherent vulnerability of democratic electorates to charismatic demagogues?
Homer vs. Dante vs. Shakespeare: How do the core metaphysical values of Homer (Honor and Fate), Dante (Divine Love and Moral Judgment), and Shakespeare (Secular Empathy and Polyphony) reflect the evolution of Western human consciousness?
The Modern Loss of Visual Language: If Elizabethan audiences visualized "slings and arrows" as cinematic mental images through spoken verse, has the rise of modern digital video technology enriched or degraded human imaginative capacity?

14. Academic References & Further Reading¶

Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Riverhead Books, 1998. (The seminal study arguing that Shakespeare invented the modern self-conscious individual).
Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. W.W. Norton & Company, 2004. (Masterful biographical and historical exploration of Elizabethan London and the Globe Theater).
Kermode, Frank. Shakespeare's Language. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. (Detailed linguistic and stylistic analysis of Shakespeare's development of blank verse and metaphor).
Bate, Jonathan. The Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare. Random House, 2009. (Brilliant intellectual contextualization of Shakespeare’s reading, theater craft, and cultural world).
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Edited by Alastair Fowler, Routledge, 2006. (The monumental English Christian epic exploring the fall of humanity and puritanical theology).
Shapiro, James. 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. Faber and Faber, 2005. (Illuminating micro-history examining the composition of Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and the first drafts of Hamlet).