Possibly the most heated critical controversy in English Renaissance studies has concerned the question of personal identity, the existence of the self. New Historicists and cultural materialists have maintained that the self is always a social construct, branding their opponents as naive essentialists. From a less parochial viewpoint, the argument may seem reminiscent of the heredity-versus-environment debate that vexed sociologists earlier in the century or, indeed, the universal-versus-particular controversies during the Renaissance itself. If, with Shakespeare's Prospero, we take rational speech to be the distinguishing mark of humans, we may not be surprised that the “either/or” choice can be resolved into “both.” Modern linguistics has found that structures of language are deeply embedded within the human mind. Human speech, then, is both innate and acquired, consisting of a “Universal Grammar” and a learned dialect, corresponding nicely to an essential identity that is complemented by the cultural construct.