ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book suggests that some people in early modern England were newly convinced of their capacity to 'fashion' their own identities and that when looked at closely these supposedly free, 'self-fashioning' individuals dissolve into force fields of socially determined contradictions. John Lee and Christopher Pye open by remarking that Shakespearean tragedy in general, and Hamlet in particular, have somehow seemed foundational texts for 'the modern subject', but that there is apparently no agreement about what that founding consists in, or what it might mean. Both Ramie Targoff and Schoenfeldt are drawn to the same range of non-dramatic, explicitly Christian texts, and surely accounting for some of the important features of 'devotional' subjectivity in English Renaissance poetry is a sufficiently worthy and ample project.
