The Soliloquy
From Dramatics Magazine, January 2012
By Robert Cohen
For a long time I have coached actors to make forceful eye contact as they
try to reach into the souls, and affect the actions, of the characters played
by actors around them. But at whom does an actor look when there is no
other actor to see—as during a soliloquy, for example, when there is no one
else on stage?
And what exactly is a soliloquy? The word is given only two definitions in
the Merriam-Webster dictionary: (1) “the act of talking to oneself,” and (2)
“a dramatic monologue that represents a series of unspoken reflections.”
But human beings don’t normally talk to themselves, at least not in long,
poetic stanzas or extended paragraphs. And nothing could be less dramatic
than a character’s “series of unspoken reflections.” So spoken words
uttered by actors who are merely “talking to themselves” or “thinking
aloud” are, in most cases, both unreal and non-dramatic. Yet soliloquies
have been featured in hundreds of plays since the time of the ancient
Greeks.
Two kinds of soliloquies
Soliloquies come in two major forms. The first is the apostrophe: a speech
directed to a being who is not present but is, at least in the soliloquizer’s
mind, potentially sentient: someone (or something) that might possibly
hear you, see you, or sense you physically. A prayer is the most common
apostrophe. When Hamlet says “O God, God, how weary, flat, stale and
unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world,” he hopes his words may
reach “God,” whom he hopes will be listening to him. I place “God” in
quotation marks here, because I’m referring to a God that Hamlet believes
may exist, but not necessarily a God that you or I believe—or Shakespeare
believed—may exist. And I use the words “may” and “hope” because people
may pray to God without having absolute certainty of “God’s” existence.
For prayer, it is only necessary that the person praying believes there is a
possibility that a divine being might be paying attention.
The second form of soliloquy is the direct address, in which an actor
speaks directly to the audience. These include, most obviously, prologues
(as in Romeo and Juliet), epilogues (as spoken by Rosalind in As You Like
It), choruses (as those between acts in Henry V), and asides (short
interjections directed to the audience, particularly common in Restoration
comedies).
I will be discussing both of these forms in these pages, mainly with
examples from Shakespeare, not only because his are the most renowned
soliloquies in drama, but because the texts are easily available to my
readers and because Shakespeare, a lifelong actor as well as a playwright,
knew better than anyone how to write speeches for actors.
The apostrophe: Lady Macbeth
Look at this line in Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy in which, alone on stage, she
plots the murder of King Duncan:
Come, thick night, and pall thee
in the dunnest smoke of Hell.
In traditional productions, the Lady is usually described as talking to
herself or thinking aloud. But in fact she is speaking an apostrophe to
“Night”—whom she might consider the God, Goddess or Spirit of Night—
and pleading for this “Night” to descend and cover her intended murder
with the blackest of blankets (the “pall” that covers a coffin) in order to
conceal her intended crime.
Conceiving Night in this way—as a potentially sentient being—makes Lady
Macbeth interactive. The line is therefore dramatic rather than simply
rhetorical or poetic; it is the opening of a potential dialogue rather than
just a monologue. Lady Macbeth is trying to gain Night’s attention, to get
Night to “come” to her. So she scours the sky to see evidences of this Spirit,
she reaches out with her arms to feel the cooler air Night brings to the
earth, and she chooses her words and adjusts her tone of voice to make
vivid sensory contact with this mysterious “Night.” All this makes Lady
Macbeth, and the actress playing her, active rather than passive. She is
trying to do something, not merely say something, which makes her
soliloquy an action rather than a recital. Love her or hate her, we are
thrilled by her bravado, and entranced by her determination to commit her
soul to unknown powers.
Considering a soliloquy as an action instead of a reflection creates
enormous advantages for the actor, who, of course, is supposed to be
acting. When acting actions instead of merely musing upon them, actors
engage all their senses, particularly their eyes, ears, and somatosensory
(feeling) systems. Their eyes and ears become proactive, their nerves tingle
at traces of air movements on their arms and the (imagined) shaking of the
ground under their feet. The actor’s emotions, thereby, flow freely from the
sensory responses they seek, anticipate, and feel—or think they feel.
But interacting with a sentient Night also engages the actor’s mind. Rather
than merely repeating Shakespeare’s text, she is forced to choose the words
at the very moments she speaks them. For while the actress has
memorized and rehearsed her lines in advance, the character of Lady
Macbeth is presumed by the audience to be making her speech up as she
goes along, just as people do in real life. And if the actress is thinking there
may be a “real” Night listening to her, she will have no problem selecting
her words moment-to-moment, as people do in life, instead of simply
repeating what she memorized earlier. She will be creating her speech in
real time, solely on the basis of what she thinks Night wants to hear. And
we, in the audience, will be watching her think, and become enchanted by
the way she translates her thoughts into words.
For these are not common words! Why, for example, does Lady Macbeth
ask Night to “pall thee” rather than “dress thee”? The word “pall,” with its
gloomy, deadly resonance (it is the root word of “appalling” and
“pallbearer”), is not something Lady Macbeth could have planned in
advance. It only occurs to her as she senses Night may be coming into her
presence, and as she tries to improvise a way to let Night know she is
planning this appalling, murderous deed. And so we see her improvise
something she has never thought of before, not merely reflect something
she put to memory last month.
And in what shroud should Night pall herself? Lady Macbeth describes it
as “the dunnest smoke of Hell,” but why does she say “dunnest” instead of
“darkest”? “Dunnest,” a word that appears nowhere else in Shakespeare,
means “extremely dun-colored,” with “dun” referring to the reddish-brown
color of certain horses. But it is also a homonym for “done,” which is a
word she and her husband use throughout the play to refer to the murder
they commit. “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done
quickly,” says Macbeth before the assassination. “They have awaked and
’tis not done.… Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done’t,”
cries Lady Macbeth when she thinks her husband has failed in his task; “I
have done the deed,” Macbeth tells his wife after the murder. And Lady
Macbeth’s final line in the play, as she heads off to kill herself, is the
tragically sad realization that “What’s done cannot be undone.” And why
not? Because her deed was the “done-est” act that could ever be done—and
because this “done-ness” comes straight from “Hell.” By asking for the
“smoke of Hell” to cloak her intended assassination, she is telling Night
that she is willing to sell her soul to Satan and be damned forever if Night
will help her pull it off. And she is saying it for the first time in her life!
This close analysis of a single line is to make just one point: to show us
Lady Macbeth’s thinking during her soliloquy. As she chooses her words,
she commits herself to a series of graver and graver steps: first to seducing
Night (“come thick Night”—spoken perhaps with a lascivious drawing of
her tongue through her teeth on the word “thick”), then to showing Night
her murderous intentions (“and pall thee”), then to offering her absolute
commitment (“dunnest”), and finally accepting an eternal pact with the
devil (“of Hell”). And she is creating the speech as she says it, improvising
it and “living in the moment” as she speaks. So if there’s a slight hesitation
in her voice before she completes her sentence, as in “the dunnest smoke of
(pause) Hell!” we know it’s because she’s giving herself a millisecond to
change her mind before she completes her request.
Does Lady Macbeth believe in spirits? We don’t know. But she allows
herself to think they may exist. (Earlier in this speech she called upon such
surreal presences with “Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts,
unsex me here”). But she need not believe in spirits absolutely. A person
who apostrophizes needs only to hope the object of the apostrophe exists in
order to beckon it, just like a fisherman hopes that there are trout in the
stream in which he casts his bait. Lady Macbeth is actively fishing for just
the right words that will make Night take her bait.
The apostrophe: Juliet
There are literally hundreds of apostrophic soliloquies in Shakespeare, of
course. Juliet, alone on her balcony, also calls for Night to come, though in
a radically different manner:
Gallop apace, you fiery-footed
steeds,
Towards Phoebus’ lodging: such a
wagoner
As Phaethon would whip you to
the west, And bring in cloudy night immediately.
Juliet is asking the horses that, in Greek mythology, draw the chariot of the
sun across the sky to speed up, as they did when young Phaethon took the
reins and sped them forward. (With tragic results, incidentally: Phaethon
lost control of the vehicle, threatening to set the world on fire, and Zeus
had to take him out with a thunderbolt.)
Most young actresses, I’m afraid, play this speech by throwing their arms
rapturously around themselves, even closing their eyes to show the
audience how deeply they are “in love.” But if we see Juliet trying to see the
horses in the sky and urging them to go faster, and trying to see Phoebus’s
lodging in front of them and the cloudy night behind them, we are far more
deeply engaged in this thirteen-year-old girl’s wondrous passion and
imagination, and her fearlessness in seeking to break the barriers of reality
to command the heavens themselves. This is far more engaging than reenacting a clichéd gesture. For when the sun has set, the Spirit of Night—in
this case a “sober-suited matron” of Juliet’s imagining—will come, and
with it Romeo and the apocalyptic brilliance of his love:
Spread thy close curtain, loveperforming night…
Come, civil night… with thy black
mantle… Come, night; come, Romeo; come,
thou day in night!
Juliet is therefore not trying to merely show something; she is trying to do
something. She is trying to speed up the sunset so as to relish the “day in
night” that she can experience with her lover and husband. And we will see
with her. We look where she is looking. We will root for her to succeed in
her goals—even knowing (as the prologue has told us) that her victory, if
achieved, will be short-lived. We, in short, will be transported to her world,
which is the ultimate goal of acting.
The direct address
Not all soliloquies are apostrophes. How about lines that seem to have no
target other than the character’s self? Hamlet has several, such as the wellknown “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” Whom, if not himself, is
Hamlet addressing? At whom is he looking? With whom is he (and thus the
actor playing him) interacting—when not only is there is no one else on
stage, but no spirit or divinity even implied?
The answer is simple: Hamlet (and therefore the actor playing him) is
speaking directly to the audience. This is the direct address format I
mentioned before.
Shakespeare clearly wrote many direct addresses. Obvious ones include his
prologues and choruses, which are generally intended as “program notes”
or even “apologias” from the playwright or theatre company, such as the
first chorus of Henry V in which an actor comes forward to apologize for
the rudimentary scenery with which the company is staging the great
fifteenth-century battles between England and France. Other direct
addresses come from characters who step forward to tell us quite frankly
their plans for the future, such as the Duke of Gloucester’s scary opening
monologue in Richard III (“Now is the winter of our discontent…”), and
Benedick’s comic speech to the audience after he is tricked into thinking
Beatrice loves him (“This can be no trick….”) in Much Ado About Nothing.
The actors playing these parts look us right in the eyes, and we look right
into theirs.
But in fact virtually all soliloquies in Shakespeare that are not apostrophes
were, in Shakespeare’s day, spoken directly to the audience. And how—
without having any sixteenth-century production photographs—can we
know this? Because in the roughly circular Globe Theatre where
Shakespeare’s company performed, there was simply no place an actor
could look without directly facing the three thousand spectators that
surrounded him on all sides! For the Globe audience extended at least 300
degrees around the actor, left to right (some scholars say it was a full 360
degrees), and from down at his toes (these would be the “groundlings”
standing in the “pit” below him) to far above his head—those seated in the
top row of the three-balconied Globe. And all this was in broad daylight
which equally illuminated the actors and the spectators.
So of course Shakespeare knew that his soliloquizing actor, when not
staring at the sky or the floor, or looking for the spirit of Night, or God, or
Phaethon’s steeds in an apostrophe, would by necessity be gazing straight
into the audience as he spoke.
And why would he do otherwise? Watching a character muse aloud to
himself while looking vaguely off into the middle distance is about as
exciting as watching a stranger muse aloud to himself on a street corner.
Most of us simply turn our heads and scurry past when this happens. But
watching Hamlet looking directly at us when he cries out, “Oh, what a
rogue and peasant slave am I!” will grab us powerfully. After all, we’ve been
involved with Hamlet and his desires and difficulties since the second
scene of the play. He’s talked to us before and we know he will talk to us
again; by now we fully agree with him that “something is rotten in the state
of Denmark,” and we are rooting for him to “set it right.”
The benefit to the actor playing these soliloquies as interactions with the
theatergoers is immense, both for actor and audience. Try it yourself: stand
in front of a group of people and say out loud, but looking over their heads
as if speaking to yourself, “What a jackass I am!” Then say the same words
to the same people while looking directly at them. Try to make them
respond to you instead of merely sharing a personal rumination on your
shortcomings. The intensity, complexity, and emotional tone of your line
(and particularly the way you say the word “jackass”) when you see these
people seeing you will double, even quadruple. If you don’t believe it, ask
them; they’ll tell you. Then do the same with Hamlet’s line. Your “O what a
rogue” line will, I promise you, feel more impassioned, more engaging, and
more intelligent—and will be spoken with far better diction and precision—
than will your “thinking aloud” version. It will be so received by your
listeners as well.
Indeed, Shakespeare’s soliloquies that are not apostrophes are now almost
always performed this way in professional productions. They are
interactions with the audience. When Hamlet offers his “To be or not to
be” question on today’s stage, he is rarely debating with himself, he is far
more often seeking our support. Throughout the play he poses us similar
questions: “Who would bear the whips and scorns of time?” “Who would
these fardels bear?” “Must I remember?” “Who calls me villain?” “What is a
man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed?”
These are often called “rhetorical questions” because they do not stimulate
a spoken reply—but our bewildered silence is itself a reply. Our reluctance
to respond tells him, “Wow, this is a tough one!” And it is a tough one. In a
melodrama, when the villain comes down to the audience, twirls his
moustache, and, pointing to the damsel in distress, asks us, “Shall I let her
go?” we holler, “Yes!” When Peter Pan asks us to applaud if we believe in
fairies, we applaud mightily and tears come to our eyes. But when we are
silent after Hamlet asks us “what is a man…?” it is because we are just as
conflicted about the answer as he is. And when Hamlet, looking us squarely
in the eye, tells us that “conscience doth make cowards of us all,” it is clear
that he is not only talking to us, he is talking about us. Who amongst us
will not be drawn deeper into the play, and into Hamlet’s (and therefore
the actor’s) mind, when these soliloquies are played in such a manner?
And sometimes, the audience does answer! Samuel West, who played
Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2001, recalls an evening
when he asked the audience “Am I a coward?” and a man in the balcony
hollered back “Yes!” West describes this as “perfect… I could play the next
line, ‘Who calls me villain?’ while scanning that part of the house looking
for him.” By meeting the audience’s eyes, West explains, his Hamlet was
essentially telling them, “I’m talking to you. I can’t go on with the play until
I talk to you.”
So when Hamlet’s soliloquies are not apostrophes to God (“O God, God…”)
or to his mother (“O most pernicious woman!”), or to his uncle (“Bloody,
bawdy, villain!”) or late father (“Ay, thou poor ghost…), they are proposals
to the audience. He is looking at us for a response, perhaps a smile, a
laugh, a tear, a puzzled frown, a nod of sympathy, or even a shout from the
back row. He is creating a dialogue with us, studying us for our reactions,
asking for our help.
When Shakespearean characters address us so directly, they invite us to
share—not just hear—their thoughts. Often they invite our participation in
planning their future actions. In Twelfth Night, Viola is confronted by
Malvolio, who hands her a ring, explaining that his Lady Olivia has
commanded him to “return” it to her. Once he departs, Viola turns to us
and says, “I left no ring with her: what means this Lady?” Viola is asking us
what Olivia had in mind. And in the next twenty-five lines she asks us our
opinions about all this: “How will this fadge? …What will become of this?”
The Duke of Gloucester (Richard III), Aaron in Titus Andronicus, and
Iago, in Othello, all develop their malevolent plots right in front of us,
looking at us as if to determine how they should proceed. Aaron, alone on
stage, explains to us how he will seduce Tamora: “I will be bright, and
shine in pearl and gold to wait upon this new-made empress.” Then, seeing
that we have raised no objections to this plan, he takes it a giant step
further: “To wait, said I? To wanton with this queen!” Iago improvises his
plan to betray his rival Cassio right before our eyes: “Cassio’s a proper
man: let me see now: To get his place and to plume up my will, in double
knavery—How? How? Let’s see… I have it!” His phrases “Let me see now”
and “How? How?” make clear Iago has begun his speech without knowing
how he will end it. And we, by witnessing this and not “calling the police,”
as it were, have become Iago’s partners in evil. For against our better
natures, we have delighted in his cunning! This is the strange magic of
theatre.
The soliloquy through the ages
Let’s move away from Shakespeare now, for though his soliloquies are the
world’s most famous, almost every playwright in theatre history has
written such speeches. Soliloquies were common in ancient Greek tragedy
where, as in Shakespeare’s Globe, they could not not be spoken to the
audience, since the audience was seated directly behind the Greek chorus
to which the characters were presumed to be speaking. So when King
Oedipus was speaking to the chorus of (fictional) eighth-century B.C.
Theban citizens, he was simultaneously facing the (real) fifth-century B.C.
citizens of Athens who were watching the play. Soliloquies were even more
common in ancient Greek comedy—indeed, every comedy of Aristophanes
featured a long soliloquy (called a parabasis) that was delivered directly to
the audience, possibly by Aristophanes himself. Medieval English dramas—
which Shakespeare’s audiences grew up on—routinely featured characters
that spoke directly to the audience; a fifteenth-century actor playing
Herod, for example, leapt off the stage and ran about the spectators, yelling
at them. From ancient times to the Industrial Age—through the commedia
dell’arte of the Renaissance, the subsequent plays of Molière, Goethe, the
English Restoration and nineteenth-century European and American farce
and melodrama—characters have spoken soliloquies, both long and short
(where they are called “asides”), directly to the audience. Even when
realism reared its head around the 1870s, dramatists world-wide continued
the practice. Henrik Ibsen, sometimes known as the playwright who killed
off the soliloquy, has his title character in Hedda Gabler, alone on stage,
burn a rival’s manuscript in the fireplace while crying aloud, “Now I’m
burning your child, Thea! You, with your curly hair! Your child and Eilert
Lovborg’s!” The great master of modern realism, Anton Chekhov, included
soliloquies in most of his plays, from one-acts like Swan Song and On The
Harmfulness of Tobacco to his major masterpieces Ivanov, The Seagull,
and The Cherry Orchard. Even the famous mid-century American realists
have used them: Tennessee Williams ends Glass Menagerie with Tom’s
apostrophe to his absent sister (“Blow out your candles, Laura”), and in
After the Fall, Arthur Miller places an imagined “psychiatrist” in the midst
of the audience so that his principal character (and hence the actor playing
him) can make his confessions a dialogue with his invisible “therapist in
the house,” along with the spectators conveniently surrounding him. And
both modern and postmodern drama, starting with the European
surrealists, absurdists, meta-theatricalists, and Bertolt Brecht’s “epic
theatre,” have made the apostrophe and direct address virtual staples of
today’s drama, as customary on Broadway (in Tony Kushner’s Angels in
America, Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound, Tracy Letts’s Superior Donuts,
Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, and particularly in one-person plays including
Jay Presson Allen’s Tru, Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine, Jane Wagner’s
Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe and Doug Wright’s I
Am My Own Wife) as it was in the Greek theatron and Shakespeare’s
Globe.
But the question remains: how is the soliloquy to be performed in modern
realism? Apostrophes are not much of a problem. No one today thinks
twice about watching Hedda speak, as it were, to Thea and Eiler Lovborg’s
handwriting on the manuscript as she tosses its pages into her fireplace.
But the same can be true of the direct address. While most of the American
productions of Chekhov I have seen still stage his soliloquies in the
Merriam-Webster fashion: as dreamy (and I’m afraid often dreary)
ruminations on the character’s woes, I have found that Kostya’s presuicidal monologue in The Seagull, performed as a direct address to the
audience, can completely enrapture both the actors who speak it and the
spectators who hear it.
It turns out that audiences no longer need to be continually shielded from
realizing they are in a theatre watching a play. In this age of Brecht, Beckett
and their followers, just as in the eras of Aristophanes and Shakespeare, we
live comfortably in more than one place at a time. Today we watch miniadvertisements of upcoming shows that sneak into the lower corners of TV
dramas. In films, we hear the final spoken dialogue in one scene
overlapping the initial visual images of the next one, and have learned to
flash back and flash forward without blinking an eye or readjusting our
time frames. TV editors even cut to brief soliloquies, delivered squarely to
the camera, in sitcoms (as in The Office). We no longer need to wait for the
curtain call in order to co-exist, in the same time and space, with the actors
on the stage or screen. The soliloquy has come out of the closet and out of
the confessional booth. It is an action, an interaction, and it is very much
alive on stage.