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  • Chapter 5 - Contemplative Idiots in Soliloquy: Rhetorical Parody, Laughable Deformity and the Audience

  • Edited by A. D. Cousins, Macquarie University, Sydney, Daniel Derrin, Durham University
  • Book:
    Shakespeare and the Soliloquy in Early Modern English Drama
    Published online:
    27 July 2018
    Print publication:
    16 August 2018, pp 68-79

  • Summary

    This chapter looks at comic soliloquies. With a particular focus on speeches of Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing, and of Malvolio in Twelfth Night, the chapter considers how Shakespeare uses the resources of soliloquy to put on display a rhetoric that is laughably ‘deformed’. Shakespeare constructs Benedick’s and Malvolio’s soliloquies so as to parody particular rhetorical techniques and modes that were very familiar to writers educated in the same Renaissance rhetorical tradition as himself. Critical scholarship has explored Shakespeare’s representation of rhetoric itself, and of rhetorical techniques and modes, but has not, in the main, used this to illuminate his comic speeches. This way of seeing the comic soliloquies of Benedick and Malvolio and others like them – as comic deformations of well-defined rhetorical procedures – gives us a further means of situating Shakespeare’s remarkable (and widely remarked) capacity to generate sympathetic laughter.

Shakespeare and the Soliloquy in Early Modern English Drama
  • Edited by A. D. Cousins, Daniel Derrin
  • Published online:
    27 July 2018
    Print publication:
    16 August 2018
  • 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.