Maus, Katharine Eisaman. Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Once the possibility of deception has been granted, the effect of thruthfulness can be difficult to convey to a wary audience even when there is no intention to mislead. 6

Raleigh destabilizes convictions about direct access to things-in-themselves by insisting that the internal working of other minds, what he call their ‘inward discourse,’ is remote and inaccessible. 7

The difference between knowing oneself ‘from the inside’ and knowing other people ‘from the outside’ may seem so fundamental to social life that it cannot be the property of a particular historical moment. 12

Earlier I mentioned that some new-historicist and cultural-materialist critics of early modern English literature have tended to deny or downplay the significance of a rhetoric of inwardness in early modern England, even though evidence abounds for its importance in the period. 26

The new-historicist critique insists, correctly in my view, that the ‘self’ is not independent of or prior to its social context. Yet that critique often seems to assume that once this dependence is pointed out, inwardness simply vaporizes, like the Wicked Witch of the West under Dorothy’s bucket of water. 28

Hamlet claims that theatrical externals conceal an inaccessible inwardness, but stages a play to discover his uncle’s secrets. 29

Thus the public domain seems to derive its significance from the possibility of privacy—from what is withheld or excluded from it—and vice versa. 29

Theater tends to be an art of collectives: groups of actors playing before large and varied groups of auditors. It would not be surprising if the complexities of intersubjective comprehension should be closer to the surface here, presented more immediately by the conditions of the performance, than they are in literary forms composed with particular patrons in mind, or designed to be enjoyed without any direct encounter between purveyor and consumer. Theater involves, too, a deliberate, agreed-upon estrangement of fictional surface from ‘truth’: the plebeian actor concealing his identity under the language and manner of a king…31

In other words, the English Renaissance stage seems deliberately to foster theatergoers’ capacity to use partial and limited presentations as a basis for conjecture about what is undisplayed or undisplayable. Its spectacles are understood to depend upon and indicate the shapes of things unseen. 32

I would argue just the opposite: that in a culture in which truth is imagined to be inward and invisible, and in which playwrights seems perversely to insist upon parading the shortcomings of their art, theatrical representation becomes subject to profound and fascinating crises of authenticity. 32

But inwardness as it becomes a concern in the theater is always perforce inwardness displayed: an inwardness displayed: an inwardness, in other words, that has already ceased to exist. 32

…they are highly public procedures of revelation, and the interiors they unveil often seem to be structured as much by those procedures as by their prior hidden content. 33

Tamburlaine does not, however, renounce theatricality. Rather than killing his most significant foes, he keeps them captive for their curious entertainment value. 94

On the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, such chronic doubts about the adequacy of what can be seen tend to make theater an art of incompletion: a form of display that flaunts the limits of display. 210