Monologues vs. Soliloquies

Monologue

• Definition- from the Greek monos (“single”) and legein (“ to speak”) – is a speech given by a single person to an audience.

Monologue Example

• Antony delivers a well-known monologue to the people of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. You probably know how it starts: “Friends, Romans, countrymen lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones: So let it be with Caesar.”

Other Examples of Monologues

• Samwise Gamgee to Frodo – In The Two Towers by JRR Tolkien

• O’Brien’s– George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty – Four

• Elizabeth’s– Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein

Soliloquy

• Definition – from the Latin solus (“alone”) and loqui (“to Speak”) – is a speech that one gives to oneself. In a play, a character delivering a soliloquy talks to themselves – thinking out loud, as it were – so that the audience better understands what is happening to the character internally.

Soliloquy Example

The most well-known soliloquy in the English language appears in Act III, Scene 1 of Hamlet:

“To be, or not to be, - that is the question:Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to sufferThe slings and arrows of outrageous fortuneOr to take arms against a sea of troubles,And by opposing end them?”

Other Examples of Soliloquy

• Juliet’s – “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?”

• Macbeth’s– “Is this a dagger which I see before me?”

• Valjean’s Les Miserables• Tony’s soliloquies (songs)– Something’s Coming, Maria– From West Side Story