Getting Past Your Fear of a Shakespearean Soliloquy

Many actors, and especially audiences, have trouble with the conventional Shakespearean soliloquy. Although an extraordinary segment of society appears to be quite comfortable suspending their belief enough to accept long-limbed human beings dressed up as cats as possessing the capability of transmitting some profound message, many of those same audience members immediately discard their capacity to suspend disbelief when a character breaks through that fourth wall and addresses them directly. Despite the fact that most people in the audience have almost certainly at some point in their lives vocalized their thoughts inside an empty room (I'm doing it right now), it would seem that for many the prospect of a character on stage doing the same crosses the finely crafted boundary between what is and what is not acceptable.

Getting past the discomfort of a soliloquy means arriving at an understanding that the message the writer needs to deliver simply cannot be done so suitably within the confines of a scene involving discourse between two or more characters. Sometimes a playwright cannot include important information about character or plot in the dialogue, so a monologue, no matter how artificial, may become necessary. To get around this dilemma, Shakespeare had his characters engage in the art of the soliloquy, or the act of having one character speak aloud in an interior monologue. Another convention that upsets some people is the aside, in which a character engaged in a conversation will also speak out loud with the assurance that only the audience hears what he has said and not any of the other characters. (I also do this a lot, but only because I've recently learned that when I say something out loud most people around me have conditioned themselves to ignore it.) These two stage devices are a convenient means of conveyance; the characters use them to convey precious information to the audience without having to let anyone else around them know their thoughts or feelings.