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.
