Save Your Monologue for the Audition

It’s so tempting to recite or record monologues from Will’s works. I was poking around Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet’s Shakespeare blog (yes, there are other people blogging about this topic!) and found this link to Shakespeare monologues.

I think we need to stop kidding ourselves: Shakespeare is confusing and boring out of context.

I can’t blame people for wanting to share their readings of famous passages from the plays; once you fall in love with these stories you want other people to love them, too, but you know they won’t sit down and read/watch/listen to the whole play so you try to feed them monologues: little kernels of enjoyment from the larger picture, Quality of Mercy or Romeo, Romeo, Wherefore Art Thou. Hell, I’ve memorized a couple of monologues myself and occasionally try to force them on people. But you know what? They don’t care. Because they don’t know what’s going on around the monologue. They don’t know the story. They’re not attached. You can’t enjoy the Saint Crispin’s Day Speech unless you’ve marched to Agincourt with Henry’s hungry men. You can’t enjoy To Be or Not to Be unless you’ve anguished with Hamlet over the death of his father.

I almost tried recording some of The Bard’s monologues and posting them for you to enjoy. But then I realized you wouldn’t enjoy them. No, if I’m going to give you something then I should give you something you can actually wrap your head around.

We’ll see. I’ve got some ideas.

If you’re going to put someone through 90 seconds of Shakespeare, let them hear a sonnet. Those, at least, are meant to stand alone.