The last chapter closed by raising two issues: ‘that whereof one cannot speak’ and the question of the ‘self’ in the sonnets. Both have tended to be discussed in contexts that are very different from – indeed often in opposition to – the conditions of embodiment upon which I have been focusing. Commentators have often conceived of that which must be passed over in silence as the product or possession of an ‘inner’ being, itself regarded as the real or authentic ‘self’ in contradistinction to whatever ‘actions that a man might play’ (Hamlet, 1.2.84). This contrast between ‘privacy’ and ‘theatricality’ has been central to critical discussion of Renaissance literature for some time. In conjunction with a cognate pair, the interior and the public selves, they have formed the crux of an intense debate. Margareta de Grazia noted over a decade ago that Hamlet and Shakespeare's sonnets have occupied a central place in the critical movement towards discovering a properly conceived ‘interior’ self. Almost ten years before that, Anne Ferry saw in Hamlet and the sonnets the culmination of a sense of an ‘inner life’ or ‘real self’ that is only half-wrought in the poetry of Wyatt and Sidney. Ferry's argument was countered by materialist critics such as Francis Barker, Catherine Belsey and de Grazia herself, who insisted that such construction of ‘subjectivity as the (imaginary) property of inner selfhood’ is an anachronistic projection of a later, properly bourgeois and thoroughly ideological, sensibility. More recently, Katherine Eisaman Maus has struck back.