Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Maurice Charney

Critical Essay by Maurice Charney

SOURCE: Charney, Maurice. “Asides, Soliloquies, and Offstage Speeches in Hamlet: Implications for Staging.” In Shakespeare and the Sense of Performance, edited by Marvin and Ruth Thompson, pp. 116-31. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Charney emphasizes the dramatic context and function in Hamlet of speeches that are distinctly different from regular dialogue. He calls attention to asides that are expository, or didactic, or expressions of guilt; to the range of tone and emotions in the soliloquies of Hamlet and Claudius; and to the dramatic significance of the several instances of voices heard from offstage or beneath it.

The frozen, stream-of-consciousness soliloquies and asides in Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude (1928), conceived in the Elizabethan and Freudian mode, which always seemed such a stumbling block to performance, were beautifully integrated into the play in Keith Hack's recent revival in London (1984) and New York (1985). The principal characters,...
(read more)