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Shakespeare's Monologues



About Us · Shakespeare's Monologues
Making it easier to find monologues since 1997

Portrait from
cover of First Folio. 
Click to browse monologues for all genders.

About Shakespeare's Monologues
A complete database of Shakespeare's Monologues. All of them. The monologues are organized by play, then categorized by comedy, history, and tragedy. You can browse and/or search. Each monologue entry includes the character's name, the first line of the speech, whether it is verse or prose, and shows the act, scene & line number. Each entry provides a link to the full text of the scene. You can download each monologue for printing, already double-spaced for scansion and transcription. These PDFs are provided courtesy of Tee Quillin.)

This site was concieved, created and is maintained by Steven Shults with help over the years from Aimée Bruneau, Tee Quillin, and last but most definitely not least, Brandon Faloona.

The money brought in by ads and tips does not cover the cost of hosting & maintenance. This is a not-for-profit adventure.

How this site came to be
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 a list of monologues in the library at A.C.T. which were left on the reference shelves by a fellow Alumnus.

Then I found the Complete Works of Shakespeare Online. I typed up the list from the shelves of the A.C.T. library and converted it to html, inserting links to each particular Play/Act/Scene.

I later (much later, and with some help from Aimée Bruneau) completed the index to include every piece of text viable for audition, performance, classwork and/or workshop.

In March of 2006 I was contacted by Tee Quillin, with an offer of partnership between our sites. Tee provided the addition of PDFs of each monologue for easy printing. The PDfs are double-spaced for scansion and transcription.

In March of 2010 my old friend Brandon Faloona offerred to greatly improve this site with his Ruby on Rails skills. This incredibly kind offer led to the great search functionality and the ability to expand and collapse monologues within the page.

A fun bit of trivia: Brandon and I first met in 1986 while working on a college production of Hamlet. The first production of a Shakespeare play either of us ever performed in.

More recently
On December 1st, 2022, the site went down when the webhost stopped supporting the old version of Ruby the site was running on. The site was down for almost 3 months. Six weeks into trying to upgrade the site to a current version of Ruby made it clear that Ruby has become more trouble than it's worth for us.

So, instead of trying to upgrade the site to a current version of Ruby (which neither Brandon nor I have the time for these days), I decided to rewrite the site in the Phoenix framework for the Elixir language. As a result, the new version of the site is not only easier to improve and maintain, it's also now much faster and more secure.

When I started rebuilding the site, I knew nothing about Phoenix or Elixir. I got a lot of help translating files, troubleshooting bugs, and learning Phoenix/Elixir from Open AI's text-davinci-003 and ChatGPT, and from the kind and welcoming community in the Elixir Forum.

Feedback, suggestions, corrections, and/or questions encouraged: Email me

Tech Stuff

If you want to have a look at / borrow code from the site: mono-phoenix on GitHub

Here's a bunch of the stuff we use to serve up the monologues to you: