Lecture 4 Literature of the 16th century. The Renaissance

 
tin enemy, his elder brother, the Duke of York, 
who is now King Edward IV: 
Now is the winter of our discontent 
Made glorious1 summer by this son of York. 
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wonderful 
This is a soliloquy, like Hamlet’s speech beginning ‘To be, or not to be.’ The 
actor, alone on stage, uses the soliloquy to give his thoughts to the audience, who 
are all around the ‘thrust’ stage (hit illustration on p. 28). The first theatres in 
London, from The Theatre, built in 1576, to Shakespeare’s own Globe in the 1590s, 
had a thrust stage, and many of the audience stood around the stage. They paid one 
penny to see the play. Others paid more to nil in the rows looking over the heads of 
the audience to the stage. All the audience was very near to the actors. So 
Shakespeare’s words are shared between actor and audience the audience can 
become closely involved with the characters and their problems. 
Sometimes a character will make a big, public speech, like Mark Antony’s: 
Friends, Romans, countrymen,1 lend me your ears 
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people from the same nation 
from Julius Caesar. But usually the soliloquy is a private rather than a public 
speech. It is this kind of involvement with characters than makes Shakespeare’s 
plays different from those of most other playwrights, especially in tragedy. 
Shakespeare’s plays were written to be performed; he did not intend
 
them to be 
published. All the plays are now divided into urn ions called acts and smaller sections 
called scenes. But this only happened about a century after the publication of the 
First Folio (first edition) of his complete plays in 1623. Shakespeare’s wrote his 
plays for performance, so it was more Important that the audience follow the 
progress of the plays on the stage than see the act and scene division on the page. 
Hamlet is built around seven soliloquies, which show Hamlet’s progress hum 
‘nothing’ at the beginning, to King at the end of the play.