Some of the books and articles below deal with selfhood quite explicitly. Others explore related concepts such as performance, political subjectivity, conscience, emotion, and sensation. I offer these sources as potential starting points as you begin to brainstorm ideas for your paper. As always, let me know if you have questions!
Altman, Joel B. The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry
and the Development of Elizabethan Drama. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1978.
------. The Improbability of Othello:
Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2010.
Archer, John Michael. Technically Alive: Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Bailey, Amanda. Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and Personhood
in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2013.
Beckwith, Sarah. Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011.
Braun, Harald and Edward Vallance, eds. Contexts of Conscience in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Curran,
Kevin. “Feeling Criminal in Macbeth.” Criticism 54.3 (2012):
391-401, Special Issue on "Shakespeare and Phenomenology," ed. Kevin
Curran and James Kearney.
------. “Hospitable Justice:
Law and Selfhood in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” Law,
Culture, and the Humanities 9 (2013):
295-310.
De Grazia, Margreta, Maureen
Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, eds., Subject
and Object in Renaissance Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996.
------. Hamlet without Hamlet. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007.
Ferry, Anne. The “Inward” Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Fineman, Joel. Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of
Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1986.
Floyd-Wilson, Mary. English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern
England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
------ and Garrett A.
Sullivan, Jr., eds., Environment and
Embodiment in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Fudge, Erica. Brutal Reasoning:
Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2006.
Garber, Marjorie. Daemonic Figures: Shakespeare and the
Question of Conscience. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.
Hanson, Elizabeth. Discovering the Subject in Renaissance
England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Harris, Jonathan Gil. Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.
Hartley, Andrew James. “Page and Stage Again: Rethinking Renaissance
Character Phenomenologically,” in New
Directions in Renaissance Drama and Performance Studies, ed. Sarah Werner, 77-91.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Harvey, Elizabeth D., ed. Sensible
Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
Holbrook, Peter. Shakespeare’s Individualism. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Hutson, Lorna. The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis
in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007.
Kinney, Arthur. Lies Like Truth: Shakespeare, Macbeth, and the Cultural Moment. Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 2001.
Kottman, Paul. A Politics of the Scene. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2008.
Kuzner, James. Open Subjects: English Renaissance
Republicans, Modern Selfhoods, and the Virtue of Vulnerability. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2011.
Lee, John. Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Controversies of Self. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2000.
Lupton, Julia Reinhard. Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political
Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
------. Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2011.
Maus, Katharine Eisaman. Inwardness and Theater in the English
Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
------.
Being and Having in Shakespeare. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013.
Paster, Gail Kern. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the
Shakespearean Stage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
------, Katherine Rowe, and
Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds., Reading the
Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
Reiss, Timothy J. Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood
in Ancient and Early Modern Europe. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2003.
Schoenfeldt, Michael C. Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology
and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999.
Seigel, Jerrold. The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience
in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005.
Selleck, Nancy. The Interpersonal Idiom in Shakespeare,
Donne, and Early Modern Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Smith,
Bruce R. Phenomenal Shakespeare. Malden,
MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
Sullivan, Jr., Garrett A. Sleep, Romance, and Human Embodiment:
Vitality from Spenser to Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2012.
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the
Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Turner, Henry S. “The Problem
of the More-than-One: Friendship, Calculation, and Political Association in The Merchant of Venice.” Shakespeare Quarterly 57 (2006): 413-42.
Watson, Robert. Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in
the Late Renaissance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
Werner, Sarah, ed. New Directions in Renaissance Drama and
Performance Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Wilson, Luke. Theaters of Intention: Drama and the Law in
Early Modern England. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Yates, Julian. Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from
the English Renaissance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002
