What Is a Soliloquy? | Its Purpose & Examples
- Melchior Antoine
- Jul 4
- 6 min read
Updated: Jul 10
A soliloquy is a monologue in which a character, usually in a play, expresses hidden thoughts and feelings to the audience while alone on stage. In a soliloquy (pronounced as suh-li-luh-kwee), it seems as if the character is breaking the third wall, that is, stepping out of the play and directly speaking to the reader and audience. There are several reasons as to why a writer would use a soliloquy.
Soliloquies allow the writer of the play (or other work of literature) to present information about a character’s motivations, hidden desires, and intentions directly to an audience. Soliloquies feature prominently in the plays of Shakespeare.
And for whatever reason, they seem to be associated with villainous characters expressing their hidden and evil intentions to the audience. These intentions are not hidden from us the audience, but from the characters in the play, resulting in a literary device known as dramatic irony.
In this article, we are going to look at an example of a famous soliloquy, namely, from Lady Macbeth. We also briefly examine the differences between soliloquy and dramatic monologue.
1. Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy
Lady Macbeth is typically portrayed as a villain (sympathetic and complicated, but nonetheless a villain). She has given us one of the more famous soliloquies in literature in Act 1, Scene 5 of the play:
. . . Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it. Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever, in your sightless substances,
You wait on nature's mischief. Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark
To cry 'Hold, hold.'
Lady Macbeth is asking to be possessed by evil spirits, so that she could be "unsexed." This is to prepare her and Macbeth for the evil deed of murdering King Duncan as he sleeps as an honored guest under the roof of the Macbeth household.
She is equating femininity with weakness and a lack of will to do what needs to be done. She even asks to “take my milk for gall.” Lady Macbeth understands well enough that the act of murdering Duncan is an immoral and evil act.
Her enthusiasm might seem to be in earnest. However, it is mere hyperbole being used to hide her internal conflict. She is conflicted between the role of the dutiful wife who helps her husband achieve the goal of attaining the Scottish throne by “manning” him up to do what is necessary: committing the foul act of regicide. However, this goes against her moral conscience, even if she claims not to care about the immorality of the act.
There is also a lot to be said about the motifs of light and darkness and unnaturalness in the soliloquy here. By asking to be unsexed, Lady Macbeth is embracing unnaturalness.
She also asks for “thick night” to hide her crimes so that “heaven” not “peep through the blanket of the dark” to witness her crime. For more on these motifs, you can check out my previous article: Understanding Literary Motifs In Macbeth.
However, it is enough to say that these motifs make it clear that Lady Macbeth understands very well that the act of murdering Duncan as he sleeps as a guest under the roof of the Macbeth household is unnatural and a crime against heaven.
Her soliloquy is doing the job of convincing not just the audience that she is addressing, but herself. Deep down, she doesn't believe a word that she is saying. She is lying to herself. This is revealed after she eventually grows insane from a sense of shame and guilt after helping to kill Duncan. She eventually ends up commiting suicide.
2. Iago in Othello
Our next example is from Othello. It is a soliloquy from the villain Iago. Iago is a much less sophisticated villain than Lady Macbeth. While Lady Macbeth lies to herself in terms of her potential to ignore her moral conscience, Iago is truly evil through and through.
There is no gap between the man’s capacity for evil and the true knowledge of himself. He is motivated purely by jealousy. He is jealous of Cassio, a general who has been promoted by Othello before him, and he is also jealous of Othello himself, a foreign moor who has risen to gain more respect, power, and honor than him in Venetian society. Here is his soliloquy from Act 1, Scene 3:
. . . I hate the Moor,
And it is thought abroad that ’twixt my sheets
’Has 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.
He plans to convince Othello that his wife is cheating on him with his officer, Cassio, hoping to destroy all three — Othello, Cassio, and Desdemona, with the innocent Desdemona being collateral damage or cannon fodder. Cassio is shameless about taking advantage of the fact that Othello trusts him completely or “holds me well” as he says.
In the soliloquy, he explains that “I hate the Moor.” Why? He isn’t even sure. He suspects that he slept with his wife. This is what he means when he says that “it is thought abroad that twixt my sheets/ has done my office.” He doesn’t know if it’s true, but it doesn’t matter to him.
He will simply pretend that it is for sure that Othello slept with his wife. As mentioned earlier, his motivation is jealousy of both Othello and Cassio. This is his pure motivation, and he seems slightly ashamed to admit it, which is really all the extent of his internal moral conflict.
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3. Soliloquy vs. dramatic monologue
A soliloquy can be described as a type of dramatic monologue. The two are often mistaken for each other. Let’s look at the differences between them. A dramatic monologue is presented as a speech given by a character to other characters or to the audience, which reveals their thoughts and feelings.
On the other hand, a soliloquy is a speech delivered by a character alone on stage, revealing their innermost thoughts and feelings directly to the audience. The main difference lies in the fact that the monologue is a speech directed to or intended for an external audience, while a soliloquy is a private thought shared with the audience, to the exclusion of other characters in the play.
The most interesting dramatic monologues are poems that resemble Lady Macbeth’s speech. That is, a speech full of irony in that it reveals facts about the speaker or internal incongruence within the speaker that they are unaware of.
A good example is Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (published in 1842). It is a poem about a man who chopped off the head of his wife because, as he puts it:
She had
A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad.
The dramatic monologue is spoken by a duke speaking to an emissary in the process of arranging a marriage with a suitable wife for the duke. In the quote, the duke is explaining how he was offended by the fact that his ex-wife was made happy by simple things such as the sunset or cherries being picked for her by some lowly citizen.
He says all this without knowing how insane and obsessed with control he comes across to anyone listening. This is comparable to how Lady Macbeth is unable to see how hollow she sounds in boasting about her ability to ignore her conscience and commit murder.
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2025, July 04). What Is a Soliloquy? | Its Purpose & Examples EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/what-is-a-soliloquy |
