William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare appears here not as a dramatized participant but as the quoted source of a brief, strategically placed passage from The Tempest. His words provide the book with an inherited language of astonishment, beauty, and human possibility, even as the surrounding discussion turns toward the moral emptiness associated with contemporary right-wing culture.

Identity and Introduction

William Shakespeare is identified by the attribution attached to the quotation: “Oh, wonder! / How many goodly creatures are there here! / How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, / That has such people in ‘t!” The excerpt is presented as a compact verbal emblem rather than as biographical information or a developed character portrait. Its presence establishes Shakespeare as a cultural authority whose language can be placed in immediate tension with the book's political and social argument.

The Quoted Passage

The passage begins in exclamation and accumulation. “Oh, wonder!” opens with an emotional response before the speaker has identified its object, while “How many goodly creatures” and “How beauteous mankind is!” extend that response into a vision of abundance and collective human beauty. The movement culminates in “O brave new world,” a phrase that appears to welcome a transformed future and to invest that future with moral promise.

The final words, “That has such people in ‘t!”, turn the passage toward the people who supposedly inhabit this new world. The quotation therefore does more than celebrate humanity in the abstract: its wonder depends on the character of the society and the people it contains. In the book's context, that dependence becomes the source of an unresolved irony. Shakespeare's exalted language can be read as an ideal of human dignity, while the surrounding commentary questions whether the society being discussed deserves such praise.

Contrast with Modern Values

The Shakespeare quotation is immediately followed by the heading “The Business Card Scene” and by a question about whether the scene in American Psycho offers “the quintessential depiction of right wing Americans and their ‘values’”—or, pointedly, their “non-values.” The juxtaposition places Shakespeare's vocabulary of beauty beside a critique of status, identity, and moral vacancy. The passage's vision of “goodly creatures” and “beauteous mankind” becomes a measure against which the later scene's implied values can be judged.

This contrast also makes the quotation structurally important. Shakespeare supplies an image of humanity as something capable of inspiring wonder; the discussion that follows asks whether visible social forms and claims to value still contain the substance those words presume. The quotation thus functions as an intertextual counterpoint rather than as a simple ornament: its optimism sharpens the force of the book's skepticism.

Narrative and Thematic Role

William Shakespeare's role is consequently that of a cultural reference point and an idealizing voice. The cited lines preserve the possibility of admiration for human beings, but their placement near a discussion of “values” and “non-values” makes that possibility unstable. The passage can sound celebratory on its own; within this context, it also exposes the distance between inherited humanist language and the conduct or social identity being examined.

The result is a compact tension between wonder and disillusionment. Shakespeare's words look toward a brave new world populated by admirable people, while the book's surrounding argument tests whether modern public life can sustain that description. His appearance is brief, but the quotation gives the discussion a moral vocabulary: human beauty is not merely something to praise, but an expectation against which a society's claims and practices may be measured.