I'd like to claim him here for us INFJs:
- 1. INFJs are known for being perhaps the best of all types at understanding other people, seeing beneath the surface. One of the main reasons Shakespeare is so acclaimed is because of his ability to create uncannily convincing and real characters for his plays. An INFJ I feel is the type most likely to be able to accomplish this consistently, and more pertinently, an INFP would probably struggle with this, as many on this thread seem to suspect he was.
- 2. He clearly displayed a preference for Se: wealth and status were obviously important to him as I believe he owned a number of properties later in his life and bought the largest house in his home town of Stratford for his family as soon as he could afford it.
- 3. I've read a book that analyzes his plays in-depth called "Shakespeare the Thinker" where it's shown how his thinking on certain questions that interested him developed over the course of several plays. Read this book and you'll become convinced that he could have easily made a great philosopher - apparently many of the ideas in his plays anticipate by hundreds of years later philosophical theories, he was that smart! And obviously, no stranger to the use of Ti. I'd also like to add that dramatizing his thoughts about certain subjects was arguably the main motivator for the plots of many of his plays - Ti was an integral part of his personality.
- 4. Clear evidence for Ni is obviously always going to be harder to find, but I believe the highly visual nature of Ni is evidenced in his strong preference for similes and metaphors of all kinds in his work. There's also its non-judgmental nature, allowing ideas of all kinds free reign where Fi would probably impose aesthetic restrictions... basically there's ample evidence for Shakespeare's undiscriminatory attitude towards ideas in his work - he even wrote a sonnet whose sole purpose (basically) was to play with the symmetrical (palindromic?) nature of the word "widdow" as it was written in his time (sonnet 9). His willingness to be fanciful is often criticized, apparently.
So in conclusion, he's almost certainly not Fi dominant, but more likely INFJ, or maybe ENFJ.