Soliloquy: Talking to the Audience

Soliloquy: Talking to the Audience EN301: Shakespeare and Selected Dramatists of his Time

What is a soliloquy? • soliloquy, n. • Pronunciation: /səˈlɪləkwɪ/ • Etymology: < Latin sōliloquium (introduced by St. Augustine), < sōli-, sōlus alone + loqui to speak. • 1a. An instance of talking to or conversing with oneself, or of uttering one’s thoughts aloud without addressing any person. (Oxford English Dictionary)

Direct address and complicity AARONNow climbethTamoraOlympus’ top,Safe out of fortune’s shot, and sits aloft,Secure of thunder’s crack or lightning flash;[…]Then, Aaron, arm thy heart and fit thy thoughtsTo mount aloft with thy imperial mistress,And mount her pitch whom thou in triumph longHast prisoner held fettered in amorous chains,And faster bound to Aaron’s charming eyesThan is Prometheus tied to Caucasus.Away with slavish weeds and servile thoughts!I will be bright, and shine in pearl and goldTo wait upon this new-made empress.To wait, said I? – to wanton with this queen,This goddess, this Semiramis, this nymph,This siren, that will charm Rome’s SaturnineAnd see his shipwreck and his commonweal’s. (2.1.1.24)

Direct address and complicity • [play Aaron video clip] • Note influence of Medieval Vice • Why does Aaron get the most soliloquies in the first half of the play? [N.B. Marcus and Lucius have one each; it is possible to play part of Tamora’s speech at 1.1.446-52 as a soliloquy, too.]

Direct address and complicity • Is it significant that Petruccio gets two big soliloquies in which he explains his tactics to the audience, whereas Katherine gets none? PETRUCCIO.I’ll attend her here,And woo her with some spirit when she comes.Say that she rail, why then I’ll tell her plainShe sings as sweetly as a nightingale.[…]But here she comes, and now, Petruccio, speak. (2.1.166-79)

Direct address and complicity PETRUCCIO.Thus have I politicly begun my reign,And ’tis my hope to end successfully.[…]She ate no meat to-day, nor none shall eat.Last night she slept not, nor tonight she shall not.As with the meat, some undeservèdfaultI’ll find about the making of the bed,And here I’ll fling the pillow, there the bolster,This way the coverlet, another way the sheets,Ay, and amid this hurly I intendThat all is done in reverend care of her[…]This is a way to kill a wife with kindness,And thus I’ll curb her mad and headstrong humour.He that knows better how to tame a shrew,Now let him speak. ’Tischarity to show. (4.1.168-91)

Direct address and complicity Propeller’s The Taming of the Shrew (2007): PETRUCCIO. He that knows better how to tame a shrew,Now let him speak. ’Tis charity to show. (to an audience member in the front stalls)You wanna say something?(Audience laughter.)(taking in whole audience) Anyone want to say anything?(Uncomfortable pause.)(with a shrug) Okay…Exit.

Soliloquies: Falstaff and Hal • Only three characters get soliloquies in 1 Henry IV: Hal, Falstaff, and Hotspur: • 1.2: Hal (‘I know you all…’) • 2.2: Falstaff (‘I am accursed to rob in that thief’s company…’ [arguably not a soliloquy]) • 2.4: Hotspur (‘“But for mine own part…”’) • 4.2: Falstaff (‘If I be not ashamed of my soldiers…’) • 5.1: Falstaff (‘’Tis not due yet…’ [arguably not a soliloquy]) • 5.3: Falstaff (‘Though I could scape shot-free at London…’ and ‘Well, if Percy be alive…’) • 5.4: Hal (‘For worms, brave Percy…’ [arguably not a soliloquy]) • 5.4: Falstaff (‘Embowelled…’, and ‘I’ll follow, as they say, for reward…’)

Soliloquies: Falstaff and Hal [Clip from 2010 Globe production]

Soliloquies: Falstaff and Hal PRINCE HARRY. Why, thou owest God a death. Exit FALSTAFF. ’Tisnot due yet. I would be loath to pay him before his day. What need I be so forward with him that calls not on me? Well, ’tis no matter; honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honour? A word. What is in that word ‘honour’? What is that ‘honour’? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tisinsensible, then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism. (5.1.126-40)

Soliloquies: Falstaff and Hal • Hotspur on the dead Sir Walter Blunt: ‘A gallant knight he was’ (5.3.20). • Falstaff on the same: ‘Soft, who are you? – Sir Walter Blunt. There’s honour for you! […] I like not such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath. Give me life…’ (5.3.32-3, 58-9). • These contrasting attitudes share the stage at the play’s climax as Hal and Hotspur, and Falstaff and Douglas, fight simultaneously in the next scene (5.4).

Soliloquies: Falstaff and Hal • But is our complicity with Falstaff strained by the fact that it is Harry who has the play’s first soliloquy? PRINCE HARRY. I know you all, and will awhile upholdThe unyoked humour of your idleness.Yet herein will I imitate the sun,Who doth permit the base contagious cloudsTo smother up his beauty from the world,That, when he please again to be himself,Being wanted, he may be more wondered atBy breaking through the foul and ugly mistsOf vapours that did seem to strangle him.[…]I’ll so offend to make offence a skill,Redeeming time when men think least I will. (1.2. 192-214)

Direct address or thinking aloud? • A disclaimer: the text is not a coded set of instructions so much as the basis for creative response. There’s no single “right” way to perform it. • Peter Brook: • ‘The Deadly Theatre approaches the classics from the viewpoint that somewhere, someone has found out and defined how the play should be done.’ (1968: 14) • Some critics, however, express a clear preference one way or the other…

Direct address or thinking aloud? • Bert O. States: • ‘In fact, the only characters in tragedy who “work” with the audience seem to be clowns and villains. […] It would be unthinkable for a character like Lear or Macbeth – or even Hamlet, who is brother to the clown – to peer familiarly into the pit because there is something in the abridgement of aesthetic distance that gives the lie to tragic character and pathos. A character who addresses the audience immediately takes on some of the audience’s objectivity and superiority to the play’s world.’ (1983: 366) • Andrew Gurr: • ‘…the explanatory soliloquy or aside to the audience was a relic of the less sophisticated days which developed into a useful and more naturalistic convention of thinking aloud, but never entirely ceased to be a convention.’ (1992: 103)

Direct address or thinking aloud? • Bridget Escolme, on the other hand, critiques Gurr’s‘post-nineteenth century assumption about theatrical progress’ (2005: 7), and points out that States’ description of an actor ‘peering’ into the pit assumes modern rather than Elizabethan theatrical conditions: ‘audience in darkness, actor with bright lights shining into his/her eyes’ (2005: 70). • When David Warner played Hamlet for the RSC in 1965, one critic noted: • ‘This is a Hamlet desperately in need of counsel, help, experience, and he actually seeks it from the audience in his soliloquies. That is probably the greatest triumph of the production: using the Elizabethan convention with total literalness. Hamlet communes not with himself but with you. For the first time in my experience, the rhetoric spoken as it was intended to be, comes brilliantly to life.’ (Ronald Bryden, New Statesman, 27 August 1965)

Hamlet’s first lines • Hamlet’s first line is often played as an aside, but is not necessarily. • Hamlet has no speeches marked ‘aside’, in fact. Alan C. Dessen points out that ‘Shakespeare apparently did not use the term as part of his working vocabulary’ (1995: 52). First Folio, 1623

Hamlet’s first soliloquy • Actor and director Michael Pennington argues that in the first soliloquy, Hamlet speaks ‘with a shocking candour new to the play’ (1996: 40). • David Warner ‘did not use the soliloquy to bond with the audience […]; he rather assumed their collusion and let off steam. The character established was a rebellious prince who did not respect authority’ (Maher 1992: 54). First Folio, 1623

First Folio, 1623 ‘Now I am alone…’ The last of these questions, suggests Pennington, ‘hangs in the air’ (1996: 75). Penningtonargues that Hamlet ‘must surely have got an answer’ to some of these questions at the Globe, and ‘even in these restrained days, the responses sit at the front of our mouths’ (1996: 75).

‘Now I am alone…’ Mark Rylance as Hamlet, Shakespeare’s Globe, 2000 David Warner as Hamlet, RSC, 1965

‘To be, or not to be…’ • ‘The Christian inhibition against self-slaughter which Hamlet recognised in his first soliloquy has gone now, replaced by fear, and his typical strengths have deserted him. […] There is no personal pronoun at all in its thirty-five lines, so it is in a sense drained of Hamlet himself: although the cap fits, it also stands free of him as pure human analysis.’ (Pennington 1996: 81) • ‘Although the content of this speech was very contemplative and personal, Warner never questioned that it should be given to the audience. Indeed, he felt that this soliloquy was the most direct of all of them. He saw it as sharing his dilemma with them (“after all, he’d shared everything else!”) and “debating gently” the very serious options.’ (Maher 1992: 56) Second Quarto, 1604

‘To be, or not to be…’ Mark Rylance: • ‘I found if I came out speaking “to be or not to be” as if it had not been cooked before, but I was cooking it at that very moment, ingredient by ingredient … it provoked a different response from the audience. Shakespeare comes to life when we speak and move with the audience in the present, particularly with famous speeches like that one. … if you actually take it step by step, you know, “to be or not to be, that is the question”; then imagine the audience saying, “What do you mean, that is the question?” And go on, “Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”, there is a sense of dialogue with the audience who are playing the role of Hamlet’s conscience at that moment.’ (Rylance 2008: 106-7) Mark Rylance as Hamlet, Shakespeare’s Globe, 2000

‘Now might I do it…’ Second Quarto, 1604 First Folio, 1623

‘Now might I do it…’ • As Lars Eidinger’sHamlet debated killing Claudius, pre-filmed footage of an audience applauding played behind him. When I saw the production at London’s Barbican theatre in 2011, Hamlet’s speech descended into a torrent of action-movie clichés (‘You killed my father, you’re fucking my mother, and that’s why you’re going to die!’), before Eidinger broke off and asked the audience, ‘Is this what you want to see?’. Lars Eidinger as Hamlet, SchaubühneBerlin, 2008

‘How all occasions…’ • This soliloquy appears only in the 1604 Second Quarto. • It gives Hamlet a very different ‘arc’… CAPTAIN. Truly to speak, and with no addition,We go to gain a little patch of groundThat hath in it no profit but the name. (4.4.8-10) Second Quarto, 1604

‘How all occasions…’ • ‘Gielgud viewed “How all occasions” as a “very important soliloquy” that showed Hamlet’s state of mind as “clear, noble, and resolved” before he went to England, with a “clear understanding of his destiny and desire.” Here was an assertion of the Victorian notion of the noble prince who valued honour above “the death of twenty thousand men.” After World War II and Vietnam, it would become less and less popular to find inspiration in Fortinbras, and, in fact, his portrayal on the stage would become more and more brutal and dictatorial.’ (Maher 1992: 14)

‘How all occasions…’ • Escolme describes the change in the character/spectator relationship following Hamlet’s last soliloquy: • ‘As a clown’s skull is replaced in its grave, as Ophelia is newly laid in hers, it seems we must also say goodbye to the complex theatrical subjectivity of Hamlet, as he slips back into a simpler moral frame where there can be no questioning of man’s inevitable fate.’ • In Mark Rylance’s performance at the Globe, this shift was, suggests Escolme, nothing less than a ‘bereavement of the spectator’ (2005: 73).

‘How all occasions…’ • Bertolt Brecht described Hamlet’s final soliloquy as ‘the turning point’ at which ‘he succumbs to Fortinbras’ drums of war’ (1948: 101). • ‘After at first being reluctant to answer one bloody deed by another, and even preparing to go into exile, he meets young Fortinbras at the coast as he is marching with his troops to Poland. Overcome by this warrior-like example, he turns back and in a piece of barbaric butchery slaughters his uncle, his mother and himself, leaving Denmark to the Norwegian. These events show the young man… making the most ineffective use of the new approach to Reason which he has picked up at the University of Wittenberg.’ (1948: 100-1)

‘How all occasions…’ • Arnold Kettle puts the same idea more subtly: • ‘Hamlet is not merely a Renaissance prince. Along with Marlowe’s Faustus he is the first modern intellectual in our literature and he is, of course, far more modern as well as much more intelligent than Faustus. And his dilemma is essentially the dilemma of the modern European intellectual: his ideas and values are in a deep way at odds with his actions. […] • Hamlet, the prince who has tried to become a man, becomes a prince again and does what a sixteenth-century prince ought to do – killing the murderer of his father, forgiving the stupid, clean-limbed Laertes, expressing (for the first time) direct concern about his own claims to the throne but giving his dying voice to young Fortinbras… The end then, is, in one sense, almost total defeat for everything Hamlet has stood for. But it is an acceptance of the need to act in the real world, and that is a great human triumph.’ (245-6)

References • Brecht, B. (1948) ‘A Short Organum for the Theatre’ in Cole, T. [ed.] (2001) Playwrights on Playwriting: from Ibsen to Ionesco, New York: Cooper Square Press, 72-105. • Brook, P. (1968) The Empty Space, London: Penguin. • Dessen, A. C. (1995) Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary, Cambridge: C. U. P. • Escolme, B. (2005) Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self, London & New York: Routledge. • Gurr, A. (1992) The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642: Third Edition, Cambridge: C. U. P.

References • Kettle, A. (1964) ‘Hamlet in a Changing World’, in Hoy, C. [ed.] (1992) Hamlet: A Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed., New York: W. W. Norton, 237-46. • Maher, M. Z. (1992) Modern Hamlets and their Soliloquies, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. • Pennington, M. (1996) Hamlet: A User’s Guide, London: Nick Hern. • Rylance, M. ‘Research, Materials, Craft: Principles of Performance at Shakespeare’s Globe’, Carson, C. & Karim-Cooper, F. [eds] (2008) Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, Cambridge: C.U.P., 103-14 • States, B. O. (1983) ‘The Actor’s Presence: Three Phenomenal Modes’, Theatre Journal 35: 3, 359-375.

Soliloquy: Talking to the Audience