The root word ‘human’ appears approximately forty-seven times in twenty-two works from Shakespeare’s dramatic corpus and poetry. Generally, Shakespeare incorporates the term ‘human’ to denote two issues: (1) inclusion or exclusion from a particular group and (2) the treatment and behaviours that members of a specific community or kind are expected to share and reciprocate towards one another. Writing more than 300 years before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was codified in 1948, Shakespeare presented being human as inextricably bound to questions of belonging and to processes of exclusion as well as to the principles and ideologies that are expected to guide interactions among people. Through analysing Shakespeare’s narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece and his plays The Tempest, Titus Andronicus, and The Comedy of Errors, this chapter analyses how Shakespeare’s works advocated for an expansion of the rights and protections of specific disenfranchised individuals. His corpus reveals that a call to recognize a shared humanity is a call for reciprocity that acknowledges the self-possession and self-determination of others—two concepts that have been integral to the understanding of basic human rights. However, Shakespeare’s works also evince the threat to privilege that such calls for recognition entails, since attending to human rights requires the circumscription of power and the limitation of privilege. Shakespeare, then, participates simultaneously in the expansion for rights, protections, and privileges as well as in the discursive production of justifications for racial prejudice and the differential treatment among people.