SHAKESPEARE AND PSYCHOLOGY:A STUDY OF THE SOLILOQUIES OF SELECT MAJOR TRAGEDIES.

Abstract

Human psychology is a major preoccupation of the tragedies of Shakespeare. Shakespeare has studied and engaged with many diverse possibilities of the ways of functioning of the human mind. Bringing out the functioning of human mind in philosophical discourse and diagnosing different personality types is different from and more challenging to bring the same alive on stage. Shakespeare has used soliloquies for this purpose. The working of the mind of a character is brought before the audience through soliloquies. However, the soliloquies do not only reveal the conscious mind of the characters but also what is in the unconscious. The reader or audience can probably approach the mind of the characters through the gaps and silences in the soliloquies. The present paper is an attempt to read some such gaps and silences in some major soliloquies.