Twenty-seven soliloquies are examined in this work, illustrating how the spectator or reader is led to the soliloquy and how the drama is continued afterwards.

'Now I am alone,' says Hamlet before speaking a soliloquy. But what is a Shakespearean soliloquy? How has it been understood in literary and theatrical history?

Provides the first systematic and comprehensive account of the conventions governing soliloquies in Western drama from ancient times to the twentieth century. O

First published in 1972. Studying Shakespeare's 'art of preparation', this book illustrates the relationship between the techniques of preparation and the struc