The Dramatic Monologue

The Dramatic Monologue

A dramatic monologue is a long excerpt in a play, poem or story that reveals a character’s thoughts and feelings. It is usually composed in the form of a speech of an individual character, addressed to one or more silent listeners offering great insight into the feelings of the speaker. M.H. Abraham analyzing the features of the dramatic monologue points out that a single person utters the speech that makes up the whole of the poem in a specific situation at a critical moment. Even though the speaker interacts with one or more persons, the auditor’s presence is perceived only from the clues in the discourse of the single speaker.

Distinction between dramatic monologue and soliloquy

     A monologue is a long speech delivered to other characters. A soliloquy is a long speech where a character talks to himself /herself aloud for the benefit of the audience.

Both are extended speeches by one person, the difference lies into whom these people are talking.

           “To be or not be” the most wee-known soliloquy is delivered by Hamlet to a human skull with no other character present.

The dramatic monologue was popularized by many poets in the Victorian period, Robert Browning and Lord Tennyson being the significant among them. Browning raised it to a highly sophisticated level in his poems like My Last Duchess, Fra Lippo Lippy, and Andrea del Sarto. Later, Ezra Pound used this form successfully in The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter, T.S. Eliot in A Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; and Robert Frost in The Pauper Witch of Grafton.