Glossary of Poetic Terms

A soliloquy is a monologue in which a character in a play expresses thoughts and feelings while being alone on stage. Soliloquies allow dramatists to communicate information about a character’s state of mind, hopes, and intentions directly to an audience. Soliloquies became a dramatic convention in the 1590s and 1600s, when playwrights used the technique to allow characters to reveal important plot points. The opening speech in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is an early example, but the most famous soliloquies in English come from Shakespeare’s plays Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello.