‘And what are you reading, Miss –?’ ‘Oh! it is only a novel!’, replies the young lady, trying to hide her embarrassment. The narrator supplies the rejoinder that the imaginary young reader lacks the wit or the experience to come up with herself: ‘in short, only some work in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language’.

Shakespeare would have had no idea what Jane Austen was talking about; her ironic defence of the novelist's art would have completely passed him by. It's not just that novels as we know them didn't exist in Elizabethan England; human nature didn't exist either. At least, that's what postmodernism tells us. In postmodern Shakespeare criticism it's taken for granted that Shakespeare and his contemporaries were anti-essentialists. That is to say, Elizabethans are thought to have had no general theory of humankind as a species: human beings had no existential ‘centre’; they lacked any kind of unifying essence; they were ‘frail, precarious, dispersed across a range of discourses’. The idea of a humankind with universal characteristics and a more or less coherent inner self is something that didn't appear in Europe for another fifty years or so. This anti-essentialist view of humanity affected the way people wrote, their theories of authorship and originality, the way they thought about selfhood and gender, their view of history, and their attitude to authority. It informed their whole world view.