Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

25.5 The representation of thoughts or inner speech in drama
Unit 25 Ways of reading drama
Section 6 Media: from text to performance

One of the characteristic strategies of novels is to give us access to the thoughts or inner speech of characters (in ways explained in Units 22 and 23). Drama does this through the use of a device called soliloquy. A soliloquy is ’A speech delivered by a character alone onstage, speaking to himself or herself, or to the audience’ (Worthen, 2000, p. 1488). As such, it is clearly a theatrical device rather than a representation of human behaviour (although some people do talk to themselves when alone). The importance of the device is that it appears to give us access to what the character is really thinking and so allows us to compare this with what the character says to other characters. (We tend to think that a character reveals the truth in a soliloquy because he or she is not at that moment attempting to deceive another character - though a soliloquizing character might attempt to deceive the audience or be self-deceived.) The soliloquy thus presents the reader/audience with knowledge that is not available to other characters and may hence play a role in the generation of dramatic or situational irony. At the end of Act One of Othello, for example, Iago delivers the following soliloquy:

I hate the Moor

And it is thought abroad that ’twixt my sheets

He’s done my office. I know not if’t be true,

But I for mere suspicion in that kind

Will do as if for surety. He holds me well,

The better shall my purpose work on him.

Cassio’s a proper man: let me see now,

To get his place, and to plume up my will

In double knavery. How? How? let’s see:

After some time to abuse Othello’s ear

That he is too familiar with his wife.

He hath a person and a smooth dispose

To be suspected, framed to make women false.

The Moor is of a free and open nature

That thinks men honest that but seem to be so,

And will as tenderly be led by th’ nose

As asses are.

I have’t, it is engendered! Hell and night

Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light.

        (Othello, I, iii, 385-402)

In this soliloquy Iago offers the reader/audience another reason for his hating Othello: the rumour that Othello has had sex with his wife. To get revenge, he will make Othello believe that Cassio has had sex with Desdemona, which will serve both to destroy Othello’s happiness and bring down Cassio. By allowing the reader/audience to know more about what Iago is doing than the other characters do, this soliloquy enables the generation of tragic irony.

However, although the soliloquy is an important dramatic device that can have resonant theatrical effects on stage, it is also akin to the representation of thought in novels and, as such, would appear to be as perfectly readable to a reader of the dramatic text as it is to the audience of the theatrical text.