{"id":416,"date":"2017-06-14T15:41:03","date_gmt":"2017-06-14T14:41:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/?page_id=416"},"modified":"2018-01-15T09:50:24","modified_gmt":"2018-01-15T09:50:24","slug":"what-speeches-do-monologue","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/?page_id=416","title":{"rendered":"What Speeches Do: Monologue"},"content":{"rendered":"

We will stick with Shakespeare for this, and look at what is probably the most famous monologue, or soliloquy, of all time, the \u2018To be, or not to be\u2019 speech from the play Hamlet<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

POLONIUS<\/h3>\n

I hear him coming \u2013 withdraw my lord.<\/h3>\n

[King and Polonius hide behind an arras.<\/em>]<\/h3>\n

HAMLET<\/h3>\n

To be, or not to be \u2013 that is the question;<\/h3>\n

Whether \u2019tis nobler in the mind to suffer<\/h3>\n

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune<\/h3>\n

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles<\/h3>\n

And by opposing end them; to die: to sleep \u2013<\/h3>\n

No more, and by a sleep to say we end<\/h3>\n

The heartache and the thousand natural shocks<\/h3>\n

That flesh is heir to: \u2019tis a consummation<\/h3>\n

Devoutly to be wished \u2013 to die: to sleep \u2013<\/h3>\n

To sleep perchance to dream \u2013 ay, there\u2019s the rub,<\/h3>\n

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come<\/h3>\n

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil<\/h3>\n

Must give us pause: there\u2019s the respect<\/h3>\n

That makes calamity of so long life.<\/h3>\n

(3.1.54-68)<\/h3>\n

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 \u2013 for that we would need a designated Shakespeare course \u2013 but we will investigate what kinds of challenges and questions this piece of dramatic monologue throws up, and how we can deal with them.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018suspend disbelief\u2019 \u2013 that is to say, we are not meant to believe that these things are \u2018real\u2019. We only need to accept that in some genres, monologues and songs happen. Drama doesn\u2019t usually have narrators like novels do, so the monologue is an alternative way to express interiority.<\/p>\n

Hamlet\u2019s monologue, however, creates all kinds of problems for the reader or audience member.<\/p>\n

For one, the language is strikingly complex. We understand that it is a meditation on death \u2013 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 \u2018to die: to sleep.\u2019 But as we move on to the next line we realise that it\u2019s really \u2018to sleep no more<\/strong>\u2018 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018solo\u2019 \u2013 that is, alone, but what happens when the speaker is not alone?<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 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 \u2013 a ruse to trick the king and Polonius.<\/p>\n

A soliloquy, then, can be much more than an expression of a character\u2019s feelings or ideas. Hamlet is obsessed with the idea of acting and make-believe, and the play Hamlet<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Back to Drama.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We will stick with Shakespeare for this, and look at what is probably the most famous monologue, or soliloquy, of all time, the \u2018To be, or not to be\u2019 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":413,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-416","page","type-page","status-publish","czr-hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=416"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1769,"href":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/416\/revisions\/1769"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}