Exploring the Soliloquy
Problems and Modern Counterparts of the Shakespearean Technique
Shakespeare's soliloquies are not just an odd dramatic convention, but part of a continuining series of dramatic techniques to express thoughts and feelings.
Problems on stage
Despite being almost synonymous with Shakespeare, the soliloquies can still provide problems when it comes to production. Since modern theatre no longer uses the convention of the soliloquy, (or its brief cousin the “dramatic aside”) it can be extremely cumbersome in production, as the director tries to engineer a situation where it doesn’t seem totally daft that one character is standing on the stage declaiming to no-one in particular. At the other extreme, sometimes it is just dismissed as a “convention”, and acted without trying to make either the audience (or even the actor) believe in it as a theatrically compelling moment.
Soliloquy as part of dramatic technique
The soliloquy is not just a bizarre quirk of theatrical convention, however, which must be apologised for, or written off. It is an admittedly extreme form of a tendency which can be seen in almost all drama. Characters in plays tend to reveal more of themselves than people do in everyday life. It’s a requirement of the form: with only a couple of hours at their disposal, playwrights have to get down to dealing with issues like hope, longing, mortality and destruction in pretty short order. When was anyone’s life ever like Look Back in Anger, with its brilliant and furious tirades, or Arcadia, with its relentlessly witty exchanges about rice pudding and predestination? Watch an episode of Frasier, and notice how the characters unembarrassedly launch into declarations of their feelings and revelations about their childhoods. The playwright’s technique takes life, then compresses and refines it, and the soliloquy is simply an extreme version of this. In one sense it is more realistic – instead of forcing a character to make long explanations to the others, so the audience can “over-hear” them, the soliloquy gives direct access to the kind of internal monologue we are all hearing most of our lives. Though hopefully few of us have internal monologues like Hamlet’s. From this point of view, a soliloquy is not an archaic and clunky device, but an attempt to get past the veneer of events into the truth of how people react and reflect on the world as it is happening around them.
Modern comparisons
Though modern drama does not tend to employ the soliloquy, it still needs to express the kind of feelings which characters don’t usually share with others. As suggested above, realistic drama has incorporated this into general dialogue, sometimes using subtext or irony to communicate with the audience “above the heads” of other characters on stage. It has also been tackled by new technology – for example, voiceovers in film and TV often provide exactly the same function as the soliloquy, and we don’t find it remotely odd that we should be able to see a character in action whilst hearing their voice reflecting upon it. Bridget Jones’ Diary even took this a step further, providing a memorable subtitle which simply scrawled the word F***************k! across the bottom of the screen as Bridget realised she’d made a blunder. Recognising that soliloquies are part of a continuing strand of dramatic effects (and have very close modern counterparts) can help actors and directors approach them in production as functional parts of Shakespeare’s plays, rather than just pretty speeches.
