And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Macbeth, V, v, 23–8

The great soliloquies may not make much noise but they are often show-stoppers in the more literal sense that they appear to suspend all normal narrative logic, reaching out instead for universalities that transcend any immediate dramatic setting.

High-flown? Without a doubt, but then in the popular mind, at any rate, soliloquy and sublimity have been near relations. Whatever the question he may pose, Hamlet certainly has a lot to answer for. His tortured will makes him the paradigm, for many, not only of the soliloquy but of Shakespeare’s plays in general. The Romantic image of the tragic hero standing high atop a craggy mountain yelling his defiance as lightning bolts play about his head is recognizably derived from Hamlet in his more rhetorical moments. Yet that stereotype, enduring as it has been, had arguably been debunked by the Bard himself long before it was installed in the cultural consciousness by Byron and his continental followers. Lear’s maunderings on the blasted heath, the sheer indignity of his aged helplessness, offered the most ironic commentary possible on this cult of the youthful Hamlet-hero, masterful in eloquence even if existentially adrift. It is worth noting that – though held by many to be Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy – King Lear has few significant soliloquies, those that there are being delivered almost exclusively not by the protagonist himself but by secondary characters. The reader will notice that other tragedies too are under-represented here. Othello and Coriolanus are both comparatively reticent, men of action rather than of words or introspection – yet their tragedies are of course no less powerful for that. Antony and Cleopatra make great speeches but add little to the sum of soliloquy: they confide either in one another, equal partners in a historic folie à deux, or in those attendants and comrades who stand by, the anxious witnesses to their tragically divided loyalties.

This book would not seek to claim, therefore, that the soliloquies contain the ‘essence’ of Shakespeare’s plays: only of Hamlet would that even arguably be true. None of the other tragic protagonists is anything like so self-conscious as the Danish Prince, while in the Comedies soliloquies are employed for altogether different ends. The Bard is not above using soliloquy for the most brazen background-briefings to the audience aimed at moving on what would otherwise seem impossibly convoluted plots. (Not that such speeches cannot make for memorable poetry: Petruchio’s soliloquy in The Taming of the Shrew (IV, i) is a blatant bit of coaching of precisely this sort, but a striking moment, in its awesome cynicism, none the less.) Since the grand, set-piece soliloquy is associated with operatic anguish and high seriousness, any comic uses would of course have to be ironic. The most obvious examples of these are broad anti-soliloquies burlesquing the exalted sentiments and profound philosophizing of the tragic ones. Hence the searing outrage of Launce’s denunciation of his dog’s ingratitude in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (II, iii), or Falstaff’s po-faced exposition of that ‘first humane principle’ of life which is sherry-drinking (Henry IV Part 2, IV, ii).