Making it easier to find monologues since 1997
Built for actors.
Used by everyone.
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Making it easier to find monologues since 1997
Built for actors.
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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 monlogue, double-spaced for scansion, transcription and ready to print, courtesy The Mirror Up To Nature.
About the revision 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 2 pages each instead of having all the plays on two long pages (all the men on one page, all the women on the other. This should 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 soon as it is ready. Enjoy. If you'd like to see the hover preview additions move along more quickly, donations would make that possible.
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 new partnership is born... 03/18/2006: Yesterday I received an email from Tee Quillin (an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Middle Tennessee State University) at The Mirror Up To Nature offering a partnership between our sites. His site is going to be the host site for a seperate pdf (Adobe Acrobat) file for each of the monologues. The files will be pre-formatted to be actor friendly; double-spaced for scansion and transcription and ready to print. The first line of each monologue will become a link to a pdf (Adobe Acrobat) file that will be hosted on The Mirror Up To Nature.
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, rather than the "Oxford" version (which I link to from this site.) 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: (Most recent edit to any page on this site - October 21, 2007) . I'm currently in the process of adding a preview-on-mouse-hover for each monologue and rearranging the site for better searchability and surfability. Eventually the site will be modernized by housing the index in a database with extra tags. This will allow search results to be sorted by various parameters like approximate length time to perform for each piece, age appropriate, whether the piece will for auditions/performances or if better suited as scrap for classwork, verse or prose, comedic or tragic, etc. 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 page at CuesandAll.com |
Discussion Forums are available but I don't promote them and there's not much activity there. Feel free to post a lot to try to get it jump-started. :-)
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. Update As of March 2006 I've entered into a partnership with Tee Quillin at The Mirror Up To Nature. 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
Hosted by UtiliGeek
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
The Moby text
of Shakespeare's plays which I link to on the MIT server is, of
course, public domain. Contact MIT regarding any intellectual
property rights related to the MIT site.
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