Protesting Too Much in Shakespeare and Elsewhere, and the Invention/Construction of the Mind

Abstract

This article examines a pattern found in a number of early modern plays (mostly Shakespeare's) in which a character is defined, early in the action, as someone who protests too much about something (wives and widows overprotest that they will never remarry, young men and women overprotest their piety or their disdain for love, etc.), and later suddenly changes to the opposite. It then asks how the plays account for this overprotesting and finds that they usually present it as the result, not of conscious hypocrisy, but of the characters’ ignorance of their own inner or real selves. Finally, it asks how this early modern explanation of overprotesting is related to the high modern Freudian unconscious and to the claims made by some postmodern critics that the mind and the conception of the self have undergone a radical change since Shakespeare's day.

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