What a "soliloquy" is

A term you'll meet in drama, especially Shakespeare.

A soliloquy (from the Latin solus, alone, + loqui, to speak) is a speech delivered by a character alone on stage, expressing their inner thoughts directly to the audience. The character is not addressing another character but is, by convention, thinking aloud — and the audience is granted access to the unspoken mind.

The convention

The soliloquy works through a tacit theatrical agreement: when a character is alone on stage and begins to speak, what they say represents their genuine inner state. No one is being lied to; the character is not performing for anyone within the play. The audience hears thought rather than speech. This is why soliloquies are the dramatist's primary tool for revealing psychology before the invention of techniques like free indirect discourse in the novel.

Soliloquy vs. monologue

The two terms are often confused. A monologue is any extended speech by a single character. The audience for a monologue is usually other characters on stage — the speaker is addressing someone within the play. A soliloquy is specifically a speech delivered alone, addressed essentially to the self (and through the convention of the stage, to the audience). All soliloquies are monologues; not all monologues are soliloquies.

Shakespeare's soliloquies

Shakespeare elevated the soliloquy from a functional plot device into a high-art form. His major tragedies are built around them:

Hamlet has seven soliloquies, including "To be, or not to be" — the most quoted speech in English. Hamlet's soliloquies are the play's central nervous system; the external plot stalls while the inner one moves.

Macbeth's "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" near the end of the play, after Lady Macbeth's death, is a soliloquy of exhausted nihilism — life as a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.

Iago's soliloquies in Othello reveal his motives (or refusal to settle on a single motive) to the audience while Othello remains tragically in the dark. The soliloquies generate dramatic irony at the same time they reveal character.

What soliloquies achieve

Psychology. Direct access to the character's thought.
Plot advancement. A character can announce a plan or decision the audience needs to know.
Dramatic irony. When the audience knows what a character knows but other characters don't, the soliloquy creates the gap.
Direct address. The convention is closer to confiding than declaiming; the audience feels intimately addressed.

The form in decline

The soliloquy fell out of fashion as drama moved toward realism in the nineteenth century. A character speaking their private thoughts aloud feels theatrical in a way nineteenth-century realism rejected. Modern drama replaces it with subtext, silence, and what is implied between characters' lines. But the convention survives in heightened or experimental theater, in voice-over in film, and in dramatic monologue — its lyric descendant.

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