We will stick with Shakespeare for this, and look at what is probably the most famous monologue, or soliloquy, of all time, the ‘To be, or not to be’ speech from the play Hamlet.
At this point in the play, Hamlet has received confirmation that his uncle (Claudius) has killed his father (Old Hamlet) and married his mother (Gertrude). Hamlet pretends to be mad in order to plot his revenge, but he is very unsure about what to do. Should he kill Claudius? Should he kill himself? Is he only feigning madness or is he a real madman who also pretends to be mad? The new king and his advisor, Polonius, want to know, so they hide behind an arras (wall hanging) to observe Hamlet as he embarks on his soliloquy.
POLONIUS
I hear him coming – withdraw my lord.
[King and Polonius hide behind an arras.]
HAMLET
To be, or not to be – that is the question;
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them; to die: to sleep –
No more, and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished – to die: to sleep –
To sleep perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
(3.1.54-68)
The soliloquy in full goes on for another 23 lines, but we shall stop here. We shall not try to unlock all the mysteries of this text – for that we would need a designated Shakespeare course – but we will investigate what kinds of challenges and questions this piece of dramatic monologue throws up, and how we can deal with them.
A monologue of this type is often compared with an aria in an opera or a song in a musical. The main purpose of these events is to provide a glimpse into the feelings and thoughts of the speaker. It should be thought of as a non-naturalistic form of speech. In real life, no one thinks out loud in complexly figurative language and iambic pentameter in order to express their inner lives. And people tend not to break out into song, either (some people do, but it is comparatively rare). In musicals and plays, however, these are conventions. We are not meant to ‘suspend disbelief’ – that is to say, we are not meant to believe that these things are ‘real’. We only need to accept that in some genres, monologues and songs happen. Drama doesn’t usually have narrators like novels do, so the monologue is an alternative way to express interiority.
Hamlet’s monologue, however, creates all kinds of problems for the reader or audience member.
For one, the language is strikingly complex. We understand that it is a meditation on death – or even on existence versus non-existence (i.e. suicide). And it asks, if to be dead is similar to being asleep, what will we dream of when we die? But there are many lines that give us pause. The punctuation is somewhat confusing, and when we read it, the constant use of enjambment (sentences covering several lines) makes it so the sense of what we are reading is constantly postponed to the next line. We think we can read the fifth line as ‘to die: to sleep.’ But as we move on to the next line we realise that it’s really ‘to sleep no more‘ – the exact opposite! The train of thought continues on an on, and the meaning of it all seems to shift and change as the speech progresses.
Here, reading the speech is fundamentally different from listening to it. In performance, a good actor would be able to instil it with a rhythm that would make the meanings clearer. But at the same time, when we read the speech, we have more time to re-read, decode and ponder over what it means.
A more serious issue is that Hamlet is being spied on by Claudius and Polonius. A soliloquy may be a convention of the theatre, but here it seems that other characters can actually hear what Hamlet is saying. As the name suggests, a soliloquy is meant to be spoken ‘solo’ – that is, alone, but what happens when the speaker is not alone?
To make things even more complicated, some commentators suggest that Hamlet has actually seen Claudius and Polonius hiding behind the arras, and that his whole speech is designed to confuse them – that it is some sort of performance inside the performance. If Hamlet is not aware that he is being observed, we might read the soliloquy as one of the great musings on death (or suicide) in Western Literature, but if he knows he is being spied on, the whole thing becomes a big lie – a ruse to trick the king and Polonius.
A soliloquy, then, can be much more than an expression of a character’s feelings or ideas. Hamlet is obsessed with the idea of acting and make-believe, and the play Hamlet explores what it means for a play to be a play. For Hamlet, the monologue is a piece of performance, and when something is performance, we have to question if he really means it or not.
As stated many times, drama does not have access to all the literary techniques that some other genres can employ, but there are ways in which it can use speeches to create something which is many-layered, ambiguous and complex. But drama is also very open to change and interpretation. If we read the monologue, we get one impression of it. If we see it performed by a Hamlet who knows he is being watched, we get another impression, and if we watch it on film as opposed to the theatre stage, the context is bound to create yet another reading of what is going on (a film might use editing to cut back and forth between what Hamlet is saying and the facial expressions of the people listening to him in a controlled manner which is difficult to replicate on the theatre stage, just to name one difference).
This, then, is evidence that dialogue and monologue can be very complex and contain enormous amounts of vital information, hidden in broad daylight, as it were. But we have also noticed, it is to be hoped, that the physical context of speeches affect and direct their meanings. We must always be alert to the way the meaning of a speech can be determined by the circumstances under which it is delivered, more about which in the section on Stage Directions.