This superlative collection offers timeless speeches from A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, Macbeth, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet

Twenty-seven soliloquies are examined in this work, illustrating how the spectator or reader is led to the soliloquy and how the drama is continued afterwards.

Provides the first systematic and comprehensive account of the conventions governing soliloquies in Western drama from ancient times to the twentieth century. O

'Now I am alone,' says Hamlet before speaking a soliloquy. But what is a Shakespearean soliloquy? How has it been understood in literary and theatrical history?