SOURCE: "Person and Office: The Case of Imogen, Princess of Britain," in Literature and Nationalism, edited by Vincent Newley and Ann Thompson, Liverpool University Press, 1991, pp. 76-87.

In this essay; Thompson studies the character of Imogen, concentrating on her inner conflict between personal desires and royal duties.

In his British Academy lecture of 1970, Person and Office in Shakespeare's Plays, Philip Edwards explored the relationship between self and professional role, private and public being, asking whether the role-theory of 1960s sociology (as exemplified by the work of Erving Goffman) was appropriate to a discussion of Shakespeare's plays. Rejecting as anachronistic the cynical (but currently fashionable) assumption that the private self is always estranged from the public self and that the latter must inevitably be a falsification of the former, he differentiated between two Shakespearean models:

I argue, then, that Shakespeare presents two views of man; one, in which there...