The self and self-conscious theatre on the Renaissance stage

It proposes that the self-conscious theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries produces a concomitant self-consciousness within its audiences that situates identity on the theatrical boundary, highlighting the performativity of the self and its relations to others.

It takes a dialectical and thematic approach to demonstrate how self-conscious theatre makes audiences conscious of themselves and their relations to others, focusing on those categories which traditionally distinguish the self from others in terms of culture, morality, class, and gender. The thesis considers a range of genres, performance styles, and self-consciously theatrical structures without lumping together or oversimplifying their effects with each chapter focusing on a particular facet of self-conscious theatre to demonstrate the different kinds of self-consciousness that the plays produce and engage with.