Mini: Shakespeare's Soliloquies and Asides
In our latest installment of our Shakespeare's Language Framework series, we are discussing the opposite of a discussion: soliloquies and asides! In this episode, we look at Marcus Nordland's work with the Shakespearean Inside Database and what trends we can find in the solo speeches of Shakespeare when we look at them across the Complete Works.
Kourtney Smith (KS): Welcome to another Shakespeare Anyone mini-episode! In these mini-episodes, we’ll be exploring topics that are related to Shakespeare but aren’t necessarily connected to whatever play we’ve been discussing.
Elyse Sharp (ES): And they’re mini, because, well, they’re shorter than our other episodes. They’re like quartos if the regular episodes are folio editions.
KS: Today, we will be discussing Shakespeare’s soliloquies and asides: moments when characters are speaking to no other character. And we are going to stay away from any sort of acting advice for these moments or any attempt to dissect a specific speech–that’s more than we have time for! Instead, we are going to focus on moments of solo speech as a whole and look at the trends and statistics we can find when we look at these moments across all of the complete works.
ES: Now, according to Miriam-Webster, a soliloquy is the act of talking to one self — expressing internal thoughts aloud either alone or with other people nearby. It is specifically used to describe a solo utterance of an actor in a play. It derives from the Latin solus meaning alone and loqui “to speak.”
KS: The word soliloquy and the word monologue exist in a sort of Venn diagram. They cover a lot of the same ground, but there are some differences in their usage. Monologue derives from the Greek monos meaning alone and legein meaning to speak but can also refer to the scene in which an actor solilquizes. It can also refer to a dramatic sketch performed by one actor, the routine of a stand-up comic, and a long speech that monopolizes conversation.
ES: We want to acknowledge that if you’ve taken a theatre class before, this definition may be different than what you were taught. It doesn’t help that each individual academic or theatre teacher might have a slightly differing definition of a soliloquy.
KS: For example, James Hirsh, in his 2003 book Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies, further defines the soliloquy as “any dramatic passage with the following characteristics: (1) it is spoken by a single actor and 2) the character portrayed by that actor does not intend the words to be heard by any other character.”
ES: Another academic, Alan Richardson, says that if you take Hirsh’s definition and add length, that equals a monologue.
KS: For our purposes today, we are going to focus on what Marcus Nordlund calls “insides”: speeches where a character in a play is speaking mostly to themselves, whether or not another character can hear them. And these speeches are neither choruses, prologues, or epilogues. Choruses, prologues, and epilogues are separate from the main action of the play and do not represent so much of an individual point of view as they serve a narrative function, such as guiding the audience through the play.
ES: Nordlund also draws a distinction that other academics do not by distinguishing between a soliloquy (longer passages where a speaker thinks they are alone) and solo asides, which are “spoken in the presence of other characters but guarded from their hearing, and therefore […] fairly short.” Nordlund notes that his “insides” can be either a soliloquy or a solo aside, and we will use all three terms today as we look at how Shakespeare uses solo speech.
KS: For his 2017 book, The Shakespearean Inside, Nordlund combined computer-assisted quantitative analysis and traditional literary scholarship to all soliloquies and solo asides (excluding choruses and epilogues) to establish a database of Shakespearean speeches where the speech is not intended to be heard by any other character on the stage. The resulting Shakespearean Inside Database is available online for free for anyone with access to NVivo software.
ES: The database allowed Nordland and his team to assign data points to the Shakespearean text such as “locus (the location of the speech: play, act, and sub-genre); genus (the speaker’s gender and class); and finally modus (the nature of the speech)” which covers what the character is ultimately doing in the speech (such as planning future events, describing events off-stage or other characters, or reflecting on a theme).
KS: One of the goals of this study was to see if “a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis can uncover patterns that a human interpreter could not easily detect by just reading or watching the plays […] that even Shakespeare himself might not have been aware of.” This data analysis of Shakespeare’s complete works allows us to examine Shakespeare’s soliloquies and asides and look for patterns that exist across all of Shakespeare’s works, across genres, and that can give us a greater insight into certain characters.
ES: First, it is interesting to note that the distribution of Shakespearean insides by act looks like an M for three out of four of his genres. The comedies, tragedies, and romances see an increased frequency of solo speech in Act 2 with a decrease in Act 3, then another bump in Act 4. In contrast, the histories tend to wait until Act 5 for the majority (if not all) of their soliloquies and asides. The histories, more than any other subgenre, often need to set-up a future installment of their series. Indeed, a closer look at the Henriads shows a reduction in Act 5 insides as they progress from their first installment to their last, “presumably because of a dwindling need for social cliff-hangers as the story draws to a close.”
KS: The comedies, in contrast, see the greatest decrease in solo speech in their fifth act. On average, the comedies see only 8 percent of their soliloquies placed in act five, compared to the 18 percent average of other genres. In fact, almost all of the six plays that have zero insides in the fifth act are comedies: As You Like It, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, and All’s Well That Ends Well. The sixth play is Edward III, and Shakespeare almost certainly did not write that act five. Where histories need to set up the next installment in their series, comedies need act five to restore whatever social cohesion has been disrupted over the course of the play, which requires a higher need for dialogue and the revealing of secrets.
ES: The data analysis done by Nordlund also allows us to learn about the figures of speech and techniques that Shakespeare employed most in his soliloquies and asides. We can also see where Shakespeare deviated from his collaborators on co-written plays and how his use of certain figures of speech varied throughout his career.
KS: Shakespeare’s favorite figure of speech is known as “apostrophe”. Apostrophe is speech that is not directed to an onstage character who can be expected to hear what is said. One fifth (or 20 per cent) of all of the insides in the complete plays is apostrophe. Compared to his collaborators, Shakespeare “always uses more apostrophe in his insides than do his colleagues. On average, he writes more than twice as much.” Indeed, Nordlund argues that apostrophe is a Shakepsearean trademark.
ES: The most frequent type of apostrophe is addressing an off-stage character, which makes up more than half of all of the uses of apostrophe in insides. Timon of Athens uses apostrophe in over half of all of its insides, making it the most apostrophe-heavy play. In act four scene one, Timon launches into a barrage of apostrophes addressing the city of Athens from its walls to its citizens, virtues, vices, diseases, and, finally, its gods. On the opposite end of the spectrum, The Comedy of Errors contains zero uses of apostrophe.
KS: Instead, over half of the insides in The Comedy of Errors can be categorized as reporting, the second most frequently used form of speech in Shakespeare’s insides. In fact, The Comedy of Errors contains more than double the mean amount of reporting for all Shakespearean insides. Reporting can be further broken down into reported words, where characters “import the actual statements of onstage or offstage characters as direct quotations or indirect paraphrases into their own private speech” versus reported actions, relaying events that have occurred offstage.
ES: The next most commonly used figure of speech by Shakespeare is prosopopeia – the act of pretending to be someone or something else. This was a commonly used figure of speech in the early modern era, and Shakespeare likely would have been taught how to write in this style in grammar school. According to Colin Burrow’s Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity, early modern grammar schools often had students write speeches as specific characters in specific circumstances. For example, students may have had to write speeches as if they were Helen of Troy or Queen Hecuba after the sack of Troy. We can see an example of prosopopeia in Henry IV, part 1, act two scene four, where Prince Hal satirizes Hotspur’s valor and imagines a conversation between Hotspur and Lady Percy.
KS: Statistically less common are Shakespeare’s uses of rhetorical speech. Rhetorical speech can be further parsed out as erotema (the rhetorical question), illeism (talking about oneself in the third person), and tuism (talking to oneself in the second person). Shakespeare used all three more frequently in his early career, then his usage tapers off and disappears completely by the end of his career.
ES: When used, rhetorical speech is heavily tied to class. Aristocratic characters, for example, “speak 36 percent of Shakespeare’s insides but deliver more than half of his illesitic and tuistic passages.” Commoners, who speak 14 percent of total insides, see a much smaller occurrence of illeism and tuism, and Gentry predictably fall in between Aristocrats and Commoners.
KS: Rhetorical speech is also inflected by gender, with the men of Shakespeare’s canon being twice as likely to talk to or about themselves as the women, and the setting of the plays. The Roman plays contain more than seven times as much illeism as other dramas, which John Velz argues means that Shakespeare saw illeism as a very Roman phenomenon.
ES: Shakespeare employs these figures of speech in soliloquies and asides to create or muffle audience empathy and sympathy. However, we do not always see a positive correlation between a character’s amount of insides and audience empathy or sympathy for a character. In other words, just because Iago tells us his plans constantly in Othello, that doesn’t mean that we take on his interests as our own, or that we take on his perspective and experience what he experiences.
KS: The soliloquies and asides in The Taming of the Shrew also do not serve to create audience empathy and sympathy. Instead, they are “an extreme example of the early Shakespeare’s tendency to use soliloquies and solo asides as expository devices.” 62 per cent of the insides in The Taming of the Shrew are spent explaining what characters are about to do, and notably Shrew is one of eleven plays with zero female insides. This means that we never get to hear Katherina’s point of view on the events of the play and how they affect her.
ES: Despite the lack of female insides in eleven plays, the ratio of insides for women compared to men over the complete works is statistically close to the overall ratio of total lines for women compared to men. In stark contrast to The Taming of the Shrew is Two Noble Kinsmen, where 75 percent of the insides are spoken by women, with 50 percent of all insides attributed to the Jailer’s Daughter, a commoner. Interestingly, in the plot of that play, “human sympathy is actively foregrounded rather than excised.” All’s Well That Ends Well is the only other play where women speak the majority of the insides (58 percent).
KS: Interestingly, All’s Well That Ends Well has important similarities to Shrew. Its male protagonist, Bertram, like Katherina, never speaks a single inside. Both characters are to be married against their wishes and their prospective spouses make use of a cruel prank to rein them in. Both plays also end with these characters declaring “how happy they are to have been brought into the marital fold.” And both of these plays are typically characterized by scholars as being uncomfortably problematic.
ES: While All’s Well That Ends Well and Taming of the Shrew lack insides for specific protagonists while others have plenty of solo speech, the plays Richard II and Coriolanus are unique in their overall lack of soliloquies and private speech for the entire play. In Richard II, the king does not deliver a single soliloquy or a solo aside until act five scene five which accounts for 91 percent of the play’s total insides. The remaining 9 percent come from Salisbury‘s soliloquy about the king’s imminent fall. Coriolanus has only one inside and one ambiguous speech – it is unclear if it is truly private speech.
KS: Despite the issues caused by a lack of solo speech in the problematic comedies The Taming of the Shrew and All’s Well That Ends Well, an overall lack of soliloquy for a character in other genres can tell us just as much about a character as a well timed soliloquy. Like Bertram and Katherina, the characters of Richard, Lear, and Cleopatra also have no soliloquies; the speeches they do deliver are in the immediate presence of other characters.
ES: As we previously mentioned, class does factor into Shakespeare’s distribution of solo speech. Royal characters have a smaller portion of the complete insides compared to the Aristocracy and Gentry, roughly splitting the difference between Gentry and Commoners. Therefore, the lack of soliloquies for Richard, Lear, and Cleopatra may have something to do with their royal status, however not all Shakespearean kings and queens lack soliloquies.
KS: Another common trait these three royal, inside-less characters share is an extreme lack of self restraint. As characters, they struggle or are unable to navigate the boundary between self and the world. They are unable to guard their speech or even determine when they should. Coriolanus also has a boundary issue. However, he has put too much of a gap between his own self and the social world and, therefore, does not know how to navigate the boundaries of the social world. Lear, Cleopatra, and Richard are not able to tell the difference between their sense of self and the world while Coriolanus finds the world foreign to his sense of self.
ES: Now, we said we wouldn’t go into analyzing specific solo speeches of the characters who have them, so we will leave this episode here.
KS: And that’s Shakespeare’s Language FrameworKS: Soliloquies and Asides!
ES: Thank you for listening to this episode.
Quote of the Episodes:
ES: From Julius Caesar act one, scene three, said by Casca, “Are you not moved, when all the sway of the earth shakes like a thing unfirm?”
Shakespeare Anyone? is created and produced by Kourtney Smith and Elyse Sharp.
Note: When this episode was recorded, Kourtney Smith was "Korey Leigh Smith".
Episode written and researched by Elyse Sharp.
Music is "Neverending Minute" by Sounds Like Sander.
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Works referenced:
Nordlund, Marcus. The Shakespearean inside: A Study of the Complete Soliloquies and Solo Asides. Edinburgh University Press, 2017. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1g0519z.5. Accessed 25 Oct. 2022.
