In this study I investigate the recurrent fascination of early modern English drama with certain moments of self-construction or identification which I shall call “seizures of the will.” I deploy this phrase as a programmatic pun, with multiple elements. I mean to point both to appropriation, the act of grasping, of taking, of violating, of seizing control, and to ecstasy, the thrill or spasm or fit of emotion, of transcendent feeling, that often accompanies the gesture in the plays of early modern England. There is also a subject–object binary: one seizes something else, an external thing, another being, the self as made. I enter upon a construction of these elements because, I believe, historicist analysis must engage the conscious and concrete utility of the category of the will for early modern England. This venture is pursued in concert with a more general reappropriation of the category in contemporary social theory generally.

Much of great value has been done in literary studies in recent years to foreground external determinations of individual life in early modern England, but the men and women who lived out their complex lives then used the notion of personal will quite energetically to construe those lives.