MONOLOGUE (from Gr. ovos, alone, and X yos, speech)

This article appears in Volume V18, Page 731 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: MOL-MOS

MONOLOGUE (from Gr. ovos, alone, and X yos, speech) , a passage in a dramatic piece in which a personage holds the

scene

SCENE (Fr. scene, Lat. scaena, Gr. oflvil, a tent or booth, a stage or scene)

to himself and speaks unconsciously aloud. The theory of the

monologue

MONOLOGUE (from Gr. ľovos, alone, and X yos, speech)

is that the

audience

AUDIENCE (from Lat. audire, to hear)

overhears the thoughts of one who believes himself to be alone, and who thus informs them of what would otherwise be unknown to them. The word is also used in cases when a character on the stage speaks at

great

GREAT

length, even though not alone, but is listened to in silence by the other characters. The old-fashioned tragedies of the 17th and 18th centuries greatly affected this convention of the

monologue

MONOLOGUE (from Gr. ľovos, alone, and X yos, speech)

, which has always, however, been liable to ridicule. There is something of a lyrical character about the monologue in verse; and this has been felt by some of the classic poets of France so strongly, that many of the examples in the tragedies of Corneille are nothing more or less than odes or cantatas. The monologues of Shakespeare, and those of Hamlet in particular, have a far more dramatic character, and are, indeed, essential to the development of the play. Equally important are those of Racine in Phedre and in Athalie. The French critics

record

RECORD (Lat. recordari, to recall to mind, from cor, heart or mind)

, as the most ambitious examples of the monologue in two centuries, that of Figaro in Beaumarchais's Le Mariage de Figaro and that of Charles V. in

Victor

VICTOR
VICTOR, GAIUS
JULIUS
- JULIUS
(4th cent. A.D.)
VICTOR, SEXTUS AURELIUS

Hugo's Hernani, the latter ex-tends to 16o lines. In the Elizabethan drama, the popularity of Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, in which Hieronymo spouts interminably, set a fashion for ranting monologues, which are very frequent in Shakespeare's immediate predecessors and contemporaries. After 1600 the practice was much reduced, and the tendency of solitary heroes to pour forth columns of blank verse was held in check by more complex stage arrangements. After the Restoration the classic tragedies of the

English

ENGLISH

playwrights again abused the privilege of monologue to such a degree that it became absurd, and fell into desuetude.

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