"...I want to know how cultural objects, expressions, and practices-here, principally, plays by Shakespeare and the stage on which they first appeared- acquired compelling force. English literary theorists in the period needed a new word for that force, a word to describe the ability of language, in Puttenham's phrase, to cause "a stir to the mind"; drawing on the Greek rhetorical tradition, they called it energia⁵. This is the origin in our language of the term "energy", a term I propose we use, provide we understand that its origins lie in rhetoric rather than physics and that its significance is social and historical."

-Stephen Greenblatt