Interpersonal Soliloquy: Self and Audience in Shakespeare and Augustine

Abstract

This essay re-examines the meaning of Shakespearean soliloquies in light of both historical context and performance practice, arguing that they stage the interpersonal dimensions of identity in early modern culture. Solo speeches in Richard II and Hamlet offer textual evidence of their intended performance not as mere inward contemplation but as direct encounters with the playhouse audience. As dialogic speech acts, they constitute a deliberate ontological paradox: the act of speaking “alone” onstage becomes a dynamic interpersonal process in which the audience plays a crucial role. This key stage-audience exchange resonates with the practice of Augustinian “soliloquy” as exemplified in contemporary religious texts. Augustine’s own Soliloquies are alive with the paradox that his fullest act of self-speaking is inherently a dialogue, voicing not just subjective experience but the reciprocal recognition of an interlocutor. By the late seventeenth century, however, the neoclassical disparagement of direct-address soliloquy as unnatural and ridiculous reflects a radical shift toward conceptions of the self as a more discrete and self-contained entity. Critical readings of Shakespearean soliloquy have often followed that post-Renaissance view, missing the significant role of the audience that Shakespeare writes into the action of soliloquy. Today’s players have helped to recover that dramaturgy of interplay. [N.S.]