| Summary: | <p>The argument of the thesis is that there was a gradual change in attitudes towards solitude during the sixteenth century, which reached its most extreme towards the end of the century, giving rise to a cult of solitude. These attitudes, and the cult itself, became a crucial formative element in the work of Shakespeare.</p><p>Part One describes the evidence for and motivations behind the search for solitude, and considers the history of ideas on solitude, placing the climactic period, between about 1570 and 1630, within the context of earlier and later ideology. Writers of the period are shown to have used the solitude debate as a vehicle for more abstract ideas about the duty to self and to society, individual preference and communal morality, and the inward and the presented self. Whereas the social ideal valued the individual as part of a greater whole, the solitary ideal saw him as an absolute in himself, defined from within. The persistence of medieval habits of thought alongside new sixteenth-century perspectives resulted in an omnipresent dualism, a balancing of opposites based on an unwillingness for unequivocal commitment to either extreme.</p><p>Part Two demonstrates the centrality pf this preoccupation with solitude and the definition of the self in Shakespeare's work, comparing and contrasting the development of his ideas with that of his contemporaries. The thesis considers Shakespeare's sympathies, moral judgements r and ideals through the changing perspectives on the solitary from play to play, Despite his sensitivity to the deepest levels of the contemporary cult of solitude, Shakespeare finally keeps faith with the essentially medieval ideal of the social bond. Solitude, for him, fails as an ideal, and is acceptable only where the social ideal is irreparably corrupted.</p>
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