King Lear and the late Renaissance dramatic convention of self-addressed speech: An empirical approach to theatrical history

Abstract

In King Lear, Shakespeare inventively and daringly employed the astonishingly precise features of the convention that governed soliloquies in late Renaissance drama. Plentiful, unambiguous, conspicuous, varied, and one-sided evidence demonstrates that soliloquies represented self-addressed speeches by characters as a matter of convention rather than either interior monologues or audience addresses. The most distinctive employment of the convention in Lear occurs when a character speaks to himself in the presence of others without guarding his soliloquy from their hearing either because the speaker loses consciousness of their presence or because he does not care that others overhear his speech.