soliloquy

/seuh lil"euh kwee/, n., pl. soliloquies.

1. an utterance or discourse by a person who is talking to himself or herself or is disregardful of or oblivious to any hearers present (often used as a device in drama to disclose a character's innermost thoughts): Hamlet's soliloquy begins with "To be or not to be."

2. the act of talking while or as if alone.

[1595-1605; < LL soliloquium a talking to oneself, soliloquy, equiv. to soli- SOLI-¹ + loqu(i) to speak + -ium -IUM; see -Y³]

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Dramatic monologue that gives the illusion of being a series of unspoken reflections.

An accepted dramatic convention in the 16th–17th centuries, it was used artfully by William Shakespeare to reveal the minds of his characters. Pierre Corneille emphasized its lyricism, while Jean Racine favoured it for dramatic effect. Overused in English Restoration plays (1660–85), it fell into disfavour. Rejected by prose dramatists such as Henrik Ibsen, it was seldom used in late 19th-century naturalist drama. Many 20th-century dramatists also avoided the soliloquy as artificial, though Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, among others, adapted it by introducing narrators who alternately mused on the action and took part in it. It has been used by contemporary playwrights such as John Guare and Brian Friel, and the illusion that the characters are confiding in the audience has proved acceptable to a culture accustomed to the interview and the documentary film.

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▪ drama

      passage in a drama in which a character expresses his thoughts or feelings aloud while either alone upon the stage or with the other actors keeping silent. This device was long an accepted dramatic convention, especially in the theatre of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Long, ranting soliloquies were popular in the revenge tragedies of Elizabethan times, such as Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, and in the works of Christopher Marlowe (Marlowe, Christopher), usually substituting the outpouring of one character's thoughts for normal dramatic writing. William Shakespeare (Shakespeare, William) used the device more artfully, as a true indicator of the mind of his characters, as in the famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy in Hamlet. Among the French playwrights, Pierre Corneille (Corneille, Pierre) made use of the lyrical quality of the form, often producing soliloquies that are actually odes or cantatas, whereas Jean Racine, like Shakespeare, used the soliloquy more for dramatic effect. The soliloquy fell into disfavour after much exaggeration and overuse in the plays of the English Restoration (1660–85), but it remains useful for revealing the inner life of characters.

      With the emergence of a more naturalistic drama late in the 19th century, the soliloquy fell into comparative disuse, though it made an appearance in T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons (1960), among other plays. Other 20th-century playwrights have experimented with various substitutes for the set speech of the soliloquy. Eugene O'Neill in The Great God Brown (performed 1926) had the characters wear masks when they were presenting themselves to the world, but they were maskless when expressing what they really felt or thought in soliloquy. In O'Neill's Strange Interlude (1928), the characters spoke a double dialogue—one to each other, concealing the truth, and one to the audience, revealing it.

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