Soliloquy, at the turn of the century, is being re-identified, and begins to change in form from a long speech integrated into a dialog, to a mode of expressing the otherwise internal thought process of a character (de Grazia 74). Still acknowledged as communication between two units, it becomes the dialog between the mind of the character and the audience, rather than a mode of actual exchange between characters. The issue of soliloquy in Shakespeare’s tragedies quickly becomes one of narration. This modification is significant to the philosophy of the content of a play; no longer is a play a set of dialog, but for the first time narration can be inserted. The idea of narration is seemingly inapplicable to theater; theater is by definition dialog between characters, who, through action, demonstrate to the audience what is happening. The narrator is superfluous. However, what the audience lacks when there is no narrator is access to the internal world of the characters. Without narration the audience has the same privilege as any character in the play; they can see only what an observer could in the world of the play. This is a reduction of privilege from their role as a reader of literature, who is party both to the action of the book as well as to an intimate knowledge of the character’s motivations, as provided by the narrator. With soliloquy in the form of voiced thought, this intimacy is returned, and the audience becomes re-aligned with the characters in a way in which they have not been accustomed.
Narration through soliloquy should be inherently of the first person. The narrator is integrated into a privileged character or characters who are allowed to step out of the world of the play and into the real world of the audience, and explain their actions to the audience. Because these characters are otherwise bound to the world of the play, they are unable to speak to the motivations or intentions of any of the other characters. As characters wax philosophical and begin to generalize, their narration becomes less and less representative of the inner-thought of an individual character, and more and more symptomatic of a mood that may be generalized for the play. For the soliloquy to evolve into a mode of third-person narration that it will eventually become and which will allow drama to involve the audience as intimately as literature involves the reader, the soliloquy must become removed from the substance and plot of the play, and, furthermore, must remove itself from the specific concerns of the individual, and become almost a critique of the play itself, drawing from the art and becoming an artistic commentary. The evolution of the soliloquy may be demonstrated by an analysis of two prominent soliloquies, Richard the Third’s soliloquy of Act I, scene I, and Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be”. While both soliloquies are characteristic of the protagonists who recite them, Richard the Third is plot and action based. It is removed from dialog and is concerned with the audience, signifying it has already moved beyond the soliloquy of dialog, but is still in the first person, concerned with the plans, future, and past of the individual character. Hamlet’s soliloquy takes on the alternative form of the third-person narrator, the observer of events who may comment on the trajectory of the play, without bringing in concerns that are plot-based. This is the final evolution of narration in Shakespeare; the narrative voice has entered as an alternative character, concerned with the trajectory of the play but even more concerned with the philosophical implications of the actions of the characters.
Richard the Third’s soliloquy begins in the near-third person, and involves the audience as equals in “the winders of our discontent” (I.i.1). Through the constant invocation of the word “our” in the first ten lines, Richard clarifies his role as a narrator, providing the audience with information relevant to the story-line of the play and to them. Their understanding of the play and their own position is dependent on his soliloquy. However, Richard will eventually break the empathy he has imposed on the audience by presenting them with their own “winter of discontent made glorious summer” and turn immediately and alternatively from a third-person removed narrator, who exists in the same capacity as the audience, to a first-person narrator, addressing primarily the issue of himself through the term “I” (I.i.14). Not until line 14 does Richard establish himself in the first-person. Even as he addresses issues less universal with the “he” that regards the amorous affairs of the king, he maintains a third-person status, informing the audience of events from which he, as the narrator, is removed. With the introduction of “I”, Richard becomes involved in a way the audience can never be, and so integrates himself into the world of the play, and reducing his ability for universal narration.
In line 28 Richard begins to clarify his role as a narrator. Between line 14 and line 28 he has introduced his own complains regarding his situation to the audience. This portion of the soliloquy is a dramatic shift from the universality of the first 14 lines, and almost over-personalizes the narration into a monologue that is so inward looking it is no longer commentary on the play. However, the introduction of “therefore” marks a very specific mode of narration; it addresses the complaints listed on the part of the narrator and it leads into a resolution. The word “determined” will contrast with the soliloquy of Hamlet, which will lack any determination whatsoever (I.i.30). Through determination the narrator assumes a specific role. The action implied in determination necessarily relegates the character speaking the lines to the first person. The audience assumes a distance from a character, who will take action as they themselves inherently will not participate in I action but will act as mere observers. The third-person narrator, who offers commentary but cannot take action, is more likely to elicit empathy from the audience for it is in the same position as the audience, removed from the action, and relegated to the role of the critic. By determining to take action, Richard the Third removes himself from the ranks of the audience to the role of a participant in the play and a recipient of the audience’s sympathy. In this case, sympathy substantially differs from empathy. The audience empathizes with those in their position. When the narrator speaks to them as an observer of events, the audience can equate themselves with this position, and feel the sentiments expressed. The sympathy of the audience is applied to characters with whom the audience cannot experience. Characters within the world of the play, who can take action in that world, are removed from the audience. The audience may understand the characters motivations and may analyze the characters actions, but they will never share a role with the character as they will with the removed narrator.
As Richard reveals the trajectory of the play, he cements his role as a third person narrator. With the phrase “plots have I laid” he signals to the audience, as a narrator, he can inform them not only of the past but of the future (I.i.32). He is not merely a character participating in the play, but he is an informer of the audience. The insight he offers the audience concerns only the information to which he is privy, that concerning himself and his own motivation and planned actions. He is narrating, but from his own perspective, and not from a perspective that can be universalized.
The word “if” in line “36”, followed by the concrete self-characterization in line 37 of Richard as “subtle, false, ad treacherous” reinforces his role as an involved first person narrator. Richard is prepared to provide the audience with specific qualities of his character. These are traits that, without narration, the audience would establish either through observation of the character’s action or through the commentary, in dialog, of other characters. Richard gives the audience a clearer perception of his character without requiring them to do any further research of their own. Yet, he is subject to the limitations of the world of the play. Although King Edward is his brother, and although he is very familiar with his character, he must insert the mitigating term “if”. He cannot speak with certainty either to the character of his brother or to the events of the future, because his insight as a narrator is limited to the first-person. The hypothetical nature of his narration is re-emphasized with the word “should”, which modifies Richard’s picture of what will happen with the reality that it is what will happen if all goes as Richard has planned (I.i.38). Richard possesses no quality himself that allows him to determine the future; he can only influence the events of the play through manipulation and action as any other character of the play might.
Richard informs the audience of the prophesy he will plant. This creates an arc in the monologue, which began as potentially third-person, informing the audience of the history that led up to the beginning of the play, then turns intensely self-reflective and into a timeless account of Richard as a person, and ends with a description of the plot to come. The ability and willingness to speak to the past, present and future establishes Richard’s role in the play as narrator, while simultaneously engaging him in immediate action within the play, a quality not of a narrator but of a character, uniting his narrative voice with that of his character.
The final line of the soliloquy contrasts with the final line of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”. Although both lines introduce the character that is entering to interrupt the soliloquy, Richard the Third introduces Clarence, the character immediately concerned with the plot Richard has just described and that entrance allowing the plot to progress. Alternatively, Hamlet introduces Ophelia, the entrance signaling a shift in voice and an ending to the unrelated interjection of the narrator. Hamlet introduces Ophelia with the command “but soft you now”, a command for his narrative to cease (III.ii.88). By addressing himself as “you” Hamlet separates his narrative voice from the character, so much so that it warrants the use of an alternative pronoun. In contrast, Richard the Third’s narrative voice is acknowledged as belonging to the character, as it is not an alternative entity but merely “thoughts” which must “dive…down to [his] soul” (I.i.41). The thoughts are his own, and will remain present with his character, having been located at his “soul”. Hamlet not only commands the narrative voice in terms of the other, a “you” separate from his own identity, but also through the act of narrating has been so removed from his character’s function within the plot that with the entrance of Ophelia “all [his] sins [are] remembered” (I.i.90). In his narration Hamlet has emphasized his interpretation of the play so much that now the aspects of the plot must be “remembered”, not only by the audience but by the character involved in the world of the play himself.
There is a universality to the “To be or not to be” speech unique in the soliloquies of the play and is revolutionary in terms of dramatic narration. The speech “has no particular relation at all to Hamlet” (de Grazia 76). Although the other six soliloquies in the play contain similar melancholy sentiment, they are intensely introspective in a way this soliloquy is not. The soliloquy,
“avoids the egocentric marker ‘I’ – first through infinitive propositions which require no subject and then through the use of a generalized and impersonal ‘we’ and ‘us’. As there is no marker for Hamlet, so there are no deictics fastening the content to the experience – no spatial ‘here’, temporal ‘now’, or personal ‘he’s’ or ‘she’s’. In other words, the soliloquy is generic rather than reflexive. Those who have looked there for Hamlet’s experience have been disappointed, finding, for example, instead of a ghostly revenant, a reference to death as the country from which ‘No traveler returns’ (III.ii.78-80). As one recent editor concludes, the speech contains no individuating insights, but rather ‘what would occur to ay well-read Renaissance man meditating upon death.’” (de Grazia 76)
The soliloquy takes a different turn from that of Richard the Third even in its generalizations. While Richard generalizes by aligning himself with the audience, narrating their collective past, notably, narrating specific events in their collective past, bringing the audience into the world of the play in order to be one with the narrator; Hamlet poses questions in the hypothetical, not to the audience, but to the universe in general as the audience would in reaction to the play, asking “whether” and suggesting possibilities and their drawbacks, then meditating thereon. Where Richard draws the audience into the scene of the play in order to be close to them and narrate to them, Hamlet removes himself from the context of the play and brings himself into the observing role of the audience and critic in order to present narration.
The “To be or not to be” speech is uniquely, universally applicable within the play. Unlike the other soliloquies, it “could drift from one position to another. In Q1, Hamlet delivers it after the ghost’s injunction. In Q2 and F, Hamlet gives it after he has encountered the players and devised a trap to determine Claudius’s guilt. In either position, it functions to break dramatic momentum, casting pale thought in the way of swift actions” (de Grazia 76). This fundamentally reflective quality of the speech, the degree to which it has no bearing on either the plot or character development, makes it uniquely narrative. Furthermore, it is uniquely third-person. Existing outside the world of the play, the speech is “autonomous ad detachable” making it into an “anthology piece which…is fit for reproducing ad re-contextualizing” (de Grazia 77). It exists within the play almost as criticism of the play. It is neither an aspect of the play or of the character, but rather the melancholy reflections of an observer of the events.
The reflections of the “to be or not to be” speech are general and unexciting. The questions asked go unanswered, and by the end of the speech it is still unclear whether there is a greater advantage in being or not being. This contrasts sharply with the determinations of Richard the Third’s opening soliloquy, and removes the soliloquy from the voice of the character into an uninvolved narrative third person. From the critical perspective, the soliloquy does begin to move I the direction of accounting for Hamlet’s potential hamartia of delay. The last line before Ophelia enters addresses both the nature of Hamlet’s character and the meditative and indecisive quality of the soliloquy itself as it concludes that, with contemplation, “currents turn awry and loose the name of action” (III.ii.87-88). This awareness of inaction is an alternative to the character of Hamlet’s awareness. It takes the re-appearance of the ghost in Act III, scene iv, to draw Hamlet’s attention to the fact that “lapsed in time and passion” he has “let go by the important acting of [the ghost’s] dread command”, and even this is presented as a question to the ghost, rather than an admonition of known culpability (III.iv.107-108). The referenced action, lost in the “to be or not to be” speech, betrays a narrator who, like the audience, is confused by Hamlet’s failure to move against his uncle, and who, like the audience, must seek terms in which to account for Hamlet’s profound delay.
The “To be or not to be” speech represents a third-person narrator, completely uninvolved with the characters of the play. Though the speech is delivered by Hamlet, it addresses the general concerns of the play, and presents to the audience the questions to be considered when watching the characters’ actions. The narrator’s role at this moment in Hamlet is so evolved from its role in Richard the Third as to be nearly incomparable. Although Richard the Third narrates the actions of the play, this concentration on action permanently restricts him to the role of the first-person narrator. Hamlet’s ability to step away from the events of the play and align himself with the observer creates an empathy between himself and the audience that allows him to offer commentary and criticism on the philosophy of even his own actions without providing the explicitly personal knowledge of the first-person narrator. Just as Claudius and Polonius watch Hamlet from behind the screen, mirroring the audience who watches him recite, so Hamlet himself reflects on his plight and poses the general questions of the play for contemplation. This is an evolution in narration that brings drama on par with the rest of literature; commentary on the play can now be given within the context of the play.
