Introduction

What if we could produce new data of real literary interest about Shakespeare’s complete plays? What if such data could uncover overriding patterns, and interesting exceptions from these patterns, that are not easily perceived by a single reader, or even by their author when he was still among the living? And what if we could combine these findings with traditional forms of scholarship that attend to finer nuances and place the works in a larger context? This could throw new light on Shakespeare’s authorial habits and help us perceive the special nature of individual plays, characters, and scenes....

Distribution

Chapter 4, entitled ‘Distribution’, explores some tonal and interpretative consequences of the large-scale distribution of insides within and between Shakespeare’s plays. Particular attention is paid to how Shakespeare guides audience sympathy for his characters through the selective distribution of insides: that is, how some characters are given copious private speech while others are denied it altogether, or how insides are distributed differently according to variables like gender or class. I show how Shakespeare’s distribution of sympathy and his distribution of insides are closely intertwined and inflected according to gender and class in three plays from three different phases in his career: The Taming of the Shrew, All’s Well that Ends Well, and The Two Noble Kinsmen.

Direction

Chapter 1 is entitled ‘Direction’, with a pun on the theatrical and the spatial senses of the word ‘direction’. The main purpose of the chapter is to mediate between, on the one hand, James Hirsh’s extended argument that Shakespeare’s soliloquies and asides were almost exclusively self-addressed, and, on the other, the modern tendency of scholars, actors, and directors to return Shakespeare to his medieval, audience-addressed roots. The chapter then turns to an extended reading of Launce’s soliloquies in The Two Gentlemen of Verona which explores how their satirical counterpoint to the main plot interrogates the underlying conditions of Shakespeare’s dramatic art.

Dialogue

The chapter begins with a systematic overview of selected figures of speech and related techniques that imbue the Shakespearean inside with some of its dialogical qualities: apostrophe (addressing absent or abstract entities), letters and reported words, prosopopoeia (personating an external speaker), erotema (the rhetorical question), illeism (speaking of oneself in the third person), and tuism (addressing oneself in the second person). Chapter 3 ends with a reading of Hamlet, demonstrating how the new research methodology can both produce fresh insights into one of the most closely studied works in world literature and place some aspects of received opinion about the play on a firmer footing.

Divergence

Chapter 2, entitled ‘Divergence’, explores a number of situations in Shakespeare’s plays where the sharp boundary between inside and dialogue becomes muddled. The chapter begins with a survey of different situations where this line is difficult to draw, often because it is hard to gauge the speaker’s fictional intentions on the basis of the printed page. The chapter then gives extended attention to two examples of such dramatically productive divergence from Shakespeare’s standard practice. The conventions governing insides are transformed in significant ways by the intrusion of magic in The Tempest and by the early modern discourse of royalty in Richard II. In both plays we find a powerful protagonist with rhetorical boundary issues that either transcend (Prospero) or dismantle (Richard II) the ordinary distinction between private and interpersonal speech.