In the Elizabethan and Jacobean literary context, heavily influenced by the oratory art of Antiquity, William Shakespeare's work is marked by the rhetorical ideal of abundance or copia, made famous by Erasmus during the Renaissance.

While the playwright celebrates copia, which pervades all oratorical genres, from the public space of the forum to the private space of the alcove, and even in the meticulous descriptions (ekphraseis) embedded within the fabric of the dramatic work, he also denounces its limits and excesses. Copia can then turn into loquacity or empty prolixity.

His work is also crossed by the dual theme of abundance and emptiness. The instability of this profusion is manifested through the subversion of the myth of the golden age, the reversal of the cornucopia into the Danaids' barrel, and the play on the figure of the Platonic silence. Between pomp and nothingness, Shakespeare's work, situated within the epistemological crisis affecting England and Europe at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century, corresponds to an aesthetic turning point that reverses polarities and makes abundance the mask of emptiness.