ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the so-called 'new' language of the performed self is a phenomenon clearly discernible in poetical compositions published during or just before the time of Shakespeare's literary activity. It suggests that one could write a history of fictional third-person self-consciousness in European literature, with examples of characters that seem to be questioning their own thoughts, in played monologues and soliloquies. The chapter places specific attention to the fact that Vasco Mouzinho could be held responsible for introducing into Portuguese literature fictional characters with a modern inwardness of the kind Bloom finds in Shakespearean theatre. Mouzinho was an exact contemporary of Shakespeare's. The chapter propose that the new kind of complexity in fictional personality, this 'Hamletian' trait, was very much alive and 'in the air', so to speak, at the close of the sixteenth century across widely different parts of Europe, in a way that would imply a general tendency stimulated by a range of favourable circumstances, artistic.
