You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
The soliloquy is one of Shakespeare's most powerful dramatic tools — a moment when a character speaks alone on stage, revealing thoughts and feelings directly to the audience. Understanding how soliloquies function is essential for Paper 1 Section A, where you may be asked to analyse an extract that includes one. This lesson examines the conventions of soliloquy and aside, explores major examples from the set plays, and develops your ability to analyse how Shakespeare uses these forms to explore the theme of love.
Paper 1, Section A: Shakespeare (AQA 7712). Set text: Othello, with reference to Measure for Measure, The Winter's Tale and The Taming of the Shrew.
AO Focus in this lesson Weight here AO1 Argument about how dramatic form positions the audience; precise use of terms (soliloquy, aside, dramatic irony, Vice) Developed AO2 Dominant. How the soliloquy as a structural and formal device shapes meaning — interiority, address, irony Dominant AO3 The theatrical inheritance (morality-play Vice; the convention of direct address) and its reception Supporting AO5 The Bradley/Leavis dispute over Othello's soliloquies; psychoanalytic readings of Leontes Strong Section A assesses AO1, AO2, AO3 and AO5 (not AO4). The dominant skill here is reading the soliloquy as a piece of theatrical machinery — not as a window onto a "real person's" mind, but as a device that constructs a relationship between character and audience.
The crucial conceptual move in this lesson is to stop thinking of the soliloquy as confession and start thinking of it as address. A soliloquy is spoken to someone — the audience — and the relationship it builds (complicity, sympathy, judgement) is itself an object of analysis.
A soliloquy is a speech delivered by a character who is alone on stage (or believes themselves to be alone). It is a convention of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre that the audience accepts as a window into the character's inner life.
| Feature | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Direct access to interiority | The soliloquy reveals what a character truly thinks, as opposed to what they say to other characters |
| Audience as confidant | The character speaks to the audience, creating a relationship of intimacy and complicity |
| Dramatic irony | Because the audience knows what the character is thinking, subsequent scenes carry added weight — we know more than the other characters on stage |
| Convention, not realism | Soliloquy is a theatrical convention; no one actually speaks their thoughts aloud. Its power depends on the audience's willingness to accept the convention |
Key Definition: An aside is a shorter comment made by a character that other characters on stage supposedly cannot hear. Like the soliloquy, it is directed at the audience and reveals true thoughts or intentions. Asides are often used for ironic commentary or to signal deception.
Othello's soliloquies chart the destruction of a man by jealousy. His language moves from the eloquent, controlled verse of his early speeches to the fragmented, anguished utterances of the later acts.
"It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul" (5.2.1–22)
This soliloquy, delivered as Desdemona sleeps, is one of Shakespeare's greatest. Othello attempts to frame the murder as a sacrifice — an act of justice rather than revenge:
"It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul —
Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars! —
It is the cause."
The repetition of "the cause" is both an attempt to convince himself and a refusal to name the sexual betrayal he believes has occurred. The imagery shifts between light and dark, justice and tenderness:
"Put out the light, and then put out the light:
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore
Should I repent me; but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume."
The metaphor — extinguishing a candle versus extinguishing a life — reveals Othello's awareness that murder is irreversible. The soliloquy allows us to see that Othello is not a simple brute but a man in agony, which makes the scene both more sympathetic and more terrible.
AO5 — Critical Interpretations: A.C. Bradley reads this soliloquy as evidence of Othello's essential nobility — he is tragic precisely because he suffers so deeply. F.R. Leavis, in a famous counter-argument, argues that Othello is engaged in self-dramatisation, "cheering himself up" with grand rhetoric rather than confronting the reality of what he is doing. Both readings can be supported by the text.
Iago's soliloquies function very differently. Where Othello's soliloquies reveal vulnerability, Iago's reveal calculation:
"Thus do I ever make my fool my purse...
He holds me well;
The better shall my purpose work on him." (Othello, 1.3.381–402)
Iago's soliloquies are addressed to the audience as co-conspirators. He explains his plans, adjusts his strategies, and invites us to admire his ingenuity. This creates a deeply uncomfortable audience relationship: we become complicit in the destruction of Othello and Desdemona because we watch it unfold with knowledge we cannot share with the characters on stage.
AO3 — Context: The Vice figure from medieval morality plays — a gleeful embodiment of evil who addressed the audience directly — is an important theatrical ancestor of Iago. Shakespeare's audience would have recognised the convention while also noting how far Iago exceeds it in psychological complexity.
Soliloquy works differently in comedy. In The Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio's soliloquy in Act 4 reveals his "taming" strategy:
"Thus have I politicly begun my reign,
And 'tis my hope to end successfully.
My falcon now is sharp and passing empty,
And till she stoop she must not be full-gorged,
For then she never looks upon her lure." (4.1.175–79)
The falconry metaphor is revealing: Petruchio explicitly compares Katherine to a bird of prey that must be starved into submission. The soliloquy's function is to make the audience complicit in the "taming" — we understand the strategy even as we witness its cruelty.
Whether this soliloquy makes Petruchio's behaviour more or less acceptable is a crucial interpretive question. Knowing his methods are calculated rather than spontaneous might suggest rationality rather than brutality — but it might equally suggest cold manipulation rather than genuine emotion.
AO5 — Critical Interpretations: Juliet Dusinberre argues that Shakespeare uses the soliloquy to expose the mechanisms of patriarchal control, making the audience uncomfortable with what they are watching. Others argue that the comedy depends on the audience's willingness to enjoy the game.
Angelo's soliloquies in Act 2 are among Shakespeare's most psychologically acute explorations of desire and self-deception:
"What's this, what's this? Is this her fault or mine?
The tempter or the tempted, who sins most?
Ha!
Not she; nor doth she tempt; but it is I
That, lying by the violet in the sun,
Do as the carrion does, not as the flower,
Corrupt with virtuous season." (2.2.167–73)
Angelo's self-knowledge is devastating: he recognises that the corruption is his own, not Isabella's. The imagery of the carrion rotting beside the violet is one of Shakespeare's most powerful metaphors for the proximity of virtue and corruption. Yet despite this self-awareness, Angelo proceeds to abuse his power — the soliloquy reveals that self-knowledge alone is insufficient to prevent moral failure.
The aside and soliloquy are crucial in Measure for Measure because the play is built on the gap between public authority and private desire. Angelo's public persona — the "precise" (1.3.50), puritanical judge — is contradicted by the private thoughts the soliloquy reveals. The dramatic irony is central to the play's exploration of justice, mercy, and hypocrisy.
Leontes' jealousy erupts in a series of tortured asides in Act 1 Scene 2, spoken while Hermione and Polixenes converse innocently:
"Too hot, too hot!
To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods.
I have tremor cordis on me: my heart dances,
But not for joy, not joy." (1.2.110–13)
The asides are metrically irregular, syntactically fractured, and imagistically obsessive. Shakespeare gives Leontes no gradual descent into jealousy — it erupts fully formed, which has puzzled critics and audiences for centuries.
AO5 — Critical Interpretations: Psychoanalytic critics (drawing on Freud) have read Leontes' sudden jealousy as the eruption of repressed homoerotic desire for Polixenes. Stanley Cavell argues that Leontes' jealousy expresses a fundamental philosophical scepticism — the impossibility of truly knowing another person. The asides, with their fractured syntax, formally enact this epistemological crisis.
The soliloquy creates different audience relationships depending on the character:
| Character | Audience Relationship | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Othello | Audience as witness to suffering | Sympathy, pity, tragic engagement |
| Iago | Audience as co-conspirator | Uncomfortable complicity, moral discomfort |
| Petruchio | Audience as fellow game-player | Comic engagement, potential discomfort |
| Angelo | Audience as moral observer | Insight into hypocrisy, dramatic irony |
| Leontes | Audience as bewildered witness | Shock, psychological intensity |
Exam Tip: When analysing a soliloquy, always consider the audience relationship it creates. Who is the character speaking to? How does the soliloquy position us — as sympathisers, judges, conspirators, or witnesses? This is a sophisticated analytical move that demonstrates understanding of Shakespeare as a dramatist, not merely a poet.
The tension between what characters say in soliloquy and what they say in dialogue is often the richest area for analysis:
Understanding these contrasts is essential for a strong Paper 1 response, particularly when the extract includes both soliloquy and dialogue.
Iago is the most prolific soliloquiser in Othello, and his soliloquies pose a famous interpretive problem. He offers the audience a series of motives, but they do not cohere. In the first-act soliloquy he cites resentment at being passed over for promotion and a rumour about his wife:
"I hate the Moor,
And it is thought abroad that 'twixt my sheets
He has done my office." (Othello, 1.3.386–88)
But note the phrasing: "it is thought abroad" — Iago does not assert the affair as fact, only as gossip, and he immediately adds that he will act on it "for mere suspicion." A later soliloquy floats a different motive — "I fear Cassio with my night-cap too" (2.1.305) — equally ungrounded. The soliloquies, which conventionally clarify a character's interiority, here produce a proliferating, contradictory set of rationalisations. This is why Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his lectures on Shakespeare, famously described Iago's reasoning as "the motive-hunting of motiveless malignity" — Iago's soliloquies, on this reading, show a man searching for a motive to justify a malice that precedes and exceeds any reason.
AO5 — Critical Interpretations: Coleridge's "motive-hunting of motiveless malignity" is the indispensable critical touchstone for Iago. But it can be set against more recent readings: W.H. Auden ("The Joker in the Pack," 1962) reads Iago as a practical joker and nihilist for whom destruction is its own end, while critics attentive to class read his resentment of Cassio's preferment as a genuine, socially grounded grievance. The soliloquies sustain all three readings precisely because they refuse to settle on one motive.
The analytical lesson is general: a soliloquy is not a guaranteed truth-telling. We tend to assume that what a character says when alone must be sincere — but Shakespeare can use the soliloquy to dramatise a character performing sincerity to himself, or rationalising, or failing to understand his own drives. This is exactly the doubt Leavis raises about Othello, and it is the doubt that makes Iago's soliloquies so unsettling.
It is not enough to analyse a soliloquy in isolation; the strongest responses track how soliloquies function across the structure of a play. A soliloquy is a moment when the play's forward motion pauses and turns inward, and the placement of these pauses shapes the whole rhythm of the drama.
In Othello, the distribution of soliloquies is itself meaningful. The play opens with the audience knowing Iago's hostility but not yet his plan; his first-act soliloquy then admits us into the conspiracy, and from that point we are ahead of every other character. The soliloquies thus establish a structure of superior audience knowledge that generates the play's relentless dramatic irony: we watch Othello trust "honest Iago" while knowing exactly what that trust will cost. Crucially, Othello's own soliloquies arrive late and concentrate in the final act, so that the play's structure moves from Iago's controlling interiority to Othello's anguished one — a formal transfer that mirrors the plot's transfer of control. By the time Othello soliloquises over the sleeping Desdemona, the soliloquy has migrated from villain to victim, and the audience relationship has shifted from complicity to grief.
This structural reading is far more powerful than commenting on a single speech. It allows a candidate to argue that the soliloquy is not merely a window onto character but a governor of the play's whole economy of knowledge — who knows what, when, and what the audience is made to feel about it.
Key Definition: Dramatic irony arises when the audience knows something a character does not. In Othello the soliloquy is the engine of dramatic irony: Iago's confidences make us knowing spectators of a catastrophe the characters cannot see.
The richest single exercise in this topic is to compare Othello's language across the arc of the play, and the soliloquy makes the contrast stark. Set the controlled, public eloquence of his early self-presentation against the private agony of the murder scene.
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.