soliloquy, passage in a drama in which the thoughts or feelings of a character are expressed aloud while the character is either alone upon the stage or with the other actors keeping silent. This device was long an accepted dramatic convention, especially in the theater of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.
Long, ranting soliloquies were popular in the revenge tragedies of Elizabethan times, such as Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, and in the works of Christopher Marlowe, usually substituting the outpouring of one character’s thoughts for normal dramatic writing. William Shakespeare used the device more artfully, as a true indicator of the mind of his characters, as in the famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy in Hamlet. Among the French playwrights, Pierre Corneille made use of the lyrical quality of the form, often producing soliloquies that are actually odes or cantatas, whereas Jean Racine, like Shakespeare, used the soliloquy more for dramatic effect. The soliloquy fell into disfavor after much exaggeration and overuse in the plays of the English Restoration (1660–85), but it remains useful for revealing the inner life of characters.
With the emergence of a more naturalistic drama late in the 19th century, the soliloquy fell into comparative disuse, though it made an appearance in T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons (1960; film 1966), among other plays. Other 20th-century playwrights experimented with various substitutes for the set speech of the soliloquy. Eugene O’Neill in The Great God Brown (performed 1926) had the characters wear masks when they were presenting themselves to the world, but they were maskless when expressing what they really felt or thought in soliloquy. In O’Neill’s Strange Interlude (1928), the characters spoke a double dialogue—one to each other, concealing the truth, and one to the audience, revealing it.