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Hamlet is the theatre's most well-known solitary, and has been celebrated as the character most responsible for changing the status of the soliloquy, or lone speech, on the English stage.1 It therefore seems appropriate that the Folio edition of Hamlet contains Shakespeare's first recorded use of the word "loneliness," which is also one of the earliest references to the concept in all of English literature.2 Since loneliness has its root in the much older word "alone," those familiar with the reception of the play might reasonably assume that the emergence of the concept is related to Hamlet's unusual proclivity for soliloquies and for solitude.3 However, Shakespeare makes the silent Ophelia of act 3, scene 1 his paradigm for loneliness, rather than the soliloquizing Hamlet. Perhaps Ophelia's reticence is part of the reason that her loneliness has so often been overlooked. yet it marks a crucial moment in the history of the new concept. Ophelia's quiet loneliness not only colors the references to loneliness in Shakespeare's other plays, but also reframes the way that Hamlet's solitariness has been understood. The tendency to isolate Hamlet as the innovative protagonist in the story of the development of solitude has obscured Ophelia's hitherto silent role in the development of the soliloquy form.4
Loneliness need not always have meant what it does it today: its associations with melancholy, for instance, are not self-evident. To understand Shakespearean loneliness in terms of Hamlet's physical solitude, his solitary speaking, and his masculine melancholy, is to belie the way in which he shapes the new concept of loneliness to describe female characters who do not speak, even though they are amongst, rather than apart from, other people. Shakespeare associates three out of four of his total references to loneliness with silent female characters.5 "Loneliness" is in Hamlet and All's Well that Ends Well, "lonely" in The Winter's Tale, Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus. The Countess in All's Well says to Helena "now I see the myst'ry of your loneliness" when she realizes that Helena has not been speaking because she loves the Countess's son.6 In The Winter's Tale, Paulina describes Hermione's similarly mysterious statue as being kept "lonely, apart" before she unveils it for observation by Leontes and the assembled group.7 The "lonely" Hermione might...