Soliloquy - Literary Terms
Soliloquy - Literary Terms
Soliloquy is a dramatic technique of speaking alone on the stage. It is dramatic convention in which a character expresses his thoughts and feelings while no one remains on the stage. Playwrights employ the soliloquy as a device to provide the audience with information about the character's motives, plans, and state of mind, to explain Carlier events and actions that have occurred offstage, or to fill in other necessary background. For example, four lines of Hamlet's famtheseublished are quoted here:
To be or not to be: that is the question. Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles.
A soliloquy is different from an aside. Both in soliloquy and in aside only one character speaks, in soliloquy none is allowed to be present on the stage, in aside some other characters remain present on the stage but they cannot hear the utterance of the character who made an aside. A soliloquy is also different from the dramatic monologue. The soliloquy is a dramatic technique but the dramatic monologue is form of poetry in which a single speaker speaks to silent listener who responds only by physical gestures.
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