Piecing out imperfections : Titus Andronicus, the shakespearean soliloquy, and cognitive literary studies -

Abstract

Soliloquies are acts of speaking one’s thoughts aloud, either self-addressed or audience-addressed. They enjoy several purposes, functions, and impacts on a play as a whole. They tend to expose characters’ traits, cognitions, and behaviors and shape their personalities as well as influence audiences’ own cognition and reception. This research project aims to explore the striking consequences of or interpretation of the absence of soliloquies at two crucial junctures of Titus Andronicus: first when Titus kills his son Mutius at the beginning of the play and when he murders his mutilated daughter Lavinia toward the end. The first Chapter identifies “missing” soliloquies of Titus in two scenes where their absence creates confusion to the spectators and readers. The great effect of these missing soliloquies is shown by introducing two “fantasy” soliloquies in the two scenes that help the audience better perceive Titus as a persona and make him intelligible in ways shared with other protagonists who speak many soliloquies in other plays from the same era (Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd and Hamlet and Macbeth in Hamlet and Macbeth by William Shakespeare). Chapter two presents the usefulness of scientific paradigms (Behaviorism and Cognitivism) in analyzing literary characters. It explores how the scientific approaches of these two schools of psychology offer insights into the behavior and cognition of Hamlet, Macbeth, and Titus. It specifically analyzes Titus from a behavioral lens, but confirms that his missing soliloquies interferes with the cognitivist interpretation. It further shows that as much as these two approaches are simultaneously needed and depend on one another to obtain a compete characterization of the psychological subjects, so are they for literary characters. The inner conflicts and cognitive processes that we are exposed to in each of Hamlet’s and Macbeth’s soliloquies share great resemblance with the psychological complexities