Making it easier to find monologues since 1997
Built for actors.
Used by everyone.
The Men
The Women
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Making it easier to find monologues since 1997 Built for actors. Used by everyone. The Men The Women |
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The links above lead to a complete list of the plays categorized alphabetically by comedy, history and tragedy. Each entry
includes the character's name, the first line of the speech, is marked
as verse or prose and gives the location within the play where the
monologue is found. Each entry includes a link to the full text
of the scene in which the monologue is found. Another link for each entry points to a pdf file of each monologue, double-spaced for scansion, transcription and ready to print, courtesy The Inexplicable Dumb Show (formerly "The Mirror Up To Nature.") Follow @ShakesMonos on Twitter and/or become a fan on Facebook for a Monologue of the Day, notifications of site updates, Q&A etc.
Most recent revision to any page on this site: September 7th, 2009 About the revisions currently underway: I'm adding a preview-on-hover to each monologue link, so that if you hover your mouse over a link, a small scrollable window will be displayed on top of the page to let you read the monologue without having to leave the page. The preview window includes a link to print the aforementioned double-spaced pdf. I'm also currently breaking the plays out into two pages per play instead of having all the plays on two long pages (all the men's on one page, all the women's on the other.) This will make the site easier to navigate and easier to search. This revision is going to take quite awhile (over 6 edits per link, over 1,100 links) so I'm making each show's page available via the index pages as I go. I'm also adding the ability for you to rate monologues for each other. Enjoy
The index is complete as of Wed Apr 12 01:57:27 PDT 2006. Every piece of text viable for audition, performance, classwork, workshop, etc is now indexed. If you know of a piece I've missed, please send me a note. A few notes: The line numbers I've listed in the index of monologues may differ (by up to 10 lines or so) from the hard copy version you have in your home/school/theatre. This is common as the line numbers vary from edition to edition. Speaking of which, I suggest you use the Riverside, the Arden, the Cambridge, the Penguin or the Folgers editions of the plays for your audition or classwork.(As part of the current revision of the site I'm changing the links to point instead to The Globe texts as made available by the Open Source Shakespeare.) Each of the above listed versions have variations in the text because each publishing house hired a different group of 'editors' who, working primarily with the First Folio of 1623, set to ink their own "interpretation" and "improvements" upon the text found in the First Folio. The folio is the oldest available full printing of the complete works, and is closer to how the plays were originally performed.* The spellings, punctuation (or lack thereof) and other conventions used in the folio contain hints for actors which are lost in the later versions, through "corrections" and other edits made by the editors of more recent generations.
Current status of the project:
At the current rate of development I should be able to stop calling the site a "work in progress" and call it "complete" by the time my consolidated school loans are paid off. :-)
*Four of the plays were printed earlier in the First
Quarto of 1603. For a more in depth description of the
Elizabethan publishing process, drop by this pageat CuesandAll.com
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How this site came about...When I was in grad school from '95 to '97, I went searching for a site like this because the idea of such a site seemed more efficient to me than spending a few hours with the complete works on my lap. I found no such site, so after graduation I built it.
During school, I found these lists of monologues in the library at A.C.T. which were left on the reference shelves by a fellow Alumni.
Then I found the Complete Works of Shakespeare Online.
I typed up the list from the shelves of the ACT library the list and converted it into html, with links to each particular Play/Act/Scene.
I later (much later) completed the index to include every piece of text viable for audition, performance, classwork, workshop. In March of 2006 I entered into a partnership with Tee Quillin at The Inexplicable Dumb Show (formerly "The Mirror Up To Nature") for the addition of double-spaced PDFs of each monologue for easy printing. See the announcement at the top of this page for details.
Feedback, suggestions, corrections and questions encouraged. Email me.
This is a not-for-profit adventure.
Brought to you by Steven Shults
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
The texts
of Shakespeare's plays which I link to is, of
course, public domain. Contact site operators of other sites regarding any intellectual property rights related to their websites.
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