Some soliloquies like these are sufficiently general in their themes to stand more or less entirely alone; others (‘O Romeo! Romeo!…’; ‘Now is the winter of our discontent…’) are so well-known that they have, as it were, outgrown their immediate dramatic context. All are rooted in the situations of those who deliver them, and derive ironic impact from their position in the play, yet, removed as they are from the unfolding action, they do lend themselves to separate performance or selection. So, while this book makes no claim to being a comprehensive collection of Shakespeare’s Greatest Hits, the reader will quickly see that a fair few old favourites appear here. Along with these justly celebrated passages, however, come many less well-known – yet equally rewarding – examples: the majority, though by no means all, of Shakespeare’s soliloquies have been included.

No attempt has been made at organization by subject (an impossible task given the thematic complexity of so many of these passages): instead the book follows the chronological order of composition, as far as it is known. The result? Well, one could make the case for its offering a series of snapshots of Shakespeare’s genius in all its range and richness, but the plaudits have all been piled up so many times before. In the end, an editor’s praises will rightly be seen as being surplus to requirements: readers are quite capable of judging – and Shakespeare’s characters of speaking – for themselves.

A Note on the Text

No single, definitive edition of Shakespeare’s plays exists. The texts we use today are largely based on those of the First Folio edition put together in 1623. Though compilers John Heminges and Henry Condell were former colleagues of Shakespeare, the author himself had been dead seven years by then. Their work could therefore carry no Shakespearean seal, and editors have felt free to add preferred readings from other early texts. Often enough these ‘Quartos’ were cobbled together from memory and published opportunistically, yet in some cases they have contained enduring poetry: Hamlet’s great ‘How all occasions…’ soliloquy comes from a Quarto edition.

‘Shakespeare’ is accordingly something of a fluid concept, but the difficulties don’t end there: Shakespeare also on occasion collaborated with various other authors. It follows that not everything in the plays can be assumed to be his, and there have been unseemly scholarly tugs of war over certain passages. These include, as it happens, some of those given here from Henry VI Part 1 as well as those from Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen. The speeches of the jailer’s daughter in the latter were almost certainly written by Shakespeare’s collaborator John Fletcher: they are included here because they are good poetry, and a part of that canon of work we have come to know as ‘Shakespeare’. The soliloquy from III, iv is of especial interest, however, since it shows Fletcher pastiching the Shakespeare style, in unmistakable hommage to the famous speeches of Ophelia in Hamlet. The text of Pericles has proved an editorial nightmare: some suggest that only the second half was ever by the Bard, the first acts being the work of the now otherwise unknown George Wilkins. We will never know for sure: in the end every reader will have his or her own suspicions; that is part of the fun of reading Shakespeare.