A monologue, or monolog, is a speech made by one person
speaking his or her thoughts aloud or directly addressing a reader, audience, or character.
- It is common in drama, animated cartoons, and
film.
- The word may also be applied to a poem in the form of the thoughts or speech of a single
individual.
- Monologue is a common feature of opera when an aria,
recitative or other sung section may carry out a function similar to that of spoken
monologues in the theatre.
- Monologues are often found in twentieth century fiction.
- Comic monologues have become a standard element of entertainment routines on stage and television.
A Soliloquy.
Youthful Mercury.
"What's this 'ere on the plyte? 'Knock and ring'! Blowed if they won't be harsking yer to 'walk hinside',
next!!"
Cartoon from Punch magazine, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892
In a monologue in a play or film, the speaking actor need not be alone on the stage or scene; however, none of the supporting
cast (in theatre or film) speaks.
There are two basic types of monologues in drama:
Exterior monologue: This is where the actor speaks to another person who is not in the performance space or to the
audience.
Interior monologue: This is where the actor speaks as if to himself or herself. It is introspective and reveals the
inner motives to the audience. This is also a common device in stream of
consciousness writings. Frequently in modern theatre, the actor may deliver the monologue in an "aside" (or a sequence of asides).
Where the character delivering the monologue is alone on stage it may also be described as a 'soliloquy'. Writers such as
Shakespeare used the soliloquy to great effect in order to express some of the
personal thoughts and emotions of
characters without specifically resorting to third-person narration.
It is a dramatic convention that soliloquies and asides cannot be heard or
noticed by the other characters, even if they are delivered in their plain view.
A written monologue may contain stage directions for the performer, and might be
preceded by information about the monologue's setting. (For example,
Samuel Beckett's monologue, Krapp's Last
Tape).
The monologue was a significant feature of French classical drama; the monologues of Racine have been highly prized by French actresses, including Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt.
The dramatic monologue is a poetic form not to be confused with the monologue in drama. It was brought to a high standard by
Robert Browning. The form is such wherein the poet writes from a speaker's point of view
in the form of an address to a listener who does not respond in the poem. The speaker in the poem generally talks about a
subject, but inadvertently reveals something about their character. It gives the poet an opportunity to present his subject in
direct 'conversation' with the reader (e.g. Browning's Porphyria's Lover) or places the reader as a 'character' to whom
the monologist speaks (e.g. the same poet's Mr. Sludge the Medium or My Last
Duchess). Such poetry combines the dramatic impact of the stage monologue with the potential of more elaborate and
suggestive use of language; on the printed page, where the words can be re-read and pondered, there is the potential to evoke
more complex layers of intent and meaning.
The term "monologue" is also applied to a form of popular narrative verse, sometimes comic, often dramatic or sentimental,
that was performed in music halls or in domestic entertainments in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century. Famous examples include Idylls of the King,
The Green Eye of the Yellow God and Christmas Day in the Workhouse.
Operatic monologue
In early opera and opera seria many arias were effectively monologues expressing the
character's state of mind - for example, the well-known Ombra mai fu in Händel's opera Xerxes. However the function of such pieces
was generally not, as in drama, to further the action or reveal anything new about the characters, but to provide opportunities
for the singer to display his or her musical prowess.
With the libretti of Lorenzo da Ponte for Mozart, such arias began to have more dramatic force. The use of monologue by Wagner in his Ring cycle however brought a new concept
of operatic monologue - much of the operas consists of extensive monologues by some of the principal characters, accompanied by
music which, by the use of leitmotifs, sometimes underlines and sometimes contradicts what is
being sung, giving an additional insight into the character's sub-conscious, as well as his (or her) overt motivation or
emotion.
This more dramatic use of operatic monologue was adapted by Verdi and his librettist
Boito to good effect in Otello and in Falstaff.
Musical Theatre
In the world of musical theatre, songs such as Ol' Man River (from Show
Boat) "((I'll drink to that))" and If I Were a Rich Man (from
Fiddler on the Roof) can be considered the equivalent of soliloquies, with characters singing aloud their inner thoughts.
There is even a song actually entitled Soliloquy in the Rodgers and
Hammerstein musical Carousel (musical), an eight-minute solo in which
the main character, Billy Bigelow, sings aloud his thoughts on learning that his wife is expecting a child.
Interior monologue
Based to some extent on Wagnerian monologue, the interior monologue has become an important feature of much 20th century
fiction. The outstanding exemplar is James Joyce, whose novel Ulysses ends with the famous soliloquy of Molly
Bloom, and whose Finnegans Wake is apparently one long monologue. Other
authors using similar techniques include William Faulkner and Joseph Heller.
Comic monologue
During the nineteenth and twentieth century a popular feature of variety shows and the
music hall in the USA and Britain was the comic monologue. This has evolved into a regular feature of stand-up comedy and television comedy. An opening monologue
of a humorous nature is a typical segment of stand-up comedy, and may often form a regular feature of television programmes such
as The Tonight Show.
Famous comic monologists include Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle,
George Carlin, Jack Parr, Billy Connolly, Bill Cosby, Lord
Buckley, Johnny Carson, David Letterman,
Jay Leno, Rove McManus, Bob
Hope, Stanley Holloway, Julius Tannen,
George Robert Sims, Ellen DeGeneres,
John Leguizamo, Jerry Seinfeld, Don Rickles, Dane Cook and Conan
O'Brien. Some of the aforementioned performers often perform what is referred to as a solo show, and some
practitioners of the form wrestle with stories and themes which mix the comic and the dramatic, namely Spalding Gray, Garrison Keillor, and Eric Bogosian.
Monologuing
Also known as the villain speech, monologuing is a common fiction cliché in which the villain of the story will take a moment
to gloat in front of the hero, who the villain believes will soon meet his demise. Commonly used in conjunction with the
deathtrap, fictional villains have a habit of pontificating on how said victim
will soon die, and reminiscing over how he tried for so long to get his kill and is now about to reap the reward. Villains may
also give away details of their evil plots, on the rationale that the victim will die immediately. This speech almost always
results in giving the hero time to escape the trap, providing the protagonist critical information he needs to defeat the
villain, or filling in plot background that has not yet been revealed to the audience. This idea suffuses comic book plotting in
all genres of film and theatre.
Along with comic books, James Bond films feature some of the earliest monologue/deathtrap combinations. For example,
From Russia With Love's assassin, Donald "Red" Grant, can barely resist the temptation to gloat over
James Bond's impending demise, allowing himself to reveal the true architect of the plot
(SPECTRE) and the finer points of how MI6
will be scandalized with circumstantial evidence surrounding Bond's (faked) murder/suicide. The practice reached its most absurd
level in the Batman live action show of the late sixties. In almost every episode,
Batman and Robin would be defeated and
captured, the villain would reveal a ludicrously elaborate deathtrap, then finally the villain would monologue about how the
heroes would die and what their plan was. These shows/movies were later lampooned in the Austin
Powers movies, and on Venture Bros. The
Last Action Hero and other shows by which time all seriousness is removed and the monologue/deathtrap becomes a joke.
The term "monologuing" was (at least in part) popularized by the movie The
Incredibles, in which the character Frozone tells Mr. Incredible about an encounter the former had with the villain Baron von Ruthless ("the guy has me on
a platter and he won't shut up") and later when Syndrome admits that Mr.
Incredible "caught me monologuing" upon attacking him during their first encounter on the villain's island.
Occasionally villains will have motives for their speech: they think the hero regards them as inferior, and wish to point out,
in detail, the marks of their superiority, or they wish to have their plan admired by the one man who could appreciate the
cleverness involved. The prevalence of the cliché, however, can make even such motivated speeches look implausible.
External links
Dramatic monologues
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
