Shakespeare and the Soliloquy in Early Modern English Drama [Paperback]

This is the first book to provide students and scholars with a truly comprehensive guide to the early modern soliloquy.The only book that comprehensively studies the soliloquy's history and diversity of form, its theatrical functions, rhetoric, and socio-cultural significances in the period from Marlowe and Shakespeare to Davenant.The only book that comprehensively studies the soliloquy's history and diversity of form, its theatrical functions, rhetoric, and socio-cultural significances in the period from Marlowe and Shakespeare to Davenant.Encompassing nearly a century of drama, this is the first book to provide students and scholars with a truly comprehensive guide to the early modern soliloquy. Considering the antecedents of the form in Roman, late fifteenth and mid-sixteenth century drama, it analyses its diversity, its theatrical functions and its socio-political significances. Containing detailed case-studies of the plays of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Ford, Middleton and Davenant, this collection will equip students in their own close-readings of texts, providing them with an indepth knowledge of the verbal and dramaturgical aspects of the form. Informed by rich theatrical and historical understanding, the essays reveal the larger connections between Shakespeare's use of the soliloquy and its deployment by his fellow dramatists.Introduction A.D. Cousins and Daniel Derrin; 1. Roman soliloquy Joseph A. Smith; 2. Tudor transformations Raphael Falco; 3. Doubtful battle: Marlowe's soliloquies Liam Semler; 4. Shakespeare and the female voice in soliloquy Catherine Bates; 5. Contemplative idiots in soliloquy: rhetorical parody, laughable deformity and the audience Daniel Derrin; 6. Giving voice to history in Shakespeare David Bevington; 7. Hamlet and of truth: humanism and the disingenuous soliloquy A. D. Cousins; 8. Choosing between shame and guilt: Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet and King Lear Patrick Gray; 9. 'Too hot, too hot': the rhetorical poetics of soliloquies ilS(