A man stands alone onstage and asks whether life is worth enduring.
A king stares into the future and tries to talk himself into murder.
A villain calmly explains a plan that no one else in the play is allowed to hear.
To modern audiences, Shakespeare’s characters can sometimes seem strangely fond of talking to themselves. In ordinary life, a long speech delivered to an empty room might attract concern. In Shakespeare’s theatre, however, it can become one of the most powerful moments of the entire play.
These speeches are usually called soliloquies, and they are far more than convenient ways of giving the audience information.
Shakespeare uses them to turn thought itself into drama.
Instead of merely watching what Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III, Juliet, or Iago does, the audience is allowed to hear the unstable machinery behind the action: fear, ambition, calculation, guilt, desire, doubt, self-deception, and sudden changes of mind.
That is why Shakespeare’s characters talk to themselves.
They are not simply talking to themselves at all.
They are thinking aloud in front of us.
What Is a Soliloquy in Shakespeare?
A soliloquy is a speech in which a character expresses thoughts while alone, or effectively alone, onstage.
The important idea is privacy.
Other characters normally do not hear what is being said, but the theatre audience does.
This creates an unusual dramatic situation. A character can behave one way in public and reveal something completely different when speaking alone.
A smiling courtier can admit hatred.
A confident warrior can confess terror.
A villain can explain exactly how he intends to manipulate everyone around him.
A prince who appears indecisive in conversation can expose a mind racing through dozens of competing arguments.
The audience therefore occupies a privileged position.
We often know more about the speaker than the other characters do.
That gap between public behavior and private thought is one of the engines of Shakespearean drama.
Soliloquy, Monologue, and Aside Are Not Exactly the Same Thing
These terms are often used interchangeably, but they describe slightly different theatrical devices.
Soliloquy
A soliloquy generally reveals a character’s private thoughts. The speaker is alone or speaks as though no one else can hear.
Hamlet’s reflections on death are the most famous example.
Monologue
A monologue is simply a long speech by one character.
Other characters may be present and listening.
A king addressing his soldiers, for example, can deliver a monologue without delivering a soliloquy.
Aside
An aside is usually much shorter.
A character briefly speaks to the audience or expresses a thought that the other characters onstage are conventionally understood not to hear.
An aside can work almost like a conspiratorial whisper.
A soliloquy opens an entire room inside the character’s mind. An aside cracks the door for a moment.
Shakespeare Turns Thought Into Action
Drama has a basic problem.
Thought is invisible.
A novelist can simply write:
He was afraid that he had made the wrong decision.
A playwright cannot do that so easily.
The audience can see a character walking, fighting, laughing, crying, or kneeling, but it cannot directly see uncertainty, memory, temptation, or private reasoning.
Shakespeare’s solution is wonderfully theatrical.
He gives thought a voice.
When Macbeth debates whether to kill Duncan, the debate itself becomes an event.
When Hamlet argues with himself, thinking is not merely preparation for the drama. The thinking is the drama.
A soliloquy therefore converts psychology into performance.
The mind becomes a stage inside the stage.
Shakespeare’s Characters Often Do Not Know What They Think Until They Say It
One of the most interesting features of Shakespeare’s soliloquies is that they do not always present finished conclusions.
Characters frequently begin speaking before they know where their own thoughts will lead.
They test ideas.
They contradict themselves.
They imagine possibilities.
They reject those possibilities.
They construct arguments and then dismantle them.
This is particularly important in Hamlet.
Hamlet’s private speeches rarely sound like tidy summaries of a settled personality. Instead, they move through changing states of thought.
Anger becomes disgust.
Confidence becomes uncertainty.
Resolution becomes analysis.
Analysis becomes self-accusation.
The result feels surprisingly modern because Shakespeare does not simply tell us what Hamlet believes.
He lets us experience belief being formed, challenged, and sometimes abandoned.
Hamlet: A Mind Thinking in Real Time
No discussion of Shakespearean soliloquy can avoid Hamlet.
The play is almost a laboratory for private speech.
Hamlet exists in a world filled with spying, surveillance, political performance, and hidden motives. People watch one another constantly.
Polonius spies.
Claudius observes.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern gather information.
Hamlet himself stages a play in order to study Claudius’s reaction.
In such a world, speaking honestly to another person becomes dangerous.
Soliloquy creates one of the few spaces in which Hamlet can apparently speak without political consequences.
That makes his private speeches feel especially intimate.
“To Be, or Not to Be”
The opening of Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy is only six words:
“To be, or not to be”
Yet the question immediately expands beyond Hamlet’s personal circumstances.
Should a person continue enduring suffering?
Is death an escape?
What happens after death?
Why do human beings tolerate misery instead of choosing the unknown?
Hamlet begins with what looks like a binary choice, but almost immediately discovers that the choice is not simple.
Death leads to uncertainty.
Uncertainty produces fear.
Fear returns him to life.
The speech dramatizes a mind trapping itself inside its own intelligence.
That is central to Shakespeare’s use of soliloquy.
The character is simultaneously the person asking the question, the person answering it, and the person objecting to the answer.
Soliloquies Let Us Watch Decisions Being Made
Modern storytelling often explains motivation retrospectively.
A character commits an action, and later we learn why.
Shakespeare frequently allows us to watch motivation develop before the action occurs.
That difference is important.
Consider Macbeth.
Before murdering King Duncan, Macbeth does not simply announce that he is ambitious.
He imagines consequences.
He considers loyalty.
He recognizes Duncan’s virtues.
He considers the political and moral danger of assassination.
He understands many of the arguments against the murder.
Yet he continues moving toward it.
The audience therefore cannot easily reduce Macbeth’s crime to ignorance.
He knows.
He debates.
He hesitates.
Then he acts.
The soliloquy makes that progression visible.
Macbeth: Hearing Ambition Argue With Conscience
Macbeth’s soliloquies are especially powerful because his imagination often seems faster than his actions.
Before he commits violence, he mentally experiences versions of what might happen afterward.
He sees consequences before they exist.
This makes his private speeches psychologically tense.
One part of him wants power.
Another part understands the horror required to obtain it.
Another imagines punishment.
Another begins inventing reasons to proceed.
Rather than creating a character who simply “turns evil,” Shakespeare gives us a man capable of understanding the moral argument against his own behavior.
That makes the tragedy darker.
Macbeth does not walk blindly into catastrophe.
He talks himself toward it.
Talking to Yourself Can Be a Form of Self-Persuasion
People often imagine soliloquies as expressions of honesty.
Sometimes they are.
But Shakespeare understood something more complicated: people can lie to themselves.
A character speaking alone does not automatically become reliable.
Soliloquies can reveal self-deception just as effectively as truth.
A speaker may exaggerate an insult.
Rationalize jealousy.
Invent a justification.
Turn suspicion into certainty.
Convert desire into something that sounds like moral necessity.
The audience therefore has an unusual task.
We hear the private voice, but we still have to judge it.
Private does not always mean truthful.
Richard III: Making the Audience His Accomplice
Richard III provides one of Shakespeare’s most striking uses of direct audience intimacy.
Richard reveals his plans openly.
He explains his manipulations.
He lets us know what he intends to do before many of his victims understand what is happening.
This produces an uncomfortable theatrical effect.
The audience knows.
Richard knows that we know.
For a time, that knowledge can even create a strange sense of partnership.
We are not helping him commit his crimes, of course, but dramatically we are standing closer to Richard than many of the people he deceives.
He turns disclosure into charisma.
That is one reason Shakespearean villains can be so compelling.
They sometimes give the audience better access to their minds than supposedly virtuous characters do.
We understand the machinery of the villain’s plot because the villain personally demonstrates it to us.
Iago Uses the Same Weapon Differently
In Othello, Iago repeatedly allows the audience into his plans while hiding those plans from Othello and nearly everyone else.
This creates devastating dramatic irony.
Othello sees an apparently trustworthy subordinate.
We see calculation.
Othello hears advice.
We hear strategy.
Othello believes he is discovering the truth.
We know that his “discoveries” are being manufactured.
Soliloquies therefore change the emotional experience of the story.
Without access to Iago’s private thoughts, Othello could function partly as a mystery.
With that access, it becomes something more painful.
We know where the trap is.
We watch Othello walk toward it.
The Audience Becomes a Secret Holder
This may be the most important reason Shakespeare’s characters talk to themselves.
They create a special relationship with the audience.
When a character reveals something privately, every person watching the play becomes the keeper of information unavailable to the rest of the fictional world.
Imagine Iago telling you exactly how his scheme works.
The scene ends.
Othello enters.
You know what Iago intends.
Othello does not.
Suddenly you are watching two different realities occupy the same stage.
That gap creates tension.
It can also create irony, humor, dread, or sympathy.
Shakespeare’s Theatre Made This Relationship Especially Powerful
The physical conditions of Shakespeare’s theatre mattered.
Performances at open-air playhouses such as the Globe were not built around the modern assumption of a completely darkened, silent auditorium.
Spectators surrounded the stage, and some stood extremely close to the actors.
An actor delivering a soliloquy therefore did not necessarily appear to be speaking into empty darkness.
The audience was visibly present.
Imagine Hamlet asking a question while looking directly at spectators standing only a few feet away.
The line between “talking to himself” and “talking to us” becomes wonderfully unstable.
That ambiguity is part of the theatrical power of soliloquy.
A Soliloquy Is Not Always a Private Diary Entry
When reading Shakespeare on the page, it is easy to imagine a soliloquy as a diary entry spoken aloud.
But theatre changes the situation.
An actor may address individual audience members.
A question may be genuinely offered to the crowd.
A joke may depend on the audience’s reaction.
A confession may feel almost confrontational.
The speech can therefore operate on two levels simultaneously.
Inside the story, the character is alone.
Inside the theatre, the character may be surrounded by hundreds or thousands of people.
That paradox gives Shakespearean soliloquy its distinctive electricity.
Shakespeare Makes Us Feel Closer to Some Characters Than Others
Not every character receives equal access to private speech.
This matters.
A playwright controls intimacy by deciding whose thoughts the audience gets to hear.
Characters with major soliloquies may feel psychologically larger because we spend time inside their reasoning.
Hamlet is not merely someone we observe.
We accompany him through thought.
Macbeth becomes more than a murderer because we hear fear and ambition colliding before the murder.
Iago becomes frightening partly because we are given access to the workshop where his manipulations are manufactured.
Soliloquy therefore influences not just characterization but audience proximity.
We feel close to the person who talks privately in front of us.
Whether we like that person is another question.
Why Villains Are So Good at Talking to the Audience
Shakespeare’s villains often benefit enormously from soliloquy.
Why?
Because villains tend to possess information that other characters lack.
They have plans.
Plans need explanation.
But Shakespeare does more than use private speech for exposition.
Villains such as Richard III and Iago frequently understand performance itself.
They know they are creating appearances.
They know other people can be manipulated through language.
They understand the distance between what someone seems to be and what someone actually intends.
In that sense, they resemble playwrights.
They create little dramas inside the larger drama.
They assign people roles.
They invent narratives.
They predict reactions.
They manipulate entrances, meetings, rumors, evidence, and conversations.
When they speak privately to us, they almost become directors explaining the next scene.
That can make them disturbingly entertaining.
Soliloquies Can Reveal Character Contradictions
Human beings rarely possess perfectly consistent personalities.
We can want two incompatible things.
We can know something intellectually while refusing to accept it emotionally.
We can condemn behavior that we later perform ourselves.
Shakespeare repeatedly exploits these contradictions.
A public speech might present certainty.
A private speech reveals hesitation.
A character may insist on courage in front of others while privately imagining disaster.
Someone may claim indifference while alone confessing obsession.
That gap gives characters depth.
Instead of creating a single stable personality trait, Shakespeare creates competing voices inside one person.
In Shakespeare, the Self Can Become a Conversation
This is perhaps the strangest and most beautiful thing about the soliloquy.
A person alone can become several people.
One voice proposes.
Another objects.
One remembers.
Another fantasizes.
One judges.
Another defends.
The speaker becomes both prosecutor and defendant.
Sometimes the mind even appears divided between observer and participant.
A character watches himself thinking.
Then criticizes the thought.
Then criticizes himself for having criticized it.
Hamlet is particularly famous for this recursive quality.
He does not merely think.
He thinks about thinking.
Shakespeare Was Interested in the Difference Between Appearance and Reality
Many Shakespeare plays revolve around deception.
Characters disguise themselves.
Letters are forged.
Lovers misunderstand one another.
Rulers pretend.
Villains perform loyalty.
People mistake strangers for relatives.
Women disguise themselves as men.
Men disguise ambition as duty.
The stage is therefore filled with appearances.
Soliloquy provides a counter-space where public appearance can be challenged.
A character may enter a room and perform one identity for everyone else.
When the others leave, another identity emerges.
This produces one of Shakespeare’s recurring questions:
Is there a true self underneath the performance?
The plays rarely offer an easy answer.
Sometimes the private voice seems more authentic.
Sometimes it is merely another performance.
Are Shakespeare’s Characters Really Talking to Themselves?
Not always.
That is the delicious complication.
On the fictional level, yes, a character may be alone.
On the theatrical level, no character performing a soliloquy is truly alone.
The audience is there.
This means a soliloquy can be interpreted in several ways.
The character may be thinking aloud.
The character may be addressing the audience.
The audience may represent the character’s conscience.
The character may be using us as imaginary confidants.
Or the speech may move between all these possibilities.
Different actors and directors can therefore perform the same soliloquy very differently.
One Hamlet may barely notice the audience.
Another may search spectators’ faces for answers.
One Richard III may treat the audience as friends.
Another may treat them as witnesses.
The text allows considerable theatrical flexibility.
Soliloquy Creates Dramatic Irony
Dramatic irony occurs when the audience knows something that one or more characters do not.
Soliloquies are perfect machines for creating it.
Suppose a character tells us:
“I plan to betray him.”
The intended victim enters.
The betrayer smiles and says:
“My dear friend.”
Two meanings now exist at once.
The victim hears affection.
The audience hears deception.
Even an ordinary greeting becomes tense.
Shakespeare repeatedly uses this gap between spoken meaning and known intention to charge scenes with energy.
Sometimes the Soliloquy Makes Us Powerless
Knowing more does not mean being able to help.
This is one of the cruel pleasures of tragedy.
We may know that Iago is lying.
Othello cannot hear us.
We may know that Macbeth is making a catastrophic decision.
We cannot stop him.
We may understand Romeo and Juliet’s fatal misunderstandings.
The characters remain trapped inside the plot.
The audience therefore occupies a strange position.
We possess knowledge without power.
That combination produces suspense even when we already know how the story ends.
Soliloquies Slow Time Down
Another reason these speeches are dramatically useful is that they alter the experience of time.
The external action pauses.
A murder may be only minutes away, yet a character can spend dozens of lines considering it.
The clock of the plot slows while psychological time expands.
This allows Shakespeare to magnify moments of decision.
A few seconds of hesitation can become an entire landscape of thought.
Film eventually developed its own methods for doing something similar: close-ups, voice-over narration, flashbacks, slow motion, dream sequences, and subjective editing.
Shakespeare had language and an actor standing on a stage.
He made those tools enough.
Why Doesn’t Shakespeare Just Show the Character’s Feelings Through Action?
Because action alone cannot reveal every kind of conflict.
Imagine Macbeth standing silently before killing Duncan.
An actor could show nervousness.
But nervousness is vague.
Is he afraid of being caught?
Does he feel guilty?
Does he love Duncan?
Does he believe the assassination will destabilize Scotland?
Does he fear divine punishment?
Does he still want the crown?
A soliloquy can contain all of those possibilities simultaneously.
The speech gives moral and intellectual dimensions to emotion.
We do not merely see that Macbeth is disturbed.
We discover what his disturbance is made of.
The Language Itself Shows the Mind Moving
Shakespeare does not only reveal psychology through the meaning of words.
He also uses rhythm, repetition, questions, pauses, images, and broken syntax.
A character under pressure may ask question after question.
A thought may restart halfway through a sentence.
An image may unexpectedly lead to another image.
A repeated word may signal obsession.
Smooth verse may fracture.
The form of the speech can therefore imitate mental movement.
An actor does not simply communicate information.
The actor performs the shape of thought.
Why Hamlet’s Soliloquies Feel So Modern
Readers sometimes describe Hamlet as psychologically modern.
Part of that impression comes from the extraordinary amount of attention given to self-consciousness.
Hamlet investigates his own motives.
He doubts his emotional responses.
He worries about the reliability of appearances.
He questions whether his reasons are genuine.
He recognizes contradictions inside himself.
In other words, Hamlet does something familiar to modern readers:
he analyzes himself.
His soliloquies sometimes resemble an internal argument that has escaped into the air.
That is why centuries-old language can suddenly feel unnervingly close.
Juliet Also Thinks Alone
Soliloquy is not limited to Shakespeare’s tragic men.
Juliet’s private speeches in Romeo and Juliet allow the audience to experience a young woman thinking beyond the social roles imposed on her.
Publicly, Juliet exists inside structures of family authority, marriage expectations, obedience, and feud.
Privately, language gives her room.
She can imagine.
Question.
Fear.
Desire.
Resolve.
The contrast between these two spaces makes her inner life dramatically significant.
Shakespeare’s private speeches repeatedly create places where characters can temporarily escape the identities assigned to them by society.
Soliloquy Can Make Characters More Human Without Making Them Better
Understanding is not the same as approval.
This distinction is essential.
A soliloquy may help us understand why someone commits a terrible act.
It does not automatically excuse that act.
Macbeth becomes psychologically comprehensible.
Iago becomes dramatically intelligible.
Richard III becomes fascinating.
None of this requires the audience to approve of murder, manipulation, or betrayal.
Shakespeare’s achievement is often to make moral judgment harder without making it impossible.
We see more.
Therefore we have more to judge.
Do Soliloquies Reveal the “Real” Character?
Sometimes, but the answer is not simple.
It is tempting to assume:
Public speech = fake.
Private speech = true.
Shakespeare repeatedly complicates that equation.
People can misunderstand themselves.
They can rationalize.
They can exaggerate.
They can perform even when no other character is present.
And because an actual theatre audience is present, private speech is never completely private anyway.
A soliloquy may bring us closer to a character’s mind without giving us perfect access to some hidden, permanent “true self.”
That ambiguity is one reason the speeches reward repeated reading and performance.
Why Shakespeare’s Soliloquies Still Work Today
The social world has changed enormously since Shakespeare’s lifetime.
Human beings have not stopped arguing with themselves.
We still rehearse conversations before having them.
We replay arguments after they end.
We imagine futures that never happen.
We invent justifications.
We ask ourselves questions we cannot answer.
We occasionally give ourselves spectacularly bad advice.
In that sense, the soliloquy dramatizes something deeply recognizable.
Most of us do not speak our internal monologues in blank verse while holding a skull.
The underlying behavior, however, is familiar.
Our minds are noisy places.
Shakespeare simply turns up the volume.
Five Major Functions of Shakespearean Soliloquy
When reading a Shakespeare play, it can be useful to ask what a particular private speech is doing.
Most important soliloquies perform several functions at once.
1. Revealing Hidden Motivation
The speech tells us what a character wants, fears, or plans.
2. Dramatizing Internal Conflict
Instead of presenting a finished decision, Shakespeare lets us hear competing arguments.
3. Creating Dramatic Irony
The audience receives information unavailable to other characters.
4. Building Audience Intimacy
The speaker may effectively transform spectators into confidants.
5. Exploring Larger Ideas
A private problem can expand into a philosophical question about death, identity, ambition, guilt, love, time, power, or morality.
The best soliloquies often accomplish all five.
How to Read a Shakespeare Soliloquy
Instead of treating a soliloquy as a difficult block of poetry, read it as a sequence of mental moves.
Ask:
What does the character believe at the beginning?
Then ask:
What changes?
Look for questions.
Look for words such as but, yet, therefore, if, then, and perhaps.
These small terms often reveal turns in reasoning.
Next ask:
What decision, if any, does the character reach?
Finally ask:
Does the character actually follow that decision?
The answer is often revealing.
Shakespeare’s characters are capable of giving themselves excellent advice and immediately ignoring it.
A Simple Example of How Soliloquy Works
Imagine a fictional character named Thomas who wants to steal a crown.
Without soliloquy, the play might show this:
Thomas enters.
He looks around.
He steals the crown.
He exits.
We understand the action but know little about him.
Now imagine Thomas saying privately:
The crown is mine if I but take it now.
Yet what is gold when every night thereafter
I hear the footstep of the man I robbed?
Still, he denied me what my blood deserved.
Why should his comfort weigh against my fortune?
No. Let conscience sleep.
The crown shall wake me.
Now something has changed.
Thomas is not merely a thief.
He is ambitious, resentful, frightened, rationalizing, self-aware, and morally conflicted.
The physical action is identical.
The psychological drama is completely different.
That transformation is the power of soliloquy.
Soliloquies Make Shakespeare’s Plays Larger Than Their Plots
The plot of Macbeth can be summarized fairly quickly.
A warrior receives a prophecy, murders a king, takes power, commits further violence, and falls.
But Macbeth is not memorable merely because of what happens.
Its greatness lies partly in the consciousness surrounding those events.
What does ambition feel like before it becomes action?
What happens to imagination after violence?
Can guilt be controlled?
Can a person become numb to horrors that once terrified him?
Likewise, Hamlet is not merely the story of a prince attempting revenge.
Its private speeches transform revenge into questions about knowledge, mortality, identity, action, morality, and consciousness.
Soliloquy enlarges plot into philosophy.
Shakespeare Did Not Invent Talking to Yourself on Stage
Shakespeare inherited dramatic traditions that already included forms of direct address, private speech, and monologue.
Earlier drama had long used speeches that communicated intentions or moral dilemmas to audiences.
What distinguishes Shakespeare is not simply that his characters speak alone.
It is what he makes those moments capable of doing.
They can explain plot.
But they can also change direction halfway through.
They can expose contradiction.
They can seduce an audience.
They can question their own premises.
They can turn a murderer into a philosopher for fifty lines without making him cease to be a murderer.
The device becomes psychologically flexible.
The Audience Is the Missing Character
There is one final way to understand the Shakespearean soliloquy.
Whenever Hamlet, Richard, Macbeth, or Iago appears to be talking alone, imagine an invisible character standing opposite them.
That character is the audience.
We listen.
We judge.
We understand.
Sometimes we sympathize.
Sometimes we recoil.
Sometimes the speaker tries to persuade us.
Sometimes the character seems to need us simply because no one else can be trusted.
The audience may not speak, but its presence shapes the scene.
A Shakespearean soliloquy is therefore not quite a monologue.
At its most powerful, it becomes a dialogue in which only one side speaks aloud.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do Shakespeare’s characters talk to themselves?
Shakespeare uses private speech primarily to reveal thoughts, motivations, conflicts, and plans that cannot easily be shown through external action. These speeches also create intimacy between characters and the audience.
What is a soliloquy?
A soliloquy is a dramatic speech in which a character expresses private thoughts while alone or effectively alone onstage.
What is Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquy?
The best-known example is Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” speech in Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1.
Why does Hamlet have so many soliloquies?
Hamlet is intensely concerned with thought, uncertainty, hidden motives, morality, death, and the difficulty of action. Private speeches allow Shakespeare to dramatize those mental conflicts directly.
Is a soliloquy the same as a monologue?
Not exactly. A monologue is any extended speech by one character. A soliloquy specifically presents private thought and is conventionally delivered when the speaker is alone or effectively unheard by other characters.
What is the difference between a soliloquy and an aside?
A soliloquy is usually an extended private speech. An aside is normally much shorter and briefly communicates a thought to the audience while other characters remain onstage.
Do other characters hear a Shakespearean soliloquy?
Usually not. The dramatic convention assumes that the audience can hear the speaker while other characters cannot, unless the scene indicates otherwise.
Are soliloquies always truthful?
No. They may reveal private thought, but characters can misunderstand, rationalize, exaggerate, or deceive themselves.
Why are villains often given soliloquies?
Private speeches allow villains to explain hidden plans while keeping other characters ignorant. This creates dramatic irony and can establish an unusually intimate relationship between villain and audience.
Final Thoughts
Shakespeare’s characters talk to themselves because external behavior is only half of human drama.
A sword can show violence.
A crown can show power.
A kiss can show desire.
But none of those objects can fully reveal the argument taking place inside the person who reaches for them.
Soliloquy gives that argument a voice.
It allows Shakespeare to place an invisible world onstage: the private theatre of hesitation, fantasy, fear, guilt, ambition, memory, and self-deception.
That is why Hamlet’s questions still sound alive.
It is why Macbeth’s hesitation matters even when we know the murder is coming.
It is why Iago becomes more frightening when he calmly tells us what he intends to do.
And it is why a character standing apparently alone on an empty stage can produce some of the most crowded moments in Shakespeare.
The character may have no one else beside him.
Inside his mind, however, an entire company is performing.